Both small films and epics are keeping us busy

We look at a tiny Sundance drama and our favorite epic of all time in today's issue

When weeks aren’t shaped the same, then how do you shape your week?

In our household, weekends matter. Not as much to me as to my family, but they are important. They are an opportunity to spend more time together, to do things we can’t do when we have school and work battling for our attention, and in our house, weekends are when we have the kids here.

That’s out the window, though, and that means it’s up to us to build structure into things. In some ways, I feel like I’ve been training for all of this because I’ve been the one who was home, who had to structure his own week, who used media as a way of marking milestones each week. But I think of things on a slightly shifted timetable. For example, I think of John Oliver as “Monday morning.” If there’s a new John Oliver episode on my DVR, then it’s Monday morning. That’s how that works. Some shows we watch live, so Wednesday night is Survivor. My week’s halfway over when Jeff Probst breaks some poor bastard’s heart at tribal council. If a new book shows up on my Kindle, then it’s Monday night and I probably pre-ordered something at 2:30 AM four and a half months ago and forgot about it. This is the way my calendar works. I love that I have the Friday Spotlight here now, because it gives me that once-a-week check-in to tally up what I’m reading and watching and playing, and it works as this constant open document each week anchoring me to time in some way.

Do you guys watch your TV when it airs or do you time-shift everything these days? It’s strange… there are shows that I don’t watch at all, shows where I just decide at some point, “That one goes into the stack and someday I’ll binge the whole thing,” while other shows feel like I need to watch them while they are current. There are some presumably very good series that I’ve never seen a moment of simply because I reached overload with too many shows at a given moment.

There’s an idea I’ve been really chewing on for a while now about the way our brains work. I think there is a limit to how many narratives you can comfortably juggle in your head at any given time, and we’re all constantly walking around managing these psychic bookmarks. How many shows are you watching right now? How many books are you reading? How many movie franchises are you invested in? Do you play games on top of that? I’ll save a game, walk away, and come back five days later and pick up in the middle of a task, and my brain somehow is able to do that, and it doesn’t seem strange to me to jump right back into it that way. In general, I think it’s a strange and wonderful magic trick, one we rarely think about even though we’re doing it all the time.

It’s also interesting to me how once we’ve seen something, we file that away in our brains as something we’ve experienced. But how long do we really retain something, and how long can we authoritatively claim to have seen or read something? We just watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a family because my boys had recently admitted to me that they didn’t remember anything about it. They’d both “seen it” before Sunday night, but the most they could recall in any detail was “some lights coming into a car” and “isn’t there something where they’re like playing music to each other?” Watching it with them now, they were both wide open for it and it was a lovely screening. When we got to the scene with Roy Neary having his first encounter in the car, Allen got excited because that was the image he remembered. The ending of the film at the landing site behind Devil’s Tower tripped some of those same memories for Toshi. It’s fun to see what did or didn’t stick from this film. There were moments throughout that both of them had vague memories of, but clearly, this wasn’t something that had stuck.

I had the same thing happen with me the night before that with The Goodbye Girl. Hey, my girlfriend’s got a thing for Richard Dreyfuss, so this is our comfort food right now. I have definitely seen this film, and if you’d asked me if I knew it last week, I would have said yes, but a rewatch definitely made it clear to me that I had only the vaguest memory of it. There are plenty of films like that. How couldn’t there be? I’ve seen (conservative estimate) 25,000 movies in my lifetime. Probably more. Talk about juggling narrative. The fact that I can recall anything from any of those films is crazy. The first film I remember going to see theatrically was Blackbeard’s Ghost. Do I remember Blackbeard’s Ghost? Not really. I’ve “seen” it, but I’m sure if I put it on right now, it would be brand-new.

That’s one of the reasons I constantly drop rewatches of things into my rotation. More than ever, I feel like when I return to a film, even one I’ve seen many times, I am coming to it fresh. Maybe it’s because I’ve been sharing so many movies with my kids or with my girlfriend, audiences who aren’t already numb to the appeal of some of these titles. Maybe I’m just at that tipping point where I’ve wiped the slate somewhat clean, by sheer overload rather than choice.

