Goodbye Arnold

Today Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves office as governor of perhaps the worst performing state economy in this country.  It is indeed a deep irony that the movie star who came to take control of California’s fortunes after a recall of  his (by comparison) surprisingly competent predecessor Gray Davis, has left this state in a far worse condition than in which he found it:  A ballooning state debt , now slated to reach $25 billion by 2014; a gridlocked legislature;  an unrepentant and emboldened union culture;  environmental policies totally out of control and a bureaucracy that has swelled beyond reasonable imagination over the past seven years.

Schwarzenegger was the first governor since the Great Depression to issue IOUs to state employees and vendors after he was confronted with a $90 billion shortfall in 2009.  He raised taxes ( violating a campaign promise) and curtailed spending on education.  In my own neighborhood,  public libraries were forced to substantially reduce  hours of operation;  the District Court would not stay open longer than 4: 30 pm because the supervisors feared having to pay overtime and the Department of Motor Vehicles slashed an entire work day from their branches’ operating schedules.

But you would barely know that Schwarzenegger retires as a failed governor. In most accounts of his stewardship, he is still the action hero who strode into office with great promise but was unfortunately dealt a bad deck of cards.   The press seems loathe to truly take him to task for his maladroit performance and his abject failure of leadership.   Pat Morrison’s fawning interview in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times is a good example.  Rarely does Morrison,one of the paper’s leading columnists, go much beyond the giddy fan worship you would expect to find the paper’s Calendar section.  No question about the Golden State’s embarrassing economic slide;  no discussion about the State’s likely bankruptcy and nothing about the way in which government unions increasingly gained influence and  control over state policy.

The failure of many media commentators and editorialists to savage Schwarzenegger for his limp performance is perhaps a symptom of a society that lives  in thrall to celebrity. There is no doubt  Schwarzenegger is a consummately charming man, possessed of  a wicked sense of humor and a certain measure of self deprecation, which have all served him well in dealing with a combative public.  But the convincing explanation of the press’ hero worship is that Schwarzenegger actually swapped parties while still in office.   His volte face in  October, 2005 after he was defeated on all eight special  election initiatives he had proposed for dealing with some of California’s endemic economic problems, transformed  him from a moderate Republican into a progressive Democrat who was prepared to embrace a host of  hot button liberal agenda issues such as  gay marriage,  fixed emission controls for California industry and increased taxation.

This transformation left us with the odor of a man of few fixed convictions or principles and who was open to changing them as the political winds dictated.  In the end Arnold Schwarzenegger’s seven year term of office differed little from his movie career.  In both cases he regularly adopted differing personas to suit the script.  The difference is that playing The Terminator never had dire implications for the future of California.  Sadly, we are now reminded of how fantasy figures bear little resemblance to real life characters, who may turn out to  have no good ideas about  how to deal with the harsh realities of  governing a fractious state.

Alice in Wonderland: A Review

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Matt Lucas

Length: 108 min.

Theatrical Release Date: 03/05/2010

Review Date: April 1, 2010

One would think that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland would be  tailor made for a film maker of Tim Burton’s prodigious talents.  The director of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd, whose dark flights of fancy have captivated us for nearly three decades, would seem a natural choice to reproduce the quirky humor and shifting time sequences of Alice on film.

But Alice has defeated plenty of other directors who have sought to capture the book’s mystery and whimsy and Burton is only the latest to crash and burn in the attempt.

Part of the problem is that his new film attempts both a sequel and a reworking of the storyline in an effort to offer the audience something entirely new, yet ends up producing neither effectively.

In order to produce an original take on Alice, Burton and his screenwriter Linda Woolverton, combine Alice in Wonderland with  Carroll’s own sequel to that book, Through the Looking Glass and introduce a denouement that has  sweet little Alice transformed into a Lord of the Rings-like warrior, dragooned into a fight to the death with the dreaded Jabberwocky.

In the process it presents us not with the original precocious  six-year- old Alice, but an eighteen-year-old version of the heroine, who, to her dismay, is being shunted into a hasty marriage to a boor.

We meet this older version at her Victorian engagement party, which has been unsuspectingly organized in her honor.  But just as her dour intended asks publicly for her hand,  she is distracted by the waist-coated white rabbit, who scurries by the gazebo where the betrothal is about to take place.  She abruptly drops everything, including her fiancee’s  hand, to pursue the bounding rodent down the rabbit hole.  As is to be expected, she tumbles into an endless tunnel, crashing into the familiar room in which she either grows too tall to enter the door to Wonderland or else becomes too small to reach the key.

