And it sounds like it’s not to run for Governor of North Carolina, either . The relevant text: This was not an easy decision. However, I am confident that it is the right decision. It is a decision I have weighed heavily over the past few months. I have always said family comes first, and I never intended to be a career politician. I am ready to refocus my priorities and spend more time at home with my wife Nikol and two young children. Translation: redistricting had doomed Heath Shuler, anyway , and it’s a bad year to be a Democrat in North Carolina. Just ask Bev Perdue . Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: Man, Charlotte’s going to be all kinds of fun during the Democrats’ convention this year, huh? Whose idea was that, anyway? Joe Biden’s? It kind of feels like a Joe Biden kind of decision.
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Breaking: Heath Shuler (D, NC) cuts and runs.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen an Iranian film, though I am always eager to see them. Most in recent years have shown the influence of Abbas Kiarostami ( A Taste of Cherry ), who has a highly visual style with long, slow takes and spare dialogue. Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation ( Jodaeiye Nader az Simin ) is a very different bowl of cherries. Tautly plotted and full of passionate speech, it engages the mind more than the eye and poses a moral dilemma, or a series of interlocking moral dilemmas, unsparingly but subtly limned, rather than the stark existential crisis of a Kiarostami film. And although the picture is very firmly set in the social, political, and religious context of contemporary Tehran, its morality has a poignantly universal relevance. Too many reviewers and interviewers focus on Mr. Farhadi’s sometimes troubled relationship with the Iranian government, as if there could be nothing out of Iran of any interest that did not directly challenge its clerical authorities. But to my mind one of the best things about this film is that it makes all such political questions seem trivial and irrelevant. The separation of the title is between Nader (Peyman Moadi) and his wife, Simin (Leila Hatami), who desperately wants to leave the country. Somehow — how is never made clear — she has obtained permission to go, but Nader refuses to accompany her as he has to care for his senile father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), a job which seemingly has fallen to her lot hitherto. “He doesn’t even know you’re his son,” insists Simin before the magistrate whom she is petitioning for a divorce. “But I know he is my father,” replies Nader. The magistrate tells them that they are wasting his time. Theirs is a small problem, he says — and it is, too, in the sense that it is really quite simple. If she wants to go, she should go; if he needs to stay, he must stay. Neither can impose his or her will on the other. But we soon discover that there is a complication. The couple’s 11-year-old daughter Termeh, played by the director’s own daughter, Sarina Farhadi, insists on staying with her father, and her mother will not leave the country without her. In fact, it appears that it is largely for the daughter’s sake that she wants to go in the first place, just as it is for the sake of her parents’ marriage that Termeh wants to stay. So, instead, Simin goes to stay with her mother (Shirin Yazdanbakhsh) and Termeh fills in for her as she can in looking after the old man, who needs almost constant attention.. For when she is in school, however, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a poor religious woman, to attend his father. But Razieh keeps the job a secret from her husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), a hot-tempered, unemployed cobbler who is heavily in debt. Moreover, she has to travel from a long distance away and must bring her own small daughter, Somayeh (Kimia Hosseini), with her to work. The arrival of Razieh seems to coincide with a further deterioration in the old man’s condition. When he becomes incontinent, she must call the religious authorities for a ruling on whether she is allowed to clean him up. One day Nader comes home early to find no one in the apartment but his father, who has been tied to the bed by one wrist and who has subsequently fallen out of it. Without his oxygen, the old man would soon have died. Nader also thinks some money is missing. When Razieh returns, she cannot explain where she has been, though she denies taking any money. He fires her and thrusts her roughly out of the door. The next day she suffers a miscarriage. The film’s big question seems to be: did Nader know when he pushed Razieh out the door of his apartment that she was pregnant. He insists he didn’t. She insists he did. If the court decides he did, then he is guilty of manslaughter; if he didn’t, then he is not guilty. Guilt will mean a prison term for Nader and/or blood money to be paid to the family of Razieh — including Hodjat, whose desperate need of money means that his (and Razieh’s) incentive to lie is as great as Nader’s. Because key elements of the story have been withheld from us, we are in the position of the judge (Mohammad Ebrahimian) who has to decide who is lying. So, by the way, is Termeh, whose attachment to her father and her hopes of keeping her parents together seem to depend on her belief in his truthfulness. But the consequences of the truth in both cases can be so drastic that it is hard to work up very much moral indignation against any of those who are driven to lie — as everyone is by the time the missing parts of the puzzle are supplied and we discover the truth for ourselves. Or almost everyone is driven to lie. The exception is Simin who is compensated, as it were, for having set the whole train of events in motion in the first place by being the only one left at the end with arguably clean hands in this heart-wrenching wrangle over love and hate and guilt and money. As a result, we are more than ever aware of the central enigma of Simin’s wish to escape, which is the only thing in the movie that remains — ironically, I think — morally unassailable. For everyone else, we are left with something approximating to the pity and terror that Aristotle said was appropriate to tragedy — which, to the extent anything can be these days, this movie is. Above all, it is like The Artist in being an example of the art of movie story-telling, something that America pioneered in the great days of Hollywood but which is now almost a lost art here. This is a movie that will break your heart, and of how many movies in the postmodern era can that be said? It is not to be missed.
