Beat into submission

Whiplash (2014)dir Damian Chazelle

Throughout the history of art and culture, and indeed the history of anything, there is a very real and conscious acceptance of suffering.
Suffering will lead to salvation, to the promised land.
Suffering is the process one goes through to reach fulfillment.
Enlightenment. Satisfaction. Education.
A theory that an element of luck can shine down on the righteous, but ultimately it is the tears shed and blood spilled that are a more accurate barometer of the likelihood of success.
But what happens when that suffering overtakes and suffocates life?
That is the essence of Whiplash.
A title of deep significance through the film, it is the song that is exhaustively repeated by the players in a Shaffer studio orchestra. It is the painful effect often suffered through the trauma of a car accident. It is also ominously derived from the swift movement of a piece of rope, used to exert control over a subject, man or beast. To wield the lash.
Here we have the relationship between two individuals, Andrew, a young man desperate to make the grade as a jazz drummer, and Fletcher, the instructor who holds so much more than a baton in his hands.
Everyone else is secondary in the focus. Andrew's father, a brief relationship with a girl, the other musicians and wider family are all peripheral.
From the first beat to the last in this exceptionally delivered story, it is all about Andrew and Fletcher.
The control that is exerted, the physical contortions that must be pushed through, the psychological examination that is constantly challenging and striking.
The music is incredible, and the performances authentic.
But the examination of what goes into greatness is a wonderful antidote to the times of instant success from reality television.
It also raises an immense question, posed by Fletcher who is exceptionally formed by JK Simmons.
How far is it acceptable to push someone?
For what many would view as abuse, both physical and emotional, another person might see them as a means to an end.
Examples are tossed out like notes in a solo; Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong. These great figures would not exist but for punishing, regimented and extreme teaching that challenged them to be better than everyone.
It brought to mind the experiences of Michael Jackson when he talked about his father in later years, the abuse he subjected him to.
But you sense in the eyes of Andrew that he never resents the torture he is put through. He relishes it. He wants to rise to the top, and if it doesn't kill him he will make it.
For why deprive the world a work of art, because a few people might fall by the wayside on the way there?
I imagine there are two groups of people who will walk away from this film.
Those who agree with Fletcher, grind those many rocks of coal and one diamond will appear for the world to enjoy, and to hell with the rest.
The other will come away shocked, appalled and feel that were it them, or people they care about, they would flinch at such punishment.
I won't say which category I fall into.
That is the joy of watching this film, you are shown, not told.
You are given a document to view and make your own mind up.
There is no resolution, beautiful music but neither an end point of traumatic failure or defiant success.
It could still go either way for both Andrew and Fletcher when the screen goes black.
But getting there gives you more than enough to draw a conclusion, and decide if you can stomach pain and suffering. Even if it doesn't lead to a pot of gold.
And even if you have no view either way. You can't help but love the performances.

