An example of the violation of the law of Chekhov’s gun that I mentioned in a recent review — that is, the rule that, “if in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act” — occurs in Thomas McCarthy’s enjoyable Win Win . In an early scene we see the hero, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) tinkering with a symbolic boiler in his New Jersey lawyer’s office. Mike’s legal practice isn’t doing too well, and neither is the boiler. Of the latter we are told that it very well might explode unless it is fixed — and that there is not enough money to fix it. If that’s not an invitation to the boiler to explode at some strategic point later in the film, I don’t know what is. But to Mr. McCarthy the boiler, its symbolic work done, has no further interest and is heard from no more. Any subsequent explosions will be only of the metaphorical kind. Admittedly, it’s a small point, but it’s a flaw in the movie’s construction, as is its waste of the great Jeffrey Tambor as Stephen Vigman, Mike’s associate and his assistant wrestling coach who more or less drops out of the movie half-way through, having been given nothing of importance to do hitherto. The time spent on Mike’s much less interesting friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale) and his failed marriage also seems to me to be wasted, as it adds little or nothing to the movie’s two main stories. One of these is about Mike’s conscience and the breach of professional ethics he commits to save his business, and the other is about a young runaway named Kyle (Alex Shaffer) who transforms the fortunes of his wrestling team. Kyle is the grandson of Leo (Burt Young), an old man drifting into senility at whose expense Mike commits the shady deed aforementioned. Kyle, on the run from a neglectful mother (Melanie Lynskey) back in Ohio, arrives in New Jersey in the vain hope of getting from his grandfather some of the parental attention his mother is unable or unwilling to give, but he ends up getting it instead from Mike and his wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), whose basic decency and goodness is attested by their willingness, in effect, to adopt him. But Mike’s ulterior motive, as suggested to us by Kyle’s wrestling prowess, once again becomes the source of a dramatic conflict that largely takes place within Mike’s conscience. I hope I don’t have to issue a spoiler alert to mention that conscience wins out in the end. For that is the principal reason why, in spite of its flaws, this is a movie worth watching. Hollywood used to turn out this kind of vaguely inspirational and uplifting moral tale all the time, but it has got out of the habit in recent years. This is partly because the audience for first-run pictures used to be middle-class adults but is now heavily weighted towards teenage boys with little or no interest in moral questions. But it also has to do with the general degradation of moral thought — not to say morality itself — in our public life. In the media culture, the only sin is the sin — if sin it be — of hypocrisy, so it’s not too surprising that Mike’s moral crisis tends to be seen through that lens too. At times we have the feeling that, to Mr. McCarthy, whose earlier films The Station Agent and The Visitor are similarly shot through with moral earnestness, cares more that Mike has kept his moral peccadillo hidden from his loved ones than that he committed it in the first place. But when it comes to morally serious movies we must take what we can get, and what we get in this case is a funny, poignant, and empathetic look at the sort of quiet desperation that ordinary middle-class life may come to. At one point as Kyle is about to wrestle, Mike, a former high school wrestler himself but a more dogged than talented one, asks him: “What’s it like to be as good as you are?” “I don’t know,” Kyle replies. “I guess it feels like I’m in control of everything, you know?” “I do,” says Mike. And so do we, even though such a state of control is likely to be for us as it is for Mike only aspirational.