After figuring it out,  just as her earlier incarnation had done, Alice is free to wander the kingdom which has now inexplicably changed its name from Wonderland to Underland, even if many of her old friends are still roaming its forests and fields.

Surprisingly, Alice has no recollection of her earlier visit or of the manic characters she once encountered there.  And while she does meet up with the Blue Caterpillar, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare and of course the Mad Hatter and they all persistently remind her of her earlier visit, her memory, until much later, remains unjogged.

But Wonderland has transformed in the intervening 12 years since her last journey and has endured an environmental degradation through war, pestilence and, one might think, the Underland version of global warming.

From thereon the plot of Alice In Wonderland takes us on a wayward journey to the Red Queen’s castle, but in truth, appears pretty uncertain of where it is really heading.    In the process we encounter  a number of highlights from both books but miss some of Carroll’s most indelibly drawn characters and scenes.  These include the White Knight, the Red King, Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn, the Gryphon  and the Mock Turtle.  Sadly lost or missing in action are the scenes of the  Caucus Race, the Lobster Quadrille and the trial of the Knave of Hearts.

The acting, save for some wonderful work from Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, is often stilted.   Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter, never seems to really commit himself to the role and often slips into an Scottish brogue that is all but incomprehensible.  He is by turns a wispy-voiced popinjay and at other times a tragedian, mooning over lost opportunity.   The over application of makeup seems strangely apposite for a film that is all color and no substance.   His breakdance at the end of the movie, with the introduction of a pounding disco beat,  is one of the more unsettling modern motifs slapped onto a film that presents itself, for the most part, as Victorian Gothic.

Anne Hathaway is out of place and out of her depth as the White Queen and her mannerisms are unconvincing.  Matt Lucas is suitably villainous as the Red Queen’s henchman but offers nothing particularly  original nor memorable.

One of the great disappointments is the failure to connect the characters in the opening scenes of  Alice’s engagement party, to the characters she later encounters in Wonderland.    This, after all, was one of the special delights of the Carroll book, where known political and local personalities would appear in the guise of  Wonderland characters  (see, for instance, the Lion and the Unicorn as the battling personalities of Disraeli and Gladstone in Through the Looking Glass).  Burton misses the opportunity to have the imperious mother-in-law appear later as the Red Queen;  the more sympathetic and solicitous father- in-law portrayed as the Red King (or the King of Hearts)  and the Tweedledum and Tweedledee brothers ( who are marvelous CGI characters in Underland)  make an earlier appearance as stodgy twins at the engagement party.

Another disappointment is the failure to tell much of the original story of the first Alice in Wonderland through Alice’s reminiscences, experiences alluded to by the Underland characters, but rarely given any cinematic expression.  As Alice finally connects her many dreams over the intervening years with her current situation, we are only privy to a 30 second flashback of her six-year-old self painting white flowers red, attending an earlier Mad Tea Party and an encounter with the blue caterpillar.

But these fleeting moments only serve to leave the viewer with the unsettling impression that Burton in fact earlier made an entirely different film, one more faithful to Carroll’s original vision, only to trash it in favor of this mishmash of themes and plot lines.

I have always thought that it takes an act of presumption to write a sequel to a masterwork of world literature, years after the author died.  It also seems something of conceit to rewrite the story line completely, leaving only ghostly smatterings of the original story as if a license had been given to reconstruct a tale that had become either too tired or too outdated for modern tastes.

But Lewis  Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is neither tired nor outdated and lives on as one of the most compelling literary works of  imagination ever set to paper.   Burton’s attempts to rewrite it ends up as a misconceived mess that not only  does discredit to a great work of fiction, but compromises  his own well honed  skills as a film maker and storyteller.

The Awards That Offer Humiliation as Their Ultimate Prize

I had my rant against Hollywood and the Academy Awards last year so I am not going to indulge myself again.   Suffice to say the Hollywood extravaganza known as the Oscars breeds a contempt in me that invariably  mingles with fascination. Understanding this dichotomy has involved me in a 27-year-long process of self-analysis.

Perhaps it is because you cannot live in this town without being affected by the movies. They are everywhere, screaming at you from billboards, bellowing at you from bus sidings, beseeching you from newsstands and leering at you from every construction hoarding. Sometimes it feels as if the entire place is one big movie set and every one living within it mere extras.

