Boyhood

If The Grand Budapest Hotel created a magical like wonderland for the viewer, Boyhood, written and directed by Richard Linklater, makes magic out of the everyday, much like Turner taught us to see fog or Hockney the light on the surface of a swimming pool. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it “an unassuming masterpiece.”

Boyhood is another coming of age film, but it is unique in using the same actors over twelve years of intermittent filming  (Ellar Coltrane as Mason, Patricia Arquette as his mother, Ethan Hawke as his father, Lorelei Linklater as his sister) so that we see their real aging and changing, which gives the viewer a sense of ...  inclusion, peace, authenticity. We are caught up in the change, compelled by time slipping by so fast, this knowledge so poignant in our own lives. This use of real time creates a kind of transcendence that has, for me, an ineffable quality.

Patricia Arquette (on 2-9-15 on The Daily Show) said  of director Linklater that he “believed what is beautiful is life. Normal life. Love. Mistakes. That we are here on Earth, a real celebration of just human beings.”

Linklater himself recounted how, in his own childhood with divorced parents, a father who lived over an hour away, he spent, with his dad, that three hour round trip trying to forge a connection. Hawke tries to do the same with the Coltrane and Linklater characters, striving to know one another as best as they can. I think it is a marvel to behold. Nominated for six Oscars, it has already won the Golden Globe and the British Academy Film Award for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (Arquette). 

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Perhaps quirkiest of all of this year’s nominees is The Grand Budapest Hotel directed by the quirky Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore) and starring Ralph Fiennes (Harry Potter, The English Patient) as concierge extraordinaire Gustave H. who seeks to provide, on the brink of WWII, unparalleled service to the guests of this magnificent hotel. 

In his nightly ‘sermon’ to the hotel staff, Gustave H. instructs his staff on how to deal with rude guests [reminiscent of the therapist’s understanding of hostile patients]: Rudeness is fear, proclaims Gustave, fear that one will not get what one wants. Thus, he explains, the staff must provide what is missing in order to disabuse the rude guests of their expectation of going unsatisfied. And Gustave H. always satisfies, both male and especially older, lonely female guests. One such guest, Tilda Swinton, bequeaths him a priceless painting which her family, of course, contests. Gustave H. steals the painting and a series of comic, and then not so comic, mishaps ensue. 

The banter in this film is unexpected and, sometimes,twitterpating, delivered so dryly at times that my brain needed a moment to register the laughter. One of the most amusing scenes to me is the enduring politeness and hospitality of the imprisoned Gustave H. as he graciously offers mush to the other prisoners, treating them as if they were his honored hotel guests. 

The sets are as delicious as the pastries and confections from Mendl’s Bakehop used to influence (maybe even bribe) prisoners and guards alike. As Nazis emerge on the horizon, Gustave H. clings to the belief that etiquette and elegance, masking his own occasional crudeness, might maintain a vanishing civilization. His sidekick, the lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori; later F. Murray Abraham), says of Gustave H. many years later, “He certainly maintained the illusion with remarkable grace.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel touts an extraordinary cast as well, with Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Tom Wilkerson and Owen Wilson, to name a few.

Oscar Nominations:Birdman (the unexpected virtue of ignorance)

Many of the films nominated this year for Best Picture are unusual in their quirkiness and singularity of subject. One such quirky film is Birdman, directed and co-written by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu [Babel and Biutiful] and starring Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson. Birdman is a film about painful transformation and the search for meaning.  Thomson, a once Hollywood blockbuster superhero (Birdman), is trying his hand at Broadway and at a comeback by writing, directing and starring in a play which is an homage to author-poet Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” This short story, now play, features two couples, Mel (Keaton) and Terri (Naomi Watts) and Nick (Edward Norton) and Laura (Andra Riseborough), who sit drinking around a kitchen table discussing what is real love. [I, among others, believe that only through love is transformation possible.Only through communion is meaning created and do we come to know we matter.] Later, Thomson asks the existential question, “Do I matter?”

Thomson searches for an “honest performance” and finds it in Mike Shiner (Norton) who otherwise, and ironically, lives inauthentically, even stealing Thomson’s back story for his own to use in a New York Times interview; and Shiner can only achieve an erection when on stage. Thomson hopes to find relevance, but theatre critic Tabitha Dickenson (Lindsay Duncan) has promised to destroy his play because, she claims,  celebrities of “cartoons and porn” aren’t legitimate actors, to which Thomson retorts with indignation that critics, unlike actors, “don’t risk anything!”

Thomson is divorced, but seems to regret it, and is attempting to reconnect with his drug-rehab’ed daughter Sam (Emma Stone). He is followed about by his alter ego Birdman who both torments [People “love action, not talking, depressing, philosophical shit”] and encourages Thomson. Birdman also allows Thomson the power of telekinesis and, at his lowest points of suicidal thoughts, lets him fly above everyone else. The final lines of the play-within-the-film, reminiscent of those which may be oft spoke by certain of our own patients, and, if we are honest, ourselves, occur just after Thomson in the play playing Mel discovers his wife Terri in bed with another man (Nick played by Shiner) and just before Mel shoots himself:  “What’s the matter with me? Why do I always have to end up begging someone to love me… I don’t exist.”

On opening night, Thomson exchanges the prop for a real gun, causing the critic Dickenson to glowingly opine that “blood spilled literally and figuratively” had been “long missing from the veins of theater,” and calling it “SuperRealism.” As Thomson recovers in the hospital, his bandaged face, reminiscent of Birdman’s mask, he and his daughter finally connect. Thomson struggles with suicidal thoughts and he experiences transformation through flying as Birdman. But we know from psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg’s work that death of our previous selves accompanies transformation. Sam, who looks out the open hospital window, and up, sees her father fly and this could as easily be metaphorical.

Some of the amusing tidbits include, Mike Shiner getting a shiner; Thomson ‘going viral’ [by living the common anxiety dream of everyone at work seeing you in your underwear] despite eschewing social media; a reference to Ryan Gosling’s failed directorial debut; and imagining Emma Stone could ever be invisible. The biggest laugh for me came when a man on the street was shouting about the “sound and the fury, signifying nothing.”  Schizophrenia? No. An aspiring actor, auditioning,  And there is a luminosity [literally] in a liquor store where the hot pepper shaped, copiously strung lights look like a festive Christmas or the stained glass of a church. But the heart of the film is about meaning, meaning co-created within an authentic relationship. Sam says the hardest thing to bear from her father is that he is always trying to make up for not having been in her life by “constantly trying to convince me I [am] special.” Thomson admits he “wasn’t present at his own life.” How fortuitous then that the stage manager calls out over the loudspeaker, “Last chance for places.”