Robert Frost: This Verse Business (2013)

Vermont Frost

Lost Nation Theater, a Montpelier Vermont based playhouse,  produced a one man show about Robert Frost. It brings to mind the apocryphal figure who brought coals to Newcastle. What could anyone say about our beloved state icon that we don’t already know? It is de rigueur for any New England higher educational institution to have a black and white photo of the ruffled white haired gentleman shaking hands with the former President of the College or head of the English department. One senses the old man spent his later years on a perpetual reading tour.  He is a superstar whose celebrity eclipses the claustrophobic hyper-literary world where most poets reside. There is a strong chance that even the jockiest Vermont highschooler would be able to identify his image and maybe even recite a line or two: “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors...” He is, after all, our small state’s claim on culture... President Kennedy gave a speech in his honor the year of his death. But what do we know of the person? What is behind the scruffy, hard-edged yet avuncular, knowing, old man?

A.M. Dolan’s answers that question in “Robert Frost: This Verse Business”. This is a succinct 75 minute monologue, performed by Gordon Clapp. The playwright could have no better vehicle to embody the old Vermonter that this seasoned stage performer.  The direction and set design were also first rate.  All the elements combined to deliver the presence of the poet.  Dolan’s challenge is to include enough of the poet’s work in conjunction with the right amount of biographical detail. If he tilts far in one direction it would seem a pedantic exercise in facts; the other extreme would be merely a spoken word recitation. Dolan strikes the balance: we hear the written work as well as personal quips and stories.  The play opens in the latter part of the poets life with him at the lectern addressing “his public”.  The playwright cleverly has Mr. Frost unable to see his notes due to the harsh lightning.  This is inspired by a famous incident in which the poet was unable to physically read the poem he created for President Kennedy’s inauguration due to the harsh glare of the sunlight. He banters back and forth with an unseen presence that is guiding the event.  His requests for less light are met with inaction. Frost never misses a beat and continues on with his ‘business’ and suddenly, apropos of nothing, the lights are adjusted.  This small exchange is a physical illustration of the poet’s belief in the ability to improvise in the face of God’s unexplainable actions. The poet himself might believe I’m reading too much into the moment.  He scoffs at all the college profs and over-eager truth-seekers who delve too deeply into his simply metaphors. But the playwright has a larger design as does Mr. Frost. His poems have a simple clarity which is often met with derision by the experts who are skeptical that the general public would have any notions of “good poetry”.  Many ‘sophisticated’ academics look upon Frost as merely a showman; the way scientists viewed the television astronomer Carl Sagan. The approachability of his work somehow gives way to the notion of being pedestrian. I would paraphrase a moment in the play in which Frost is asked by a college professor questions the plausibility of the horse in “Stopping by Woods” ringing his bells “to ask if there is some mistake”. Can animals have the capacity to ask good questions? Frost turns the query over to a seasoned farmer in the assembly who is reported to have said “sometimes better than college professors”. Frost has the healthy American skepticism of authority, especially the kind dressed up with the moniker of “expert”.

Gordon Clapp’s performance rises above being mere mimicry.  He looks, sounds and moves as the elder frost (at least judging by archive footage and recordings) but to really be the man himself a performer must mix what is inside his own being.  It’s paradoxical that in order to fully inhabit someone else one must bring themselves into the picture. There is no clue as to the Mr. Clapp’s off stage personality, but what is being experienced on the boards is more than simply hitting the right notes. Mr. Frost was there in Mr. Clapp and vice versa. This was especially true during the sequence in which he recites the blank verse poem, “Death of a Hired Man”. As someone who has run farms I have met many a “Silas” - the subject of Mr. Frost’s harrowing portrait.  This farm hand is a broken man who deserves no favor; but does.  There is nothing logical about the wife’s sympathy as Silas is, by any definition, a wayward narcissist. But it is in the illogic of finding reason to be kind where we find our humanity. One can’t help but wonder if Mr. Frost’s own passion for the curmudgeon underdog had something to do with his own personal fortunate misfortune. This is touched on during the play with opaque references to pre-deceased children, one by suicide. Mr. Dolan strikes this minor chords in passing... making them all the more haunting.  It prompted me to do some digging to confirm what I had suspected: not only was Frost and his spouse plagued with depression; but as a young man he had to commit his sister to a mental hospital where she perished soon after. His grandfather bought him a farm and supported him financially in the beginning. But the real good fortune was his ability to focus on his work and establish his mark on the world by winning a Pulitzer prize at age 50 in 1924. He lived another four decades.... but one wonders if playing the grand old man was more burden than relief.

