SING SING - TRUSTED BY A MOVIE
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GARETH HIGGINS ON REAGAN, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE, AND SING SING
The brilliance of adrienne maree brown’s writing continues to amaze me, each page of her Emergent Strategy - this week I’ve been pondering her provocative aphorism that when you trust the people they become trustworthy. This may or may not be true in all cases, but surely most of us can identify with being on either side (or both sides) of that trust (or lack thereof). It’s like when my dad taught me to ride a bike, and he risked removing the training wheels and letting me pedal away from him - he had to trust himself, trust me, trust the relationship of my body to gravity, and trust that even if it went badly, it would still be ok. brown is speaking into a context far more profound than learning to ride a bike - she’s talking about the process by which we become the kind of people capable of remaking the world.
I thought about this a lot when watching three films over the past week, one of which will perhaps end up as my favorite of the year, one a crashing a disappointment, and one - I hate to say it - possibly one of the worst I’ve ever seen.
Let’s start with the bad news. By “worst” here I mean the quality of a thing relative both to the resources available, and the potential it had to be something better. That film is Reagan, a biopic so propagandistic that it literally relegates any criticism of its protagonist to a discrete music video montage of what “other people” said about him, but allows almost none of the empathetic characters in the film to say anything less than lionising. The most egregious part of the montage is a reference to the notorious Reagan White House silence about HIV/AIDS for nearly half a decade after it first emerged; but the way it’s presented in the film could sincerely be read as an endorsement of that very silence. Reagan’s character is portrayed as so pure, so inviolable, so impervious to criticism that the fact that he did something means that it must have been right.
You don’t have to criticize the man’s policies or ideology to see that such hagiography is a disservice - not only to the discernment of a more truthful story for its own sake, but also to learning about how the lives of significant public figures can both shape our own, and serve as mirrors to emulate or resist.
The funny thing is that Reagan was known for (sometimes) respectful dialogue with political opponents (not only the well-known friendship with Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neill, but such currently unlikely happenings as hosting a White House screening of Reds, Warren Beatty’s biopic of John Reed, epic of US American Communism, and one of the greatest social movement films). His personal kindness and affinity with (some) ordinary people were not artificial; and whatever you may think of his legislative endorsements or executive decisions, he does seem to have cared about whether or not he was telling the truth. Sadly, Reagan seems to want to indoctrinate the audience into the notion that the man was really a kind of god, and that God Himself (definitely not a gender-inclusive deity) engineered his election in order to bring about the end of the Soviet Union. Russian dissidents, anti-nuclear weapon activists, and The Day After don’t get a look in, not to mention George H W Bush.
And yet, there’s something valuable here - the first being Dennis Quaid’s central performance, which sometimes feels like an embodiment, and sometimes a caricature, but it’s not clear whether the latter has more to do with the garish backdrop, makeup, and music. The second is that it is, in the end, a reminder that Reagan led or at least substantially contributed to the end of the Cold War and the prevention of a nuclear one “with words” not weapons. If such things matter to you, he may have been the perfect mingling of “soft” and “hard” power; his personal affability sparking mutual recognition with Mikhail Gorbachev, a moment when two particular individuals probably did feel the weight of the world on their shoulders. But Reagan’s refusal to engage with the man’s shadow side and ugly alliances, and the absolutely legitimate criticism of choices he made that caused enormous suffering; the blunted thunder of most of its performances, its shallow psychology and unreflective theology mean that it misses the importance of its subject by a mile. It doesn’t trust the audience enough to portray the man as less than perfect, so it offers us nothing we can learn from.
In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the crashing disappointment of the week, the audience specifically expects a less than perfect protagonist - the point of Beetlejuice, the rambunctious and aggressive ghost is that he gets to say things our shadows would want to, and we laugh. The problem with Tim Burton’s sequel, thirty-six years after the original, is that it doesn’t take storytelling seriously enough. There are funny vignettes (the waiting room for heaven leads to a platform to a literal Soul Train, a delicious kind of boogie-man), and as with all of Burton’s work the thing looks marvelous; but there’s only a sketch of something to hold onto narratively. The movie feels like a series of SNL skits with the thinnest through-line. Four days after seeing it, I - honestly - don’t remember much about it. When Burton tells stories with a deep pre-existing source (such as Batman, Sweeney Todd, Edward Scissorhands, and especially Big Fish) he seems guided by a narrative serendipity. But the looks and the sounds of the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice overwhelm the heart.
And so to Sing Sing (above), which sounds and looks fantastic (shot on film!), and feels it too, with a central performance as big as life, and one of the most original premises. I don’t want to say much more, because the extraordinary pleasure (and challenge) of this film comes partly from knowing little about it in advance. Perhaps it will be enough to note that Sing Sing takes place inside a prison, and is credibly about many things that matter: masculinity, storytelling, community, regret, dignity, amends. Recent Academy Award nominees Colman Domingo and Paul Raci merge with a cast unknown outside the very specific (and very much not public) circumstances in which they first met; it’s one of the best acted films because most of the performances are truly incarnations. Unlike many prison film clichés, Sing Sing is about how shallow hope can keep you prisoner before the real stuff sets you free; and that liberation is an inside job.
I felt a kind of awe watching this movie - like the best “focused” dramas of the 1970s (Kramer vs. Kramer my gold standard) it feels like real life, but more so. I wanted to reach into the screen and touch these people, be embraced by them, learn from them. What stimulated that impulse was the fact that I felt they were reaching out of the screen to touch me. I felt trusted by Domingo and director Greg Kwedar; they know that we can change people by how we look at them.
Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS: HILDEGARD OF BINGEN / NUNS ON THE BUS
September 17 is the Memorial of St. Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century mystic declared a Doctor of the Church in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI. In her own time, Popes Hadrian IV and Alexander III asked her to preach throughout Germany, making Hildegard the first woman to ever preach at Cologne Cathedral, among many other sites. (Note: if you encounter someone who tells you that women aren’t allowed to preach in the Catholic Church, you can remind them that this wasn’t always so. And it’s not completely true today; Benedictine abbots can invite women to preach. I know this from experience, as it once happened to me.)
Hildegard regarded music as a living sign of the unity that God intended for us, and for the universe. All of her poems were written to be sung in the daily liturgies of her community of Benedictine nuns. One great work, Ordo Virtutum (or Order of the Virtues) contains glorious choral music, but the devil, who makes a brief appearance, is consigned to speaking in a scratchy voice, because when he rejected God, he lost the power to sing. The musical ensemble Sequentia has a CD of the work, translated by renowned medieval scholar Peter Dronke.
When Hildegard and her community were ordered by civil authorities not to bury a prince who had been guilty of some political offense, the women buried him anyway. When they heard that soldiers were coming to exhume the prince they went out in the middle of the night with rakes and shovels to disturb so many of the graves that the soldiers couldn’t determine where the prince was buried. The punishment imposed on the women was especially painful for Hildegard; they could speak their liturgies but not sing them. Nuns on the Bus is a contemporary example of the long tradition of civil disobedience among women in religious orders. Ironically, in 2012 when the same Pope who had honored Hildegard complained that nuns were too outspoken about social injustice, a group of nuns began to tour America by bus advocating against budget cuts in programs serving the poor. They’re still at it; the 2024 tour includes 20 cities and partners from other religious faiths.