I’m working my way through the second FOR CONTEXT column, which I’ll be posting here very soon. If you didn’t read the first one, it’s available for subscribers in our archives. These are going to be a fun way for me to reset my palette for a lot of sacred cows, and I think I’m going to be as surprised as anyone about where I land on some of the films and filmmakers I write about in the upcoming year.

BRUISED

As studios make the choice about which films they’ll allow to play at home first and which ones they’re going to hold back for the eventual re-opening of theaters, I feel like the smaller more intimate films are the ones that are going to take the real hit. Case in point: Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Eliza Hittman’s film made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival this year and then Focus Features picked it up. That’s a huge success story. Focus does a nice job with the festival titles they release, giving them real pushes in theaters. It’s the dream for an indie filmmaker, but their theatrical release date was March 13. That was basically a death sentence this year, and so Focus ended up moving the digital home release date significantly forward to April 3.

Does it suffer from seeing it at home? No. Not really. Sidney Flanigan’s spectacular lead performance is the kind of delicate, nuanced, internal work that plays just as well on your home screen. She plays Autumn, a 17-year-old girl who learns she’s pregnant. Living at home in Pennsylvania, she can’t get an abortion without telling her parents, so she and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) head to New York City so she can get it done. It is a very small film. There is no major dramatic complication dropped on top of that. It’s just a close-up portrait of what it feels like to be in this situation, and there’s not a ton of dialogue. It’s almost all experiential, and I thought it was flawlessly made. There’s an actor who shows up late in the film who was so natural and honest that I felt like she must have been a real social worker, and the whole film feels like that. I found the entire thing heartbreaking and acutely observed, and I feel like because of the way the release was handled, it’s going to get lost coming and going. It’s a real shame because it’s clear that Eliza Hittman is a real talent. I think under ordinary circumstances, this would have been a solid spring hit and there would have been a strong conversation around her and her actors. Instead… silence. And I suspect that will be the case for a number of strong small pictures.

There’s no do-over for these movies. You don’t get to go back and make the entire spring happen again. For some films, this is it. The same thing is true for books. I mentioned two books I read recently on Saturday’s Free-For-All post, and I thought both of them were just terrific. Sarah Watson’s Most Likely is a smart, fun, heartfelt teen drama about three girls in high school and their senior year. The twist? One of them is the future President of the United States. Zack Jordan’s The Last Human is smart, ambitious science-fiction about a human girl being raised in a vast alien network where it’s literally illegal to be what she is. The book is funny and sprawling and packed with big ideas, and I loved it. Both Watson and Jordan should be on tour right now, supporting their books, meeting people, converting readers. This is something they’ve worked toward for years, and it’s wild watching so many people hit that same frustrating point right now. BenDavid Grabinski is a friend of mine who had his first movie accepted into the Tribeca Film Festival, and he was about to start production on his second film. Neither of those things happened. My friends Eric Vespe and Aaron Morgan were about to launch their short at SXSW. There are so many people I know who have had similar moments happen that I think it’s urgent we share them, just so they don’t all feel alone and like it’s happening just to them.

More than ever, it’s a time to try some of these smaller works and these first-time works and even new works by established artists. Don Winslow’s Broken is a fun experiment that’s very different than his giant sprawling novels he’s been putting out recently, and he was going to be doing his own tour right now. He may be a brand name, but he’s just as frustrated as the new authors who were about to have their first go-round. It’s heartbreaking for everyone, but it’s also something that unites us right now.

LOST IN THE DESERT

Everyone’s all hot and bothered about those Dune photos that Vanity Fair’s publishing this week, so in that spirit, I thought I’d reprint something I wrote about my favorite film, which is part of this year’s Turner Classic Movies line-up, and which subscribers to Pulp & Popcorn might have read a few years ago:

“Lawrence Of Arabia” (1962)
dir. David Lean

The key to Peter O’Toole’s approach in playing T.E. Lawrence, the central figure in David Lean’s remarkable personal epic, is the way his pants are tailored.