My father was a college student in the late 1950s and had the honor of escorting Mr. Frost around the campus before one of the command performances.  By that point everyone wanted to see him as there might not be another opportunity given his age. Frost asked my father to go to the college library and check out a book of his poems as he had forgotten his own. The eager young student knocked on the hotel room door and presented “The Complete Poems of Robert Frost”. The elder poet looked at my father and said “I guess if I write another poem I’ll have to do it on the back of this book”.  This was the man Mr. Clapp became at the Lost Nation production: self-deprecating star of the show. He held the audience in rapture with “I’m going to show you how I write a poem”. This was followed by him on the front porch of his cabin clutching pen to paper while sitting in a chair. He held that pose and all the audience with him for what seemed an eternity; only to say: “sometimes it takes time.”  The cabin appears in the closing third of the play and gives rise to soul bearing.... from a man who has skepticism of soul bearers.  In real life an incident occurred in the actual building a couple of years back.  Some highschoolers had a illegal kegger and trashed the place. Being Vermont, the penance was to have a noted Middlebury Professor give them a lecture about the man and his work in order that they realize the gravity of their crime. I felt a cackle from Frost’s grave when I heard the ‘punishment’. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the old man would have approved.  The professor chose the poem “Out, out” which tells the story of a young man who cuts off his hand with a chainsaw and bled to death. It is not one of Frost’s major works and not featured in the play. It no doubt captured the imagination of  the captive boys who know the dangers of chainsaws... or at least chainsaws. The closing line is revealing in a way that one could only know from having knowledge of the world’s steely nature:

...................................And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs

No doubt it was lost on the classroom prisoners, who were probably planning another party. Frost would have approved. He might not have shown... but he would have wanted to be invited. He’d grown up in the city and personally never partook in the rural social isolation of many of his solitary creations.

Mr. Dolan has a very clever title to this work: “Robert Frost: This Verse Business”.  It is a quote from the script. One takes the word ‘business’ to mean, ‘business’ in the sense of ‘giving them the business’; or poetry is Frost’s ‘shtick’. But in a broader sense ‘business’ can also mean, vocation. The play is peppered with Frost reflecting on the art of forming a poem. He has an aside where he states “Free verse is like playing tennis without a net”. He derides other poets for being too lax in their structure.  One senses the craftsman, not the artist. In other words Frost seemed to imagine himself as a glass-blower, blacksmith or barrel maker. There is a distinctly tradesman-like kinship he shares with his inspirations. Once again Frost was personally more urban and urbane and never had to fear the result of pecuniary burden of losing a crop.  Here is an excerpt from his NY Times obituary which chronicles his career:

Strangely enough, Frost spent 20 years writing his verses on stone walls and brown earth, blue butterflies and tall, slim trees without winning any recognition in America. When he sent them to The Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note:
"We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse."
It was not until "A Boy's Will" was published in England and Ezra Pound publicized it that Robert Frost was recognized as the indigenous American poet that he was.
-NY Times, Jan. 30, 1963

Tradesman don’t wait two decades to see if something works... that’s the realm of college men... in fact Frost attended two Ivy League schools but never graduated.  He met Ezra Pound while briefly living outside of London... once again not exactly what one would expect from a homespun frugal Yankee... but he wasn’t... he was actually born in San Francisco before being brought East after his father’s death. Mr. Clapp captures this odd contradiction but Mr. Dolan shaded the duality.  My only note on this very fine production would be to witness the disappearance of the beautiful facade that appears after the ‘lecture’ segment. In other words we see Frost sitting on that porch ‘playing’ the rustic. But I feel it would have been more appropriate if the New England cabin facade literally vanished at the end of the play: Frost in a Godot-like emptiness. He could look at the audience and visually communicate his disdain for people who think they have answers.  He might even recite the epitaph which he took from his poem, “The Lesson for Today”. This work imagines a dialogue with failed poets/teachers of the past. Here are the closing lines:

And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

He was good to his word. That last line is on his tombstone in Bennington. That’s what I took away from watching the hardscrabble romantic... behind the tweed jackets, the adoring fans, the cultural posing, the family grief, the not so simple rustic simplicity... was a lover.

Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013)

The Black Woman’s Burden

In the interest of full disclosure: epic bio-pics rank with movie adaptations of musical comedies as my least favorite film experience. (see my review of Spike Lee’s “X”: http://thebettertruth.blogspot.com/search?q=%22x%22 ).  “Lee Daniels' The Butler” is a new mainstream feature based on the biography of Eugene Allen, an African American man, who rose from Southern Cotton fields to serve as a key member of the White House staff for decades.  Perhaps “mainstream” is not accurate in that the Hollywood suits never would have bet millions on such a project capturing America’s transition from the Jim Crow era through the civil rights struggle and beyond. Note the competition at the theater I attended: “We’re the Millers” (a Jennifer Aniston comedy with the premise of a stripper traveling to Mexico, incognito as a soccer mom, for a drug deal), “Disney Planes” (animated children’s feature staring anthropomorphic airplanes ), “One Direction: this is Us” (documentary about the pop group featured in 2 and 3D), “The World’s End” (beer drinkers face zombies) and “Elysium” (Matt Damon in future apocalyptic thriller).  The folks at Fox saw this last film as a socialist parable about the evils of our current immigration policy... others view it as simply a slick sci-fi movie. Needless to say one can safely assume that even if this film had a political agenda - it wasn’t going to get funded without a muscle bound, leather clad Damon dancing around pyrotechnical special effects.  It is doubtful that any 11 year old boy (who seem to be the target audience) left the theater with a passion for the plight of illegals or resentment about the class divide. “The Butler” is a no holes bared view of American’s cruel treatment of its black citizens in modern times. It is an overt expose of the dark side of ‘one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all’.  One can feel the studio executives grabbing the antacid tablets at the early meetings.  I would have loved to have seen a video of one of them turning down Oprah Winfrey. I imagine the dialogue: “It’s a really good script... ah really important BUT....” cue the special effects for Ms. Winfrey’s reaction. 

Oprah is a force of nature in the entertainment business and has shown the willingness to back projects based her personal belief that something is ‘important’.. In fact she has created an industry based on her own taste which has upended television, film and book publishing. Not bad for a woman born to a single black teenage mother who worked as a domestic in Kosciusko Mississippi. One can see that she would be drawn to the story of a man born in the grip of Southern oppression who, working as a domestic, rises to a position where he is on a first name basis with the leaders of the ‘free’ world.  Lee Daniels, a Winfrey protege, is a daring African American journeyman film producer. In 2009 Winfrey put her power behind “Precious”. Mr. Daniels, a former nursing agency entrepreneur, created a film about a morbidly obese, sexually abused illiterate African American teenager. Once again it is easy to understand Ms. Winfrey’s attraction to the plot given her own Dickensian childhood of poverty and abuse.  The film entered the Sundance Festival without a major distributor and finished the year with a multi-million dollar box office gross and a number of Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. It won in the best supporting actress category. None of this would have happened except for Winfrey’s stamp of approval. Not surprisingly “Lee Daniel’s The Butler”  had poor financial prospects given the serious content. In the end - the film was #1 at the box office for 3 weeks and has grossed nearly $100 million.  Note: the budget was around $30 million. Once again... it is Oprah’s world and we just live in it.

Mr. Daniels, as director, is faced with the daunting task of balancing the vast historical story with the relatively small world of the butler.  In 1979 NBC did a television mini-series called “Backstairs at the White House” which chronicled the relations between the Presidents and the domestic staff for a period of 60 years as told from the POV of an African American mother and daughter.  It’s strange that Mr. Daniels failed to give a theatrical nod to the real life Lillian Rodgers Parks whose mother started working as a housemaid in the Taft administration. Parks. who was a seamstress, retired during the Eisenhower administration - the same time the Mr. Daniels character assumed his responsibilities. Perhaps he felt the ‘originality’ of his project was sacrosanct? “Backstairs” was interesting in terms of the historical gossip but the domestics’ domestic challenges were less captivating.  “The Butler” repeats this unfortunate dramatic lull.  Despite Winfrey’s strong appeal as a performer her battles with the bottle and men failed to compete with the Butler interacting with Jack Kennedy during Civil Right mayhem or Nixon during Watergate.

The second major artistic challenge is integrating the history with the arc of the story. Given the fact that the film breaks the two hour mark it is not surprising that this exercise had hits and misses. One must remember this is popular drama for a mass audience rather than detailed scholarly study. Daniels hits all the big moments and the big characters hit their big marks. Daniels has the butler’s son turn into a Zelig-like character who goes from the Freedom Marchers’s daring struggle to the Black Panthers radical excess to anti-apartheid acceptable righteousness while the butler himself struggles with intergenerational torment of having survived Jim Crow. It’s all, well, as one would except. Kennedy is charming. Nixon is creepy. Johnson is vulgar. The butler is appropriately glad/mad/ happy/ sad. Forest Whitaker  has the ability summon vast currents of emotional wattage. I felt my TV set dimming from sheer lack of current during his guest appearance on the TV show “the Shield”. I was nervous about him being cast in this type of drama as his tears and sweat might drench the first few rows of the theater. Ironically he kept it in check - in his case the result is a good heartfelt performance.  Ditto for Winfrey. Although she failed in her battle with history; it was a valiant effort. Daniels’ historical re-enactments create one sharp note amidst the gushing music and gooey cinematography: the portrayal of Ronald Reagan. Given the director’s penchant for simplicity this segment was the unintentional highlight of the film.