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A Separation
Wolf Blitzer has just gone to a break. He is planning to ask each of the candidates, “Why would your wife make the best First Lady?” Why does any of that matter? We’re not electing a First Lady. It’s true that some First Ladies publicly exert their influence (Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt come to mind) but is Blitzer thinking that one of the candidates is going to put one of the other candidates’ wives down.
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Are We Electing a First Lady?
The Artist , by the French director Michel Hazanavicius, begins with the noise of an old-fashioned projector and a black screen. Music then comes up, a jazzy tune reminiscent of the 1920s without being quite of the period. The titles which then appear are entirely of the period, known to us now as “the silent era” — as is what we are soon seeing on the screen, which is a lurid adventure yarn in living black-and-white. Called “A Russian Affair,” the movie has reached a peak of excitement as the hero, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is being tortured with an electrical current through his head, administered by a couple of sinister-looking Russians. “I won’t talk!” he cries to his torturers by means of a dialogue title printed on the screen. “I won’t say a word” — a promise that the film allows him to keep in spite of the word he has just supposedly spoken. “Speak!” the Russians command him, also by inter-title. But he remains silent — then and throughout both that film and the one we are watching. It is a good joke and one that Mr. Hazanavicius returns to several times, as when he shows Valentin gathered with his fellow stars on the other side of the screen, awaiting their cue to appear for a curtain call at the film’s premiere under a sign reading “Please be silent behind the screen.” Later, his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) ominously says — again in print, of course — to Valentin: “We have to talk, George.” Alas, George has already told Al Zimmer (John Goodman), the studio boss of Kinograph pictures what he told the sinister Russians, namely that he’s not talking. Shown his first talkie, George tells Al via another dialogue title, “If that’s the future, you can have it.” Well, Al does and he doesn’t. Sticking with silence, he takes a bath with a self-produced film in which we see his character sinking into quicksand at the end. Virtually overnight, he’s all washed up. While he is on his way down in the quicksand of post-crash 1929, sinking into despair and alcoholism and, therefore, cliché, a young ingenue called Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), with whom he has had a brief but unforgettable flirtation in his glory days, is on her way up. She becomes, in one of the film’s few false notes, a “superstar.” For although the OED gives a date of 1925 for the first appearance of this word, I think for most people at the time just being a star was quite enough hype to be going on with — and quite enough, too, to make the familiar, melodramatic point that youth must be served and the old must give way to the young — as the wounded and failing George overhears Peppy saying to an interviewer. But this isn’t, quite, A Star is Born , for we also know from the larger-than-life faces of these two extraordinarily attractive people — which are all that we have to go on, after all — that their love is a different and brighter cliché. That love conquers everything will go without saying. George’s trademark on screen and off is his little Jack Russell terrier. “If only he could talk,” he says of this beast, though his own words are equally unheard. The inarticulate but obviously highly trained animal is also a reminder of the origin of the movies in vaudeville — where animal acts had absence of speech in common with early movies. Both were necessarily founded on familiar conventions, also known as clichés, but at their best — as they are in The Artist — these are clichés that preserve, somehow, an unexpected freshness. In The Artist this is owing, I think, to the unfamiliarity of modern audiences with the conventions of silent film. So much can be conveyed in the absence of speech partly because the absence of speech is, to us, so shocking and unusual. I think that our visual sense must be more acute in compensation as well, for we are continually struck by the long-forgotten silent-movie experience, especially the larger than life beauty of the two principals and, therefore, of their not quite tragic love