Coming down the mountain

Calvary (2014)
dir John Michael McDonagh 

There is something in the calm and serene environment that doesn't prepare you for the climax of Calvary.
The tranquil foothills of Ireland and trundling shorelines that break silently and respectfully.
The slow and purposeful movement of frame and character marches to a consistent, but lighter pace.
The introduction of a daughter more used to the lifestyle of London only serves to illustrate the importance of speed.
Slowing down.
Speeding up.
Going too fast.
Going too slow.
Life can be judged by the direction we are going, and how quickly we are going to get there.
The confessional scene that opens this film plots a course that will define the central character, played with growing resignation and despair by the excellent Brendan Gleeson.
The end has been declared, the priest is to be killed a week on Sunday.
From that point we are on a journey, an examination of the mind of someone who has to a certain extend been condemned.
Condemned not for his sins, but for the sins of others.
The abuse of the priesthood is brought to light graphically, but then effectively cast into the shadow.
It's an effective device to examine the thinking of an audience without explicitly addressing the issue for more than a fleeting glance.
There is a sense of injustice that a good priest is to be condemned for the crimes of his fraternity. The seemingly absurd argument that this is more judicial is voiced, and then left to hold or evaporate in the ether.
The fact that this man had a child and was married earlier in life only serves to mark his difference to those donning the hassock for a lifetime. Those whose repressed sexuality brought about untold suffering. Those who are seen as deserving of punishment. Those we do not meet here.
Throughout the course of the journey we must ask, do we sympathise with Gleeson's forgiving and quietly shackled existence?
Do we have sympathy for the victim of abuse who has decided to exact his crooked form of equity?
If we don't, why not then?
How by the shocking conclusion can we feel pure judgement on the perpetrator of the final act?
It is less an examination of the crimes of the Catholic Church, and more a lesson in crime and punishment. A modern adaptation of The Merchant of Venice.
We have an innocent man blamed, and punished for the sins of another.
The concept of an eye for an eye is skewered, dissected and we seemingly cannot accept that a good man is condemned by the company he keeps.
The film's title references the place that Jesus was crucified.
The ground on which the Christian faith was born.
Bob Dylan once asked the question in a song whether 'Judas Iscariot had God on his side'.
One wonders the same in this conclusion.
Where in this story is the presence of God. And who is He rooting for?

Are there echoes of Armstrong in Breaking Bad?