Ronald Reagan’s son, Michael, wrote a rebuke to what he saw as a portrait of his father as a racist. Here is the closing paragraph of his Op-Ed entitled “Butler from Another Planet:

Despite what Hollywood’s liberal hacks believe, my father didn’t see people in colors. He saw them as individual Americans. If the liberals in Hollywood -- and Washington -- ever start looking at people the way he did, the country will be a lot better off.

The film itself is extremely generous about Reagan and his relationship with the butler which stood in stark contrast with the President’s support of the racist South African regime. Michael Reagan does not refute the history but instead says the Gipper was acting within the context of Cold War politics not animosity towards blacks. He counters that Reagan had a history of having black friends and standing up for African Americans. The film SUPPORTS the idea that the President was personally NOT a racist.  Reagan trusted the butler to dole out cash to constituents while hiding this from the First Lady and his staff.  The confidence was mutual: the butler trusted him to lift the decades long internal White House wage discrimination against the black staff. In fact Jimmy Carter, the left leaning Democrat, is omitted from the film suggesting that the butler failed to trust him to overturn the internal pay disparity. Interesting question to know if in real life, President Carter, a person who was such a control freak he personally approved who played on the White House tennis court, failed to overturn this longstanding injustice. President Reagan,  according to the film, was affable and righteous in regards to his personal associations with African Americans. His son, however, doth protest to much. The historical record shows failings far beyond the South Africa policy. Reagan was AGAINST the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his skittishness regarding racial equality carried over into his later career. His first public speech after receiving the Republican Presidential nomination in 1980 was in Philadelphia Mississippi, the town famous for the murder of three civil rights workers during the freedom march. He chose the topic of  “States Rights” saying he would “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them”. Given this it was not a surprise that the KKK endorsed Reagan for President. The HISTORICAL record clearly shows him capitalizing on white resentment for political gain. Perhaps what upset Michael Reagan was the strange reaction the butler himself had to Nancy Reagan’s invitation to a state dinner as a guest rather than a employee.

The critic Walter Benjamin said that kitsch art "offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation".  The Reagan sequence is one of the few moments which require the film audience to dig out the emotional inner life of the characters.  There is nothing in the preceding hour and a half to prepare the audience for the butler’s queasiness at being perceived as the show negro at the White House state dinner. In fact the previous encounters with President and Mrs. Reagan seem genuine and cordial.  Why was the butler offended? It is especially odd given he had just successfully overturned decades of entrenched pay-scale racism within the White House. The First Lady refers to this victory and commends him on his leadership. In the end the butler resigns, ostensibly due to Reagan’s stand on South Africa. The President himself is genuinely saddened and confesses possibly being wrong on civil rights and South Africa - but he never changes his policies. At this point the characters are wrestling with demons that seem to savage the kitsch auto-pilot sensibility of the most of the drama. This conflict has shades of love and hate that stand in stark contrast to the parade of pure representatives of good and evil.   This film needed more of that subtly. It was a jarring moment which gave life to a somnolent storyline; perhaps this is what triggered Reagan’s son to pen the fierce op ed. There were a few other missed opportunities for character introspection. The decision for the butler to leave his mute, mentally ill, sexually abused mother was blurred over in voice over. Ditto for the relationship between himself and the old white female house manager who saved him from the field.  In a monologue he insists that she would miss him dearly although she never showed it.  Why? This is the heart of the story. The friction between good people participating in morally bankrupt actions that hurt those they supposedly love. It is a challenge to paint this portrait using one dimensional characters who rarely let down their guard to show... inner turmoil? denial? justification?... nothing at all?