It’s a simple thing, but from the first moment we see this man who eventually helps unite the Arab tribes against the Turks, he is just that wee bit silly, and that little tiny flair of absurdity makes him approachable and human. It is because he seems vaguely ridiculous that no one sees him coming, and because no one sees him coming, he is able to move mountains.

When you’re making a film about a life as gigantic as that of T.E. Lawrence, finding the right place to start the telling of that story can be daunting. The opening titles of Lawrence Of Arabia, coming at the end of a sustained overture, play out over an overhead shot of a man preparing a motorcycle for a drive. It’s only after the titles conclude that he climbs on and starts the motorcycle. There’s no score after the titles conclude. Instead, we just hear the sounds of the engine, of the construction along the side of the road, of the wind whistling past the ears of Lawrence (O’Toole, young and beautiful in his debut film role), right up to the moment where he loses control of his bike and flies off the side of the road. The hard cut to Westminster Abbey, where he has already been enshrined, makes it clear that despite the almost stupid mundanity of this death, this was a man of tremendous cultural import. We hear people discussing him as they file out of the funeral. There’s a general sense of respect, but there are a few people who speak of him as if he was, shockingly, only human.

One of the reasons I’m not a big fan of biopics is because they tend to devolve into lists of things a famous person did. That is not the case with Lawrence of Arabia. Instead, Robert Bolt’s ferociously smart screenplay manages to tell a monumental thematic story that is hung on this remarkable person as a framework. When I saw this film for the first time in 1989, I walked into it with a chip on my shoulder. Years earlier, I tried watching it on TV, and I didn’t get it at all. What was the big deal? This was the movie that Steven Spielberg always watches before he makes a movie? Really?

When the restoration of the film was released to theaters, I had to drive across town to the one theater that was set up to play 70mm, and I did so begrudgingly. I basically walked into it, arms folded, sure that I was going to end up finding the whole thing silly. Instead, when the film ended almost four hours later, I went to the box-office and bought tickets for two more showtimes that week. I went back and I sat in the front row and I lost myself in the movie both times. First and foremost, there’s the technical end of it. There is something superheroic about the physical staging of the film. I look at scenes like the invasion of Aqaba and I am blown away at the thought of coordinating anything like that, much less capturing it in such pristine beauty. David Lean’s work with cinematographer Freddie Young is an education. There’s no other way to put it. They are just as adept with tiny details like the subtle sway of Prince Feisal’s tent as Lawrence discusses the idea of miracles with the ruler as they are with the epic imagery of sandstorms and train attacks.

The length of the film is almost absurd when you first hear it. 227 minutes. I’m not great at math, but I think that comes out to something like eleven hours. It’s so much longer than what we think of as the standard running time of a movie that it is daunting. I took a friend to see a screening of the film here in Los Angeles, and I could tell before we went in… he was nervous about it. He talked about possibly ducking out at the intermission if it was too much like homework. He most decidedly did not step out at the intermission, instead using the break to flip out about how much he was enjoying it. I understand exactly how he felt. After all, how many films today are built out to full roadshow specifications?

I think of the overture and the intermission as essential parts of what makes this such a complete immersion. The film has to be that long, though. Lawrence was a man from a green section of England. A “fat place,” as he calls it. His attraction to the desert is something chemical, something wired into him. He is drawn to the vast scale of it, the open endless horizon. He calls it clean at one point. The size of this movie is to the viewer what the size of the desert was to Lawrence: a challenge, and a threat. There is a sense of accomplishment that comes from viewing the film in its entirety, and the length allows Lean to move through several distinct sections of film, giving each one its own shape and rhythm. We slip into the movie, and then we are swept up by it. Lean understands that this film is a journey and whether its the witty, propulsive editing by Anne Coates or the photography by Freddie Young or that incredible score by Maurice Jarre, everything about the movie works pull us along on that journey.