We received a poignant reminder of this on March 4 when we opened our morning paper.  There was Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter (in Tim Burton’s soon to be released Alice in Wonderland) in florid color dominating 3/4s of the front page. It was if the Los Angeles Times had been eviscerated of all other news, leaving just the Calendar section as the remaining source of information about local, national and international news.

Doubts were soon put to rest. We were  to learn that this was actually a faux front page and the real front page remained buried within. But it was a turning point. The venerable Times had seemed to have sold itself, eclipsing any remaining reputation it may have had for seriousness and giving itself over wholly to the movie industry upon whom it greatly relies for much of its revenue.

I suppose this sets the context for our annual religious rite paying obeisance to actors and actresses, directors and all those associated with making of their films. I had always felt that the Awards had been set up as kind of club where we were given the annual opportunity to poke our heads into Olympus and observe the Gods at work and at  play.

This year, that impression grew stronger than ever. Now they really did look like Gods. Best director winner Kathryn Bigelow, beheeled and towering over every other living creature on the stage, began to resemble one of the Na’vi  in the film that her own production, The Hurt Locker had just beaten out for best picture. Best actor winner Jeff Bridges, mumbling blandishments as if he had stumbled in from the set of The Big Lebowksi, bestrode the stage like Neptune, complete with flowing mane and bewhiskered chin. He was only missing the trident. Meanwhile George Clooney’s face, which filled more camera frames than any other on the night, revealed a stoniness that made me think of a clean shaven, mirthless Apollo, deciding when and if he would loose an arrow at the stage.

It is set up this way of course. We are manipulated into seeing these individuals as occupying a higher plane of existence.  But there was a certain point that I began to feel that I was no longer a welcome guest but a peeping tom. The cloying personal anecdotes by actors and directors to the nominees made me squirm because it seemed that these private addresses did not belong on stage nor in public. These people weren’t being honored because they were good guys –humanitarians and philanthropists or good mothers and fathers – but because they are actors. Why did I need to hear Oprah Winfrey expostulate about Precious star’s Gabourey Sidibe’s extraordinary compassion or Michelle Pffeifer’s reflection on Jeff Bridges as a great family man who played with his daughters on the set?

But then again, the more you watch the Academy Awards the more you understand that everyone involved with it is acting. The hosts are acting, the presenters are all acting (often woodenly so)  and even the nominees themselves, who must force smiles to their faces even in defeat, are required to play a role.

In fact the whole show is a performance with little left to spontaneity. Occasionally we hear a few unprompted comments, such as Geoffery Fletcher’s (winner of the best adapted screenplay award) who spoke movingly about following his dream.

But too often the speeches seem canned, the words of acceptance bottled into a few seconds before the music interrupts and forces the awardee from the stage. In such a circumstance, the awardee becomes a commodity and just as quickly as she or he has been feted, is shunted aside. What greater humiliation could there be than having your own words of acceptance and gratitude made to seem irrelevant because there is no time to deliver them?

No one knows what most Oscar winners feel on the morning after receiving their awards. But one thing is certain.  The media frenzy that swirls around them immediately isolates them – from friends, family and their colleagues. As an Oscar winner they become public property and as such they are subject to all the exposure, scrutiny and humiliation that this involves. Then, just as suddenly as it begins, it ends.  Euphoria under these circumstances, as many Oscar winners have attested, can often give way to despair.

This is, of course, the price of being a star. Its just too bad that so few are prepared for the crushing reality that their star will only burn brightly for a very short period before it slowly dims, the luster fading and then ultimately passing away.…..sometimes forever.  Hollywood history is littered with the tales of  stars who won an award one year and then more or less disappeared.  The enduring fame of  the George Clooneys and Jack Nicholsons of that world is an exception to the rule and not the rule itself. 

Many an Oscar winning director will also tell you that the Oscar was the kiss of death for their career and not the expected breath of life.  After it, many failed to make a film that came anywhere near the popular acclaim of the feature for which they won.

Can there be anything more humiliating then, than to be quickly elevated and admired for your skills and talents and then just as suddenly find yourself a nobody again? 

Humiliation is therefore one of the special prizes that Hollywood reserves for its stars.   Maybe we should think about that next time we envy our Hollywwood glitterati their special gifts, public acclaim and faboulous lives.