Evening

Last night Sue and Enrique took me to see Evening. I wanted to see Live Free or Die Hard. Sue,girlunraveling, posted a real cool critique of the film last night, which pretty much says what I would have said about it. The screenplay is from a book by Susan Minot, but Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours, co-authored the screenplay and so I think we were expecting something edgy and discomfiting, rather than a feel-good movie. Instead, we got Vanessa Redgrave dying beatifically, with her beautiful long hair feathered over the pillows and her weeping middle-aged daughters saying things like "There's so much I still want to say to you." Like Sue writes "This movie is not about living hard, but about folding softly back into the earth." (We should have gone to see Die Hard!) The movie tries to subjugate our fear of death through the worst kind of high-kitsch sentimentalism. What struck me most about the film was how all the "feelings" were cast against such opulence and financial well-being. The musician boyfriend says at one point his band is "climbing up from dumps to dives..." and that's supposed to be all boho and arty-like. But you're never far away from the idea that after he learns Toni Collette is preggers he can slip back into law school or a job with the family business.

Now that I'm officially pushing 60, I feel like I have the right to brood upon how we die in this culture. My suspicion is that everybody daubing kleenex to their eyes last night, as well as everybody reading this post, is going to die under florescent lighting in a room painted lime green, with paid strangers standing around and every tube in the hospital stuck up their asses. Sue cites Strether from The Ambassadors as a counter example to Meryl Steep's little homily about how, after all, there are no mistakes. I will add another voice to that, Alan Arkin's advice to his grandson in the back of the family van in Little Miss Sunshine (a film also about death that is everything this one is not):

Fuck a lotta women!
NOT ONE WOMAN!
A LOTTA women!

Here, you get a sense of a life closing down around somebody who wishes he had made different choices, or at least that he had caught a different set of breaks. There is a sense of horror, loss, futility -- what Faulkner would call "abnegation and denial" -- and in the face of all this you still you get affirmation, tenderness and love. The beauty of Little Miss Sunshine lies precisely in its hardness and its willingness to hurt its audience.

Mike O'Donahue, one of the guys who took the Harvard Lampoon to the National Lampoon, and one of the founding writers for Saturday Night Live, once put out a spoof called "Let Me Show You How to Write Good!" In it he suggests ending every story with the line "Suddenly, they all got run over by a truck." Evening is a movie where you just wait for the truck.