When T.E. Lawrence is first approached about heading into the desert, he’s stationed in Cairo working in the maps division. He’s got a table in some basement, and the work he does is almost microscopic in scale. Is he helping anyone? Maybe. Maybe someone will use his map at some point. But most likely, he’s just being wasted there, tucked away where he can do no harm. Nothing about him suggests that he might be a military genius or a man of any particular destiny. When he’s brought to meet General Murray (Donald Wolfit) at the start of the film, the meeting threatens to topple over into a court-martial thanks to the weird rubber-limbed impudence of Lawrence. Thankfully, Mr. Dryden (Claude Rains) is there to help gently detach Lawrence from the job where he’s been wasting away. Dryden sees something in the way Lawrence thinks about “the Arabs,” and he sees a chance to make a real difference in the ongoing conflict with the Turks. Ultimately, England cares about the Suez Canal because of the access it allows. It is important strategically for the larger war effort as WWI rages on other fronts, but it feels like it is a long way from anything that really matters. Lawrence sees something totally different going on, though, because he has studied this culture and is frustrated by it. He wants to believe that the various tribes that make up “the Arabs” can be brought together under one flag, and that they can be a strong united nation on the world stage. Lawrence isn’t thinking of it as a maneuver designed to strengthen England. He genuinely seems to want to help this nation simply because he sees it as a problem to be fixed.

Lawrence is assigned to the Arab Bureau, which basically means he’s under Dryden’s command and free from any sort of conventional military structure of command. Emboldened, Lawrence heads out to find Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness) so he can observe how Feisal is doing with British assistance. On his way there, he meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), and their relationship is the true defining spine of the film. When they meet, Lawrence and his guide have stopped at a well in the middle of nowhere. Sherif Ali shoots the guide for drinking from his well. It is forbidden. He is the wrong tribe. That’s the exact thing that frustrates Lawrence so greatly, and he is offended by it. He rants at Sherif Ali about tribalism and about how it keeps the Arabs from being great. There is an arrogance to Lawrence as he scolds Sherif Ali about his own culture. One of the most insufferable things about imperialism is the way it views certain nations as children on the world stage, in need of grown-ups to tell them how to do things. There is a callousness to the way Sherif Ali shoots the guide, though. Certainly, Lawrence has a point about the way this violence erupts over such a small thing. After all, it’s the only well for miles. Would Sherif Ali really deny someone a drink of water in the desert over something as fundamental as which tribe they belong to? Neither man truly sees the other in this first encounter. They each project their view of the world, insisting upon it, unable to imagine any other perspective.

For Lawrence, the education begins once he reaches Feisal’s camp. He begins to see some of the very real challenges of an Arab state. The Turks appear to have them outgunned in every significant way, and the British are only willing to offer a certain amount of support to the Arabs because they are afraid that if they arm them too well, they may also find themselves driven from the country. As a British military officer, it is clear where Lawrence’s allegiances should lie, but he doesn’t view the situation as a British military officer. By the time he reaches Feisal, he has already fallen in love with the harsh, unforgiving nature of the desert, and with this alien culture that fascinates him so completely.

There’s a quiet early scene where Lawrence joins Feisal in his tent, along with Mr. Dryden and Colonel Brighton (Anthony Quayle), who is Feisal’s official military advisor from the English. Sherif Ali also joins them, and they listen to a holy man read from the Quran first, then begin a conversation that is a marvel of film writing. It lays out character, political background, social context, and necessary story information, and it never once shows you how it’s doing any of it. This is simply a conversation, and part of what makes it so interesting is watching the way Feisal tests this new young Englishman, curious to see where he stands. Feisal knows right away that Lawrence is not like Brighton or even like Dryden. With both of them, there is an agenda at work, and Feisal cannot even begrudge them this. They are who they are, and he knows that. But with Lawrence, he immediately senses something else, some other kind of ambition. Lawrence does not propose his solution because it will give him what he wants; he proposes a solution because it is a genuine solution, and he is able to propose it because he is an outsider who is not bound by thoughts of what he “can” do. It’s some of the finest work in Guinness’s long career on film…