I'll try to write this without spoilers, the ending mostly, as I know a lot of people are at various stages of the show. Some unconvinced by the early slow pace of development, some turned away by the more lurid scenes of drug use and violence, some just not caught up in the same thrall of the more ardent viewers.
Whatever the reason for the limited acceptance, I don't wish to spoil any potential future commitment.
What I do wish to explore is a thought I had towards the end of the show, and how it coincided with a prominent fall from grace of another former American hero.
I guess it is true of most narrative structures that they will have blurred lines to other events, fact and fiction will combine to lead to a new creation, a new story.
Perhaps there are no new stories, nothing can ever truly be original when it is created under the influence of everything around you.
My comparison centres around Walter White and Lance Armstrong.
There are enough tangible aspects of both characters' actions and attitudes that made me see them together in a similar fashion.
The first aspect is the premise of the entire series, the prompt for everything that occurs in Albuquerque, the justification at least in early moments for what follows.
I mean of course, cancer.
The threat to life.
The knowledge of something alien within one's body that will end your existence.
To read from White's story, this comes as a freedom that permits him the bravery and assurance to do anything to provide a future for his family. His character slowly develops into Heisenberg, his bravado and lack of fear are extended by the knowledge he has nothing to lose. The ultimate thing we have to lose is our life, and he knows his is gone.
This frees him, but also enables a level of deception to his family and friends.
By being given the role of victim, he exploits and justifies irrational, abusive and ultimately criminal behaviour because he has been given a death sentence.
It's ok.
I have a free pass.
That attitude permeates into all his actions and what is from outset a necessity - must provide for my family - it quickly moves into a hunger for more power.
Power corrupts, absolute power absolutely corrupts.
But what of Armstrong in this situation? For anyone who has read his autobiography there can be no doubting the sympathy and power of feeling for his situation in this moment.
When he describes the awful, almost inhuman experience of donating sperm prior to commencing his course of treatment you cannot help but feel the emptiness he must have been overcome by.
His world had just been ended, or at least forever altered. His chances of having a family, let alone living to see it develop would have been slim to none.
But can we imagine similar motivations at that point of diagnosis in 1996? Are there echoes of that same feeling that White had?
At a point of his life where he had not achieved a great deal, Armstrong faced the end and survived. As did White.
The next element I feel has the same sense in both stories stems from the deception and casual relationship with the truth, and what is used as justification.
As a fictional television show we are far closer to White and his mood swings, we are given a full account of the lies he tells to his family, his associates (I hesitate to say friends, as I don't believe he has any), and ultimately himself.
In Armstrong's case we have seen unfold the myriad of ways in which he was untruthful through those around him, his team-mates and staff, and in an interview with Oprah, himself.
And the factor that I believe brings the closest comparison between the two characters is the charm and persuasion to both themselves and others when dealing with the reasons for deception. They have a noble cause, they are evangelists who are fighting for others (in White’s case it is his family, in Armstrong’s it is other cancer survivors).
And on this point it is hard to argue at times with the motive of helping others, perhaps you even find yourselves drawn in by that sentiment and for Armstrong it is hard to look past the enormous funds raised for charity through LiveStrong, a brand completely in tatters now.
The question will always be, do the means justify the ends? Does the great deception and tactics for winning races tarnish every penny donated to eradicate cancer?
And in the end of Breaking Bad, no spoilers I promise, can viewers accept what White did when viewed alongside his desire to create a better life for his family?
His wife and his son are interesting prisms for our own reaction; they go through the moral questioning internally to decide whether they can abide by what they now have and what was done to give it to them.
Then there is the relation of those in close working proximity to the two figures, the mixture of hatred and loyalty that feuds within that dynamic. Jessie who comes to despise his clinging reliance on White, and Emma O’Reilly who has publicly spoken about the contrasting emotions she felt while working with Armstrong, and even now how she reacts to him as a person.
It is a theme throughout much of modern culture, film, television, books, music; the charm of the scoundrel. The illogical and uncomfortable drawing in that results from those we understand are bad, but we cannot look away. For Walter White read Tony Soprano, read McNulty, Frank Underwood, Rust Cohle. In film see Henry Hill, see Travis Bickle, Michael Corleone, Patrick Bateman. In music the Stones, Sex Pistols to Eminem and Snoop Dogg.
Those that conform are, by and large, boring. Those that challenge, and often act in a way we understand to be wrong, are interesting. We are drawn to the bad, we are intrigued by their actions and what gave them rise to do such things.
Compulsion to slow down when passing a car crash is part of that instinctive nature.
From Paradise Lost to Richard III there is a sense of the devil taking the best lines, crafting an outsider narrative that is prevalent in everything from Marlon Brando and James Dean, to Elvis gyrating his hips.
Being wicked is far more exciting.
It's important to note that you cannot make comparisons of the levels of criminality of White, a fictional character, and Armstrong, a living and breathing sportsman.
But in the methods of deception, the rationale for the behaviour, the demonstrable change in psyche, and the essence of their stories, there is quite a similar quality that struck a chord in my analysis.
What I find most disturbing in looking at both White and Armstrong is the number of people who are rooting for Walter despite all his despicable acts, and while real life changes everything, far fewer seem to be on the side of Lance for his actions.
Much of that must come down to the narrative devices of television, and the storytelling from the perspective of the protagonist.
I make no judgement about either, merely seek to highlight the similarities in their circumstances. 