It is a tall order to wish that this film would plumb the soul of the characters caught up in the struggle for African American enfranchisement.  Perhaps it is an unfair expectation as the creators are illustrating broad stokes of history in palatable easy to digest narratives. Winfrey and Daniels see themselves as delivering a synthesis of grand themes to an audience that has little or no knowledge of the past. This estimation of ignorance might seem harsh until you consider that numerous news outlets have conducted studies which reveal that nearly one third of Americans would fail the civics section of the test given to new immigrants. Once again this trend can only worsen as scores of students abandon History and other humanities subjects in favor of business studies due to the escalation in the price of tuition. In this new harsh economic shrinking pie reality, Winfrey and Daniels are entrepreneurs filling a need. Don’t bother with the nitty gritty - just the outline.  Why become bogged down in MLK’s radical economic views or the Black Panther’s misogyny or Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s race politics....  Their product eschews unrelenting negativity and bothersome complications.  Ironically they are pushing the most overreaching, and perhaps pernicious of American values: blind optimism.

Gore Vidal was an author who shared Daniels and Winfrey’s ‘outsider’ status in the traditional halls of power. Although he was to the manor born, he wrote openly about homosexuality in the late 1940s and became a fierce critic of his fellow Brahim.  His historical novels set in 19th century attempt to ‘explain’ the past to the masses he feels are duped by entrenched power.  Vidal quipped : “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.” No doubt Winfrey and Daniels have the same sense of righteousness.  In their case, however, they are firmly living the American dream.  A ‘happy ending’ is vital to their world view.  It is doubtful that Winfrey or Daniels would ever back a film about such historical events as the 1917 Houston insurrection or the 1921 Tulsa race riots. In both cases the good, law abiding black citizens were crushed under the harsh unforgiving stone wheel of Jim Crow.  The election of the first African American President was vital to the success of this film. The closing sequence features the retired butler being led the oval office by a fawning newly appointed African American chief of White House Operations. It was said that President Obama was asked to actually participate in this film.  Perhaps his advisers recalled the last time a main stream American ‘serious’ bio-pic attempted profundity with a cameo by a real live historical figure: Nelson Mandela’s appearance in Spike Lee’s “X”.  Don’t remember? Neither does anyone else.  The point is that, despite the seeming critique of ‘the system’ - “The Butler” is a parable about the possibility of progressive change in America.

Both Daniels, a black homosexual, and Winfrey, an African American woman, were born into worlds that gave no voice to their respective groups. Both have good reason to applaud America’s bounty. There is, however,  an odd contradiction in being a cheerleader for a system that, statistically, is unkind to so many of your constituents. Perhaps a more appropriate closing for this film would have been the addition of a scene in which the distinguished Butler, who has just met the President, is unable to hail a taxi cab because of his race. The struggles continues and the majority will never see the promise land of equal opportunity. Here is a sobering fact: African Americans make up 13% of the general population and account for 43% of the people in American prisons.  Once again the American dream exists. It is doubtful someone of Ms. Winfrey’s race and class would have been able to achieve the heights of fame of power in any other country. But even the broad strokes of history should be tempered by the ugly reality that class mobility in the United States fails to match rhetoric of our national land of opportunity. The NY Times in 2012 writes that social mobility is greater in Canada and Europe than the land of the free and the brave. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 ) It is important not to overlook the gains made. Women of my grandmother’s generation were born legally disenfranchised from voting. I was born at a time when African American’s were de jure second class citizens. Winfrey and Daniels are correct in celebrating a William Cullen Bryant quote spoken by Dr. King: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again”. But the key is, what truth? It is equally important to  echoed a sentiment spoken by Gore Vidal:

“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”

Vidal overstates the case and there is nothing wrong with entrepreneurs of any stripe selling historical ‘bon bons’.  It is troubling, however, that there is such little illumination of the economic divide.  One forgets that Dr. King was in the midst of organizing a massive rally pointing out economic injustice when he was assassinated. It would be a tough issue to raise for someone who purchases handbags that equal the downpayment on most homes. Once again expecting Oprah to tackle serious social issues is the equivalent of wanting a Hallmark birthday card to read: another year closer to death.  Certainly a factual statement... but probably not a money maker for the greeting card giant. She is a businesswoman; an entrepreneurial juggernaut, PERIOD. Mr. Daniels is a first rate commercial director, PERIOD. Buying into the premise that they are social activists, is akin to believing one will change the world by buying Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.  It is sophomoric to expect our good natured moguls to be superhero activists. Oprah’s life is a testament what is good in American, as is Mr. Daniels; but that should never be confused with greatness... either artistically or morally. It’s too bad Oprah didn’t take a shine to Matt Damon’s “Elysium”... she might have given gravitas to all the fireworks. The 11 year old might have started to wonder about more than explosions.... what if he left the theater and asked his parents: “how come our house isn’t as nice as their house” - now that would be revolutionary.