for each other. To me, at any rate, it was like watching the familiar story for the first time. The unfamiliar context created sorrow at the lovers’ partings and joy at their reunions that would hardly have been possible in a more straightforward — and spoken — telling. The movie is a love story, but the yearning it expresses is not just of two people for each other but of a whole world for articulacy and understanding. At one point George has a dream where everything around him makes its appropriate noise — all noises we can hear on the sound-track — and only he is mute. Maybe, too, I was moved partly by the evidence that Hollywood story-telling is not quite dead after all, as I have so often suspected it is in recent years. Although the movie was made principally by French people, there was enough of a Hollywood presence in it, even beyond the setting in the Southern California of the heroic period, to make it a hopeful sign and an example to its models and idols to return to their roots.
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The Artist
PALM BEACH, Fla. — For dinner, they sat my wife next to a self-declared gigolo on the Auto Train to Florida. The seating in the train’s dining car is four to a booth, and the couple across the table from us looked like a nice elderly pair, each 80 years old as it turned out. It wasn’t long after we discussed what to order based on our previous dining experiences aboard the Auto Train — the not-too-good chicken or the not-too-good steak (our server told us to “stay away from the salmon”) — that we started to talk about where we lived and what we did for a living. Our dinner companions said they were both professional dance instructors, working for a nationwide chain with well-known dance studios (they said the name, but I won’t state it here). It was a good half-century ago when they were cutting a rug, back when the fox trot, tango, mambo, and ballroom spins were hot. “We would try to sign up elderly women for $20,000 lifetime memberships,” explained the husband. That was the price of a nice house back then (our first house, a three-bedroom, two-story brick colonial in a nice suburb, was $12,500 in 1964). “We would become their regular dance partners, several times a week,” he said. “We would flatter them on their appearance, suggest what they should wear and recommend how they could vary their makeup and hair. We would take them on trips to New York City, to shows, restaurants, fancy hotels, and have them meet the principals of the company.” The wife said she didn’t get into that part of things. “Men aren’t as gullible,” she asserted. There was never any hanky-panky, explained the husband (but his wife was sitting next to him with a steak knife). “I look back now and I’m ashamed of some of the things I did,” he acknowledged. “You had to do what you had to do,” his wife responded. They said they were both now evangelicals. The instructors got a 10 percent bonus, $2,000, for every $20,000 lifetime member they signed up, and it wasn’t hard for a handsome fox trotter to pick out the rich widows, as our dinner partner explained: “They’d say, ‘My husband owned a string of lumber yards.’” But his career at the dance studio ended with a lawsuit. “I had to sue them because I signed up two women for lifetime memberships in one month and they refused to pay me the $4,000. They just told me to clean out my locker.” When we arrived and got to the beach, we noticed that several of the best restaurants on the uber-wealthy island of Palm Beach were gone. As U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in 2010, “Palm Beach is, in many respects, unfortunately ground zero in the $65 billion Ponzi scheme perpetuated by Bernard Madoff.” One of Madoff’s fallouts may be that there are fewer folks around now who are willing and able to pay $21 for a hamburger and $59 for a pork chop — salad not included. There is a Starbucks, though, right next to Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Several years ago, a storm of protest occurred when the owner of a building on super-tony Worth Avenue asked the town council to approve a permit for a Starbucks inside his building, discreetly tucked away and not visible from the street. The town newspapers published a collection of anti-Starbucks letters. The locals weren’t sure if people drinking coffee through small slits in plastic lids on paper cups were their type of people. Resident Jere Zenko expressed a popular sentiment: “Is Nike next? How about a Disney store?”
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A Tale of Two Schemers