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Win Win
Ash Wednesday started out as a pretty good day, notwithstanding the grayness of the sky and the forecast of rain and flooding. My train arrived on time in Philadelphia, the meeting went well, and the hotel was very nice and conveniently located adjacent to the Independence Historical Park. Given my early departure from Washington, and the press of business in the City of Brotherly Love, I had not been able to attend Mass and receive ashes to mark the beginning of Lent. Providentially and due to the kindness of the hotel concierge, I found a church, just a few blocks away, which had 7:30 p.m. services. It was a dark and cold night… Well, it was. I set out on foot from the hotel lobby through the Society Hill section of town. The streets were deserted with barely adequate lighting for a visitor to find his way. I came to Willings Alley and made a left turn, as directed by the concierge. My destination was Old St. Joseph’s Church , a Jesuit parish that dates its founding to 1733, making it the oldest Catholic church in the city. While more of a teaching and academic order, you will find the Society of Jesus running a parish, here and there, in older neighborhoods in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest where it has a university, college, or prep school. The Alley was wet reflecting the glow of street lights from its cobblestones. It was, I confess, a bit foreboding for one not given to meandering down alleys in the dark of night in a city not my own. On the left was a brick wall of considerable size, part of a fairly substantial building which appeared to run the length of the Alley. But where was the church? A few yards down the Alley, an entrance through an arch opened up in the brick wall, leading into yet another dark space — a courtyard surrounded by buildings several stories tall. Straight ahead, though, were several, tall stained glass windows, illuminated from within, indicating that this was, indeed, Old St. Joseph’s, welcoming the nocturnal worshipers to come in out of the cold, literally and figuratively. The interior of the church struck me as a pleasant blend of neo-classical colonial style and Jesuit Baroque. The church was built in 1838—39. Its altar is framed by doubled Ionic columns crowned by a curved pediment. A massive painting, I am guessing 12 to 15 feet tall, of Christ crucified, hangs over the altar. The congregation was reasonably large for that hour, young (I understand half of the urban parishioners are single) and devout. The choir was excellent and its musical selections were to my taste. The Prayers of the Faithful were sung, beautifully, by the music director. Among the various petitions was one asking either for healing or protection (memory fails me) of the children of the city of Philadelphia. This had to be a poignant moment for the congregation. It was for this visitor. The headline in the morning paper had told the sad story: “More priests placed on leave. The Phila. [ sic ] Archdiocese removed 21 from their duties pending a probe of abuse allegations.” The entire list of these men was published the next day in various media outlets. Cardinal Justin Rigali had taken this action pursuant to a grand jury report indicating that the priests were still serving in the ministry despite reports of “questionable behavior.” The late Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things , once described the tragedy of clerical sexual misdeeds as the “Long Lent” for the Church in America and now Ireland, Belgium, and elsewhere. Sitting there, awaiting the distribution of ashes, it seemed that the Long Lent was getting longer here in Philadelphia. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the evil, the sin that afflicts so many, the guilty and the innocent. I offered my prayers and Communion for the victims of these crimes as well as the many holy men of the cloth who will suffer for the deeds of their brothers. After the ashes came the sacrifice of the Mass, Christ, once again, suffering on Calvary. In forty days comes the Resurrection and triumph over sin and death, which only the Son of God himself can overcome through the immeasurable gift of Himself. Walking home, through the cold, dark night, I hold tight to the Sacrament of forgiveness and look forward to the renewal that comes on Easter morning.
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Philadelphia’s Long Lent Gets Longer
WASILLA, Alaska — The young lady at the desk of the Dorothy Page Museum and Visitor Center has blue hair — not the blue-silver of advanced age, but a punk-rock razor-cut style dyed cerulean blue. She is friendly and helpful to out-of-towners who stop by the Main Street museum to ask about the town’s most famous resident. Has Sarah Palin become a tourist attraction in Wasilla? “I don’t know,” says the blue-haired woman. “I guess a lot of people have added it to their itinerary.” Rumor is that the Palins are out of town and hope of an interview seems doomed to disappointment. Then my cell phone rings. “This is Todd Palin,” says the man on the phone. We chat briefly about the recent GOP primary victory of Joe Miller . I explain that I’ve driven 50 miles from Anchorage to Wasilla just to get a sense of the town where Sarah began her political career as a city council member and mayor. Todd then tells me that although his wife is out