100 Year Anniversary of the Plainfield Vermont Volunteer Fire Department

The Plainfield Volunteer Fire Department was formed the same year a band of Vermont Civil War Veterans had gathered to mark the 50th anniversary of their struggle at the Battle of Gettysburg. This year, a century later, Vermont Veterans organized a parade to mark the 50 year anniversary of the Vietnam war.  Things change... but the important things remain.  The people who founded this organization probably never saw an engine driven firetruck - they were invented only 6 years earlier -  but they would be familiar with the real part of being a volunteer. Being called away from the office, farm or quarry at an odd hour to risk one’s life to help save a random neighbor for no reason that anyone from ‘away’ would understand.  Robert Frost said “Good Fences make good neighbors”.  People often quote this line to underscore our individualism which is as bountiful as all those granite boulders that pop out from the dark brown cow pastures. We are set in our ways and our ways are not our neighbors. Back to Mr. Frost’s poem: “He is all pine and I am apple orchard”.  What people who live ‘away’ don’t understand is that the neighbors in the poem re-build the wall TOGETHER - every year. They do it even though one of the neighbors thinks the other is crazy and there is absolutely no logical need for the wall as neither has livestock and the boundary is clearly marked by a change in tree variety. One keeps asking questions. They other keeps answering by not answering and yet.... they BOTH keep re-building the wall every year.

I have little doubt that if the original fire brigade was looking around at us they’d be asking some serious questions: what is a traffic light? why do you spend so much time on those things you call radios? why are those things you call firetrucks ‘yellow’?  But when the siren rings everyone would fall inline.  The men of 1913 would join with the people of 2013 and they go and put out a fire. They’d be uneasy on the truck; which would seem to move as a rocket compared to their horse drawn rig. They would not be familiar with working with women in this capacity..... but in the end they would all join in the rescue. The important things remain true. Whether pine or orchard, EVERYONE knows: good fences make good neighbors and good volunteers make a good town.

Organized firemen have been around since the days of ancient Rome. Volunteer Fire Departments have been in the United States since the beginning. President George Washington was a volunteer fireman. This gives me hope that the institution will survive in some form for the bicentennial in 2113.  Perhaps a young child who is here with us today will be an honored guest at that celebration. I’m sure there will be questions. I can imagine the man who wears the white helmet at that time showing this person an image of Chief Martin in a multi-colored Plainfield Volunteer Fire Department shirt. The question would be ‘what is the significance of the pattern on the clothing?’. The person would respond: "it’s a Tie-dyed T-shirt. The hippies used to wear them." And the current Chief would say: "what is a ‘hippie’? and why was Chief Martin one of them?"  At the same time the Old Home day parade would be hovering slowly down a palm tree lined Route 2 in the modern flying vehicles.  They would pass the Gary Graves Town Hall Building; which would be famous at that time for having the driest basement of any structure in Vermont. At that point the parade route would pass through the dangerous intersection down into Plainfield  Village- the town would still be trying to get funds from AOT for repairs and the Selectboard would still be saying ‘it’s a few years away’.  A young child will point at the Plainfield  Volunteer Fire Department Vehicle and ask her mother. “How come our town has a yellow one and all the other ones are red?”  The mother will answer in a very clear voice: “Plainfield is not plain. Never has been. Never will be.”  The important things remain true.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

Woody Allen, Working Man

Woody Allen has written and directed a feature film every year since 1977 and he is on schedule to complete another project in 2014. This is AFTER a two decades of establishing himself as a stand up comic and show business writer.  It is astounding that the super-star auteur writer/director of my youth in the 1970s would still  be producing work. What is even more extraordinary is his latest films have been commercially and critically the most successful of his career. “Midnight in Paris”, “Vicky Christina Barcelona” and “Match Point” were all made in the last decade and have certainly equaled or excelled the inflation adjusted box office for such Allen classics as:  “Annie Hall”, “Manhattan” and “Hannah and her Sisters”.  The word ‘genius’, which was commonly associated with Mr. Allen in his prime, has once again been resurrected. Proof is in the pudding - the latest feature “Blue Jasmine” - has the premiere performers of the moment lining up to work for scale on this project: Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin,  Louie C.K have all joined to have their names appear in alphabetical order in Woody’s trademark Windsor-EF-Elongated font with soft jazz music playing in the background. Decade after decade, serious talent wants to join the club.  Mr. Allen deserves high praise for his business acumen in creating an American art-house brand.  He has a kindred spirit in another Bronx born entrepreneur. Those people on the upper east side of Manhattan might not take notice of Ralph Lipschitz and Allan Konigsberg ... but they proudly wear Ralph Lauren and would do anything to be in a Woody Allen movie. Let the naysayers carp about Lauren’s lack of originality or Allen’s unevenness as a writer/director.  These men view the world through the eyes of their immigrant families and have a different ‘bottom line’. Ralph Lauren classic car collection has been featured in the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Woody Allen used to park his chauffeur driven cream-colored Rolls Royce in front of Elaine’s restaurant. What kind of cars do the critics’ drive?