… and yet…

The actual racial casting of Lawrence of Arabia is understandable through the filter of when it took place, and I would argue that every performance in the film, whether from someone with genuine Middle Eastern heritage or from someone playing a race other than their own, is pretty much great. Would I want to see them cast a film like this now? Absolutely not. Guinness came from a tradition of English actors who were used to playing everything. That was part of the appeal of the job for them. I think of Guinness and Peter Sellers as being cut from that same cloth, and I’m sure the last thing Guinness ever thought was that he was erasing an actual Arabic actor from being able to play a part. I’m not sure any studio would have gone all-in on a racially-accurate cast for this film, and I’m fairly sure David Lean wouldn’t have wanted to do that. He and Guinness had a long history of using make-up to render Guinness invisible from role to role. When they were shooting this film, there were people who approached Guinness thinking he was the real Prince Feisal. They worked hard to try to make him look as close to correct as possible. It is an amazing performance of subtle emotion, and Guinness does a great job of showing you what a chess player Feisal must have been conversationally. He not only sees through politics, he finds small ways to deflate those he sits across the table from. He knows very well what the English want, and he’s aware that he could easily get burned if he’s not careful. He could sign away the future of his people and his own influence, and that is the last thing he wants. Am I saying there was no actor of color who could have played the part? Absolutely not. But in 1962, I’m not sure there was any actor of color who they would have allowed to play the part, and that’s just a by-product of when it was made.

As a whole, the film is absolutely concerned with the differences between cultures and how Lawrence’s interest in the region made him uniquely qualified to be the person who helped change everything. To some degree, he was like a child with a train set. The things he proposed were not done because they were dangerous, but to him, it looked simple. We just take our people from here and we go over there. There is a hubris to Lawrence, and he is constantly courting disaster. Because it pays off, Sharif Ali begins to believe in the greatness of this man, and in the possibility of something greater for himself as well. He is changed by mere proximity to Lawrence. As this quiet cartographer blooms into this near-mythic figure, those around him are also touched by that and changed. Ali begins to see a political future in a country that is united, something he would have never thought possible. He begins to question his core values, the way he thinks about things like fate and violence and conflict, and at the same time, Lawrence is also changed. In Lawrence’s case, though, there’s nothing comfortable about it, and we see that every role he plays fits him like that damn uniform at the start of the film. Lawrence seems to abhor bloodshed when he first sees it close-up. It sickens him. But there comes a moment where he has a gun in his hand and he has to make a choice, and if he does not kill a man, everything he’s worked for could end for no good reason. Lawrence is forced, in the most personal way, to come to grips with what it means to take a life, and in a pivotal sequence, learns he may have a taste for it.

Much of the film’s first half is about this one idea that Lawrence has, this arrogant impossible idea, and what happens when it pays off. Lawrence is so immediately taken by his own infallibility that he gets someone he cares about killed, and we see the seeds of what will bloom in the film’s second half. Is Lawrence a man or is he the legend? Can he be both? Does either fully exist? By the time Lawrence makes it back to Cairo, he has been born again, and he has finally become Lawrence Of Arabia, this larger-than-life icon, and the question becomes whose weapon he will be. If the film ended there, it would be a terrific movie, and I would still probably love it dearly. But Bolt and Lean weren’t making this movie so they could pump up another British hero. The film’s second half is as canny a deconstruction of why we need heroes and what it costs to be one as I’ve ever seen. The more valuable Lawrence is as a symbol, the less connection he has to who he is as a man. He is able to justify terrible things in the name of greatness, and there’s a harrowing sequence near the end of the movie where Lawrence leads a battalion of mostly hired guns into a bloody raid on some Turkish soldiers who just laid waste to a village full of unarmed women and children. It is not played as a moment of earned moral outrage, though. Lawrence sees the emotional devastation land on one of his men who came from that village, and he can feel the rising anger in those around him, and for that moment, strategy and honor and nation-building and all the rest goes out the window, and Lawrence, like everyone around him, just wants blood. Sharif Ali has, by this point, grown numb to the violence, and he watches in horror as Lawrence loses himself. “NO PRISONERS!” Lawrence yells, and every time I see it, the horror of what he’s saying and the out of control emotion behind it both flatten me. It is a pulverizing moment, and after this, Lawrence and Ali can never truly be the same. Ali has seen the ugliest part of Lawrence, and Lawrence knows that he is capable of far worse than he would have believed. They have traded places, and neither one of them is sure quite how it happened, or how difficult that would be on them.