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans

Boyhood (2014)
dir Richard Linklater

There is a moment towards the latter stages of Boyhood where Mason junior asks 'What's the point of it all?'
He is asking his father, who can offer no answer or clues as to the meaning of why we are here.
Both the cast of characters, one presumes, and the audience will have similar notions at various stages of this sprawling, but ultimately mundane story of a boy growing up.
And that at it's heart is what this story is about; nothing and everything.
Objectively you could walk away from this film and say 'nothing happened', there are no special effects, no great culmination or dramatic turns. It follows a family through the course of 12 years, through the small to large changes in living that influence the adults that emerge. It could easily have been entitled 'Childhood' such is the prominence of Mason's sister Sam, both come through the experience and we bear witness to how events in their lives shape the adults they become.
Like limpets on a ship, some moments in time can seem inconsequential but have lasting impact that cannot be rectified. Here we have a front row seat as the mother tries dutifully to sweep the hull of her ship clean from the effects of three failed marriages and countless new starts. Only when her nest is emptying does she come to realise the futility of it all, life happens to us not the other way around.
In similar fashion to the great American novels of John Updike, the Rabbitt series that charted the life of Harry Angstrom from 1950s US suburbia to the turn of the Millennium, here there is a great appreciation of time and space.
Just in the imagining of this concept Richard Linklater indulged his dreams as opposed to the hard nosed business of production. To come up with a filming schedule over twelve years, hoping beyond logic that all the child actors would wish to maintain their involvement through their entire adolescence, and to produce powerful scenes through every stage of their development is entirely unique.
The stamina and resolve required to prevent the seemingly inevitable imbalance of any aspect of the film over such a long period; acting, camerawork, costume, set, chemistry, emotion, pacing.
Knowing that each year you would return to the same project, and be able to deliver work that would stand alongside that from each year prior, is a sizeable demand on a cast and crew of varying degrees of talent and experience. It is huge credit to Linklater that this project held, and the end product is remarkable. A visual document of both a family, and of every family. Of specific happenings, and universal truths. Of the local and the global.
As in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath where the narrative turns at alternate chapters through the specific story of Tom Joad's family with the general picture of Dustbowl existence, here we can recognise where this story becomes greater than Mason and Samantha and speaks for the experience of all children.
There are relevant and relatable moments in these lives for everyone. Everyone is born, everyone must survive, everyone must deal with the varying degrees of love and attention they receive. Everyone has a family of some description, and only over long periods of time can one come to recognise just how much power these people in our lives have over us. There is nothing we can do but be influenced by everything we encounter. Perhaps the transition from boy to man is recognising the power that exists to influence others, and recognising what can be exerted upon us.
It must have been tempting to end the film at the point of Mason's graduation, a true metaphorical moment where his boyhood has ended in pomp and ceremony, but much of the point here is that life is not wrapped in ribbons and bows. We are provided a snapshot that ends when it ends. We close our eyes and the story halts, we open them again and it starts once more.
Time unfolds before us through sheer persistence. It is a constant theme in everything that happens, because it is the one inescapable fact of all our lives. Time goes on. It stretches out in front of us and taunts us at various stages. When we want it to slow down it speeds us through periods we wish we could repeat over and over. When we are going through trauma it slows us down and enforces absolute consumption of events.
Robert Frost once said of life that he could sum it up in three words; 'It goes on'.
Those words are never said in this film, but it is demonstrated powerfully by the quick succession of events that tumble before our eyes. At almost three hours many might baulk at the length, but condensing 12 years into that period is an immense skill and thus the film does not dawdle along at any stage.
If there is one trick missed in this inspiring, moving and darkly funny film, it is that John Lennon's 'Beautiful Boy' does not feature in the soundtrack.
With the oft-recounted lyric of 'Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans' but also the more general floating lullaby of a doting John to his son Sean captures much of the distant but powerful love Mason senior has for Mason junior.
Indeed the perfect opportunity for such use, in an otherwise faultless soundtrack, comes when the father gives Mason a self-generated Beatles album of solo content by John, Paul, George and Ringo. The 'Black Album' brings the Beatles back together long after their split in 1970, a sentimental notion that could only come from a father who for long periods of the film is incapable of dealing with the reality of his family situation, and would rather apply a retrospective smudge on historical events as if the trauma never happened.
At points like this you don't know which is the adult and which is the child, Mason or his father. The father at points seems to long for his family to be back together, much like the Fab Four, before he starts a family of his own.
He later confides that he has finally become the 'castrated old fool' his first wife longed for him to be.
There is a certain feeling of correlation between Mason junior and senior. They come to moments of realisation in similar fashion, despite the fact one is the others father, they even get girlfriends at the same time.
A generation separates them but you could accuse Ethan Hawke of subtly stealing the boyhood from his son. We first encounter him in his absence, he is somewhere in Alaska unable to cope with being a father. He then surfaces in a GTO without seatbelts, offering presents, bowling and fries. Being fined by his pre-pubescent daughter for swearing is an interesting freudian reverse. But by stages and through to the end of this film, Mason senior feels comfortable in his own shoes.
As an experience in cinema, there are few similar offerings to Boyhood, and for that it is worth seeing.