“Blue Jasmine” is about the familial devastation wrought by a con-man; who has affairs and simultaneously destroys the financial stability of his friends, family and business associates.  The cruel aftermath of marital deception coupled with heinous crimes has been visited by Mr. Allen on a few occasions. “Crimes and Misdemeanors” has a doctor killing his lover to safeguard his marriage. “Matchpoint” reprises this scenario.  In both cases the men remain relatively unscathed by their treachery. “Blue Jasmine” has a far bleaker outcome.  In this case, however, it is told from the woman’s POV.  The wrongdoer faces justice but the spouse seems to suffer a worse fate. Ironically ‘loyalty’ trumps dishonesty. In other words the despicable actions of the Bernard Madoff trickster, played effectively by Alec Baldwin, seem less of a problem then Cate Blanchett’s failure to stand by her man. Her performance is outstanding.  She brings a heartfelt depth to the character which should be attributed to her gifts as a performer; rather than Allen’s work as a writer/director. She created a silk purse from a ponderous, narcissistic cow’s ear full of  dialogue.  One of the challenge's in Allen’s films is a lack of gravitas.  This is understandable in that his roots are in slap-stick comedy rather than drama.  Allen in at his best in mad-cap social satire: “Play it Again Sam”, “Sleeper”, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex”.  His work takes on an unappealing sophomoric angst when he wades into the deeper end of the pool: “Interiors”, “Husband and Wives”, “Stardust Memories”... Unfortunately he is most personally revealing in these moments. “Husband and Wives” was shot while he was still married to his co-star Mia Farrow. Unfortunately it was released during the tumultuous divorce where it was revealed he had left his wife for his step daughter. The Allen character in the film ends up embracing a bachelor life. He feels he has hurt enough people with his failed attempts at intimacy. In real life Allen married his step-daughter permanently estranging himself from Farrow and their biological child. “Stardust Memories”, which Allen considers his best work, features a filmmaker who laments that fans prefer his “earlier, funnier movies”.  Perhaps it is because the protagonists, who bear a striking resemblance to their creator, fail to be sympathetic.  The lovable onscreen persona Allen delivers in his early work, a nebbish, overly-intellectual, clumsy, insecure mensch/shlemiel, gives way to something closer to Sammy Glick - the rags to riches sociopath in Bud Shulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run”.  The ‘real-life’ Allen is a multi-lingual former high school athletic star who, in addition to being a playwright and best selling author, is a professional musician. He was out-earning his parents in his early teens writing comedy.  There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and talented but the tenor of his work betrays a meanness. There are no real good guys in Woody Allen films... just head cases, villains and scores of set-piece clowns.  The drift away from ‘slapstick’ has brought his dour world-view into sharper focus. The characters are fleeting in their griefs and triumphs. One always remembers the ‘gags’ or one-liners in Allen films... but never the characters - save the ever-changing Mr. Allen himself. Now that he has retired from onscreen appearances his work has become a pastiche of well-known performers acting out clever set-piece dramas. Nothing wrong with that... we all enjoy parking our brains at the door while we much away on the popcorn.... but it would be wise to raise our ‘genius’ bar for the real McCoy. 