For a few weeks after I see the film, I can still feel it rattling around inside me. I consider these characters old friends at this point. I haven’t even mentioned maybe my favorite performance in the film, Anthony Quinn as Auda Abu Tayi, who is a river to his people. He roars into the film, all bluster and boasting, and then little by little, he tips the truth about this guy’s heart. It is an amazing performance, and as big as it is, he is matched in greatness by Jose Ferrer’s work as a Turkish officer in a single scene. Ferrer communicates volumes, and he does it with very little. It’s a remarkable exercise in miniature. I love Arthur Kennedy as the newspaperman who needs a hero he can use to lead America into war. I love big mooney-faced Gasim (I.S. Johar), who teaches Lawrence a powerful lesson about what is or isn’t written. I love both Farraj (Michel Ray) and Daud (John Dimech), the two orphans who become servants to Lawrence. Claude Rains is so damn great in every scene he has that in any other film, he would have been the one they threw awards at, but instead, he’s just a piece of the larger tapestry here. Dryden’s constantly pulling strings to see what will happen, and if there’s anyone in the room who knows the whole truth, it’s probably him, although he’ll never ever share it. Jack Hawkins is terrific as General Allenby, who I’m convinced became the reference model for every Pompous British Military Git in every cartoon made since the ‘60s. Lean uses his actors to paint in big broad strokes, and yet the film is a miracle of subtlety. While it makes all of its points in very clean, very controlled ways, it never feels contrived.

In some ways, it feels like the film’s energy ebbs in the last half-hour, but that’s the point. This “Arab Revolution” that Lawrence believes he can inspire peters out once practical concerns assert themselves, and the film makes the bitter point that all of the effort ultimately leads to an Arab waterworks with a British flag. That’s the sum total of everything, and it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. That energy dissipates, and there’s nothing Lawrence can do about it. Feisal’s last encounter with him underlines just how completely Lawrence feels like he failed. The film doesn’t let him off the hook, but it’s also not a condemnation. The running time, more than anything, allows for the possibility of contradiction, and that is the greatest lesson that Lawrence’s life teaches us. He was a man who was riddled with contradictions, plagued by them, and yet he kept pushing forward, one tiny figure against this punishing landscape, believing not only in his own greatness but in the collective greatness of men. Those disappointments do not diminish who he was. Instead, they define his greatness. We all have greatness in us. It requires courage and vision to identify and implement that greatness, but it’s there. Digging it out, making something of it, rising to it… that is difficult work, and it may hurt.

The trick is not minding that it hurts.

IN CONCLUSION…

I’ve got that FOR CONTEXT piece on Jack Nicholson cooking for you guys right now, and that Star Wars piece that just keeps growing. I’m not hitting publish on any piece of that until I have it finished, but that way, when I do it, you’ll get a full week’s worth of stuff out of it. Hopefully it’ll be worth the wait for you.

Now it’s off to pick a movie for tonight for family night, which is maybe my favorite part of all of this. It’s a great anchor to sanity, and I hope you guys are finding ways to make yourselves happy right now as well.

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Image courtesy of SPHE
Image courtesy of Focus Features
Image courtesy of SPHE