town, he’s still in Wasilla and … Half an hour later, I drive down an unpaved road past a large Miller-for-Senate campaign sign and turn into a driveway marked with multiple “No Trespassing” signs, past which no wise person would go uninvited. Here, nestled among birch trees on the shore of scenic Lake Lucille, is the home of the woman whom liberals love most to hate — and Todd, the man who got the nickname “First Dude” during his wife’s term as Alaska’s governor. Todd opens the front door and his youngest son, two-year-old Trig, scampers across the living room to greet the guest with a “high five.” Rambunctiously energetic, Trig is the focus of his father’s attention — Todd bounces the toddler on his knee, reads him a book, and fixes him a bottle — for the next several minutes until 16-year-old Willow comes downstairs, scoops him up and carries him upstairs for sisterly babysitting. Getting an interview with Sarah Palin is difficult. Getting an interview with Todd is next to impossible, and I would never have gotten this far if mutual friends — including Anchorage conservative talk-radio legend Eddie Burke — hadn’t vouched for my bona fides. So most of the conversation over the next two hours is off-the-record, or at least on background. To breach that agreement would be to put myself into that category of reporters whom Sarah Palin recently described to Sean Hannity as ” impotent, limp and gutless.” That was most specifically a reference to a profile in Vanity Fair by Michael Gross that was, in the words of Politico ‘s Ben Smith , ” so bad that even her harshest critics are leaping reluctantly to her defense.” Smith noted that Melissa McEwan , a hard-left feminist blogger and certainly no Palin fan, called the Vanity Fair article “the worst thing I’ve read all day” and accused Gross of employing “misogynist smears.” How bad was it? It was even denounced by Shannyn Moore, one of Alaska’s most relentless anti-Palin bloggers (which is a tough competition, by the way). So often have the Palins been the targets of such media abuse — thinly sourced hit jobs based on anonymous gossip from the disgruntled and deranged — that one hesitates to approach them with notebook and pen in hand. And right next door to the Palin home is a classic case of the raging two-year-long pandemic of journalistic psychosis that Michelle Malkin was the first to diagnose as Palin Derangment Syndrome. On the other side of a tall fence that Todd built to protect what remains of his family’s privacy is a rental home currently occupied by Joe McGinniss, a journalist with a contract for a book about Palin. When McGinniss moved in and the Palins complained about this bizarre intrusion, McGinniss went on NBC’s Today show to portray himself as the victim of ” the same kind of tactic that the Nazi troopers used in Germany in the ’30s.” As ironic as that claim may be, perhaps the greater irony is that anytime Sarah publicly mentions the media’s evident vendetta against her, her critics accuse her of “whining.” Todd Palin is no whiner — a former oil-rig worker who has proven his toughness by winning the 2,000-mile “Iron Dog” snowmobile race four times — and he seems mainly interested in pointing out how little credit his wife has gotten for her accomplishments during her truncated tenure as Alaska’s governor. He talks at length about her success in securing an agreement to build a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope down through Canada to the “lower 48,” to name just one notable achievement. In fact, Todd can talk Alaska politics and energy issues with such a thorough mastery of details that he could easily be mistaken for a think-tank analyst, except that he’s obviously not the sort of neurasthenic geek one usually finds in those policy-wonk jobs. He’s a red-blooded hands-on kind of guy, and is proud to point out that he acted as general contractor in building the latest addition to the Palin property, a two-story structure that includes a state-of-the-art TV studio that Sarah uses for her appearances as a Fox News contributor. He emphasizes that his wife began her political ascent with “in-your-face local politics,” where the interaction between Sarah and her Wasilla constituents was direct and personal. The same kind of “in-your-face” quality characterized the recent Republican primary in which Palin’s endorsement of Miller (who supported her in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign) was seen as the key to the Tea Party-backed insurgent’s upset of Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Many have portrayed that race as the byproduct of a personal feud between Palin and Murkowski, but Todd disavows any such animosity, noting that the two women were often allies in the past. Professionally, I’m obliged to mention speculation about Sarah’s plans for 2012, but Todd says his wife is currently focused on the upcoming mid-term congressional elections, now less than nine weeks away. And after November? I wasn’t taking notes and my memory is notoriously dodgy, so it’s possible that Todd’s answer was, “We’ll see.” Or maybe he didn’t say that. A good reporter never burns his sources.
Original post:
Meeting Mr. Palin
[Guest post by DRJ] According to The Hill , the head of the Capitol Hill Visitor Center has been fired. More on Ms. Rouse here . – DRJ
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Something You Don’t See Everyday