“Blue Jasmine” is a callow view of contemporary class friction.  Ironically Allen, who knows both worlds intimately, fails to deliver. There is a forced quality to his portraits which hints that he stopped noticing people, blue or white collar, decades ago. The stilted exposition combined with laughable plot points renders the whole enterprise stillborn.  Allen, who studied under famed writing teacher Lajos Egri, might want to dust off a copy of his “The Art of Dramatic Writing”... specifically the section addressing ‘coincidences’. Are we really supposed to believe that the protagonist runs into her nemesis at the exact moment her lover is purchasing an engagement ring? And to add insult to injury: the clever fiancee, who is an upperclass worldly diplomat, never performed a basic google-search of the new love of his life?  And to add insult to injury squared - the nemesis reveals a long lost relative who is a short commute from where she is standing? There are two simple words for this: bad writing.   Once again the craft and talent give the veneer of quality.   The references, accents and accoutrements are all spot on... but the center does not hold.   It is interesting to contrast “Blue Jasmine” with the television season of “Damages” which re-creates the Madoff mayhem.  Glenn Close’s portrayal of an ambitious prosector is an interesting parallel to Cate Blachett. These women are first rate actresses at the top of their game and deliver unforgettable performances. The difference is that Close’s work integrates with the overall storyline and has meaningful impact on one’s views of Madoff’s real-life actions.  Blachett merely gives an unforgettable performance. Once again it is worth twice the price of admission to see her tackle this part - but it has nothing to do with the high stakes morality of conning your closest loved ones and sending them into financial ruin. “Damages” delivers the damage. “Blue Jasmine” riffs on the major chords but fails to deliver a nuanced solo. The result is as forgettable as running water. Once again there are some marvelous performances Of note: Andrew Dice Clay resurrects himself from the doldrums of self-induced career suicide and  constructs a meaningful rendering of a little man caught in a rich man’s world.  Unfortunately Allen fails to possess the writing ability to raise this person from the shoals of caricature.... a problem that has plagued his ‘serious’ work for many decades. It all stems from Allen’s dread of real emotional connection and revelation.

Woody Allen’s Wikipedia bio, which omits any mention of his messy divorce and high profile court fight with his long-time producers, has a brief line about Allen’s father: Martin Konigsberg. They describe him as a “jewelry engraver and a waiter.”  There is another profession the elder Konigsberg had which is not listed. During the heyday of Allen’s work in the late 70s and early 80s his father was a messenger in Allen’s production office.  It is hard to understand this arrangement as one might think Allen might prefer to buy the old man a small house in Boca Raton rather than face him EVERY DAY at work.  It is difficult to know the inter-personal dynamics - certainly Woody isn’t blabbing.  But it sheds light on a die-hard work ethic. Certainly Mr. Konigsberg felt the need to show up for the job and earn his keep. Having been born in 1900 he was in his late 70s early 80s at the time and no doubt he might have found an easier way of passing the time. It is interesting to pair this ‘need to work’ with Allen’s own obsessive dedication to his career. Throughout all the personal turmoil he never has gone a year without having some substantial project to show for it. One might say the process has overtaken his need to dig in the emotional weeds of self-examination. Humor has always been a trusted friend from the demons of personal-introspection. Unfortunately dramatic work requires the personal risk of ‘putting yourself on the line’.  “Blue Jasmine” has an important moment centered around a child formally rejecting a parent.  It is, despite strong performances, merely another note in the clumsy storyline. Strange to think Allen himself has faced this torment and yet there is nothing of ‘him’ in this writing - just platitudes and plot points. But perhaps the expectation that Allen would live up to his ‘press’ really misses the point. Mr. Konigsberg, who died a centenarian, might be able to say a thing or two about people the press dub as ‘geniuses’.  He strikes me as someone who wasn’t interested in hype - life is about the bottom line. I think that spirit is passed down in his son.  The Wikipedia page lists scores of accolades - including a life sized bronze sculpture of himself erected in a town in Spain. Allen is smart enough to know he is more Salieri than Mozart but worrying about that sort of truth is reserved for private school kids. He built his business. He  sells stuff that people like and playing ‘genius’ is part of the schtick.  They want to complain - they can come to him. He’s not collecting Oscars or giving seminars or wasting time on talk shows. I imagine a film reviewer asking him, point blank: why don’t you try harder? Why not make a real film about betrayal instead of showcasing vain, shallow representations of rich and poor? The nebbish/kooky artist would vanish and he’d be face to face with Sammy Glick who would stare deep into their eyes: “Who the f#%* are you? What have you directed lately? How much money did you earn last year?”... then after a pause.... “What do you drive?”..... Then after an even longer pause  “You’re not getting tickets for a screening of the next one... you’re paying retail like everyone else”. 

Woody is laughing all the way to the bank.... of course it’s not really about the money... that’s only valuable in that it’s proof of his standing with the ruling class. But there is a sense that he’s playing everyone for what it’s worth.  He’s funny but I sense an emptiness when he stops telling jokes. I am in the vast minority. If Woody’s dad’s age is any indicator of the director’s longevity:  there will scores of more films, the hottest talent will be lining up to be in them and people in the know will be lining up to see them. As the song goes, “It’s nice work if you can get it.” I wonder, is this a comedy?... or something else.