Three great films best seen in a theater
Friend, I beg of you. Go to a theater
and see three great movies sometime soon: The Boys in the Boat, The
Peasants, and The Zone of Interest.
Leopold Staff, a Polish poet who
survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, said that "Even more than bread we
now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all."
Movies are democratic. They are accessible and they are communal. It's
fashionable to declare one's superiority by sneering at popular culture. It's
harder to sneer when you remember that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fearless
counter-jihadi, was inspired by Nancy Drew novels, and that Top Gun and Saving
Private Ryan drove military recruitment. Politics is downstream from
culture. The culture we support with our ticket-buying dollars is as important
as the candidates we support with our votes.
We get something from publicly watching
a movie together with our fellow citizens. The Major and the Minor is a
1942 screwball comedy. I'd watched it a couple of times at home, alone, on a
small TV screen before seeing it for the first time in a jam-packed, Greenwich
Village art house theater. In that crowd of rollicking laughter, I suddenly
realized what a very naughty movie The Major and the Minor is. Its
double entendres had flown right over my head. While watching Gone with the
Wind, a loud and spontaneous sigh erupted when the camera zoomed in on
Rhett Butler's handsome face (see here).
Gathering in the ladies room after a movie like that is a genre of
psychotherapy. While washing your hands you ask complete strangers, "Do
you think Scarlett and Rhett ever got back together?" You comfort and
enlighten each other and the world is warmer, more connected, less lonely and
tense. Mel Gibson's The Passion depicts Christ's torture, crucifixion,
and death in grisly detail. Three Muslim guys took seats directly behind me.
They were joking sarcastically. Clearly, they were in the theater to mock.
After the film ended, I turned around to check on them. One was doubled over,
distraught. His companions were rubbing his back and speaking softly to him.
The loss of public movie-going erodes
not just community, but also art. Ali's well is a famous, eight-minute scene in
Lawrence of Arabia. Most of what we see is a completely flat, lifeless,
tan desert landscape against a blue sky unbroken by any cloud. Two men draw
water from a desert well. A tiny dot appears on the horizon. Slowly we realize
that that dot is a man approaching on a camel. He shoots one of the men to
death. As we wait, and wait, and wait for the approaching man to arrive, we experience a fraction of the
desert: the emptiness, the boredom, the terror, the sudden and irrational
violence, the value system so very different from our own. That scene could
never move us in the same way on a small screen. And, when we are watching
alone on a small screen, we can fast forward through the parts we don't like,
like, say, the grim depictions of the Holocaust in Schindler's List.
My students, trained on media that
rushes and delivers jolts of violence and sex aimed at the lizard brain's
reward-squirting mechanisms, lack the ability to sit through a scene like Ali's
well. They also have trouble sitting through a complex lecture on current
events, or a long story of personal struggle told by a friend. Movies, like all
art, have the potential to train us to be our best selves.
The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest are three very different films, but they are all innovative, in different ways. Peasants is so innovative another movie like it may never be made again. Zone rewrote how the Holocaust will be treated in film, and how it will be understood. Boys is rebellious, counter-cultural filmmaking in ways I'll detail below. All three films have much to say about our current politico-cultural landscape. Each addresses community. Each, given their visual and auditory artistry and impact, should be seen in a theater.
The Boys in the Boat tells the previously obscure story of
the University of Washington rowing team's underdog victory at the 1936
Olympics in Berlin, Germany. This was the same Olympics at which Jesse Owens, a
black American, won four gold medals, as frustrated racist, Adolf Hitler,
glowered.
The film is based on the 2013 book by
Daniel James Brown. New York Times writer Timothy Egan said that Brown's
book, "is about who we used to be. And who we still could be. Like the
best history, its then-and-now wow factor is both embarrassing to the present
and inspiring to the future." Brown's book has almost 90,000 Amazon ratings,
averaging a 4.6 score out of a possible 5. The book was published nine years
ago and it is number 7 on Amazon's charts this week. A popular reader review
calls the book "thrilling, eye-opening, often heart-wrenching."
Boys the movie was directed by George Clooney with a script by
Mark L. Smith, who also wrote The Revenant. The cast does not include
name-above-the-title stars, and that added to the film's verisimilitude for me.
I'd never seen lead actor Callum Turner before, and his anonymity contributed
to my totally believing him as Joe Rantz.
Within the first few minutes, I was
grateful to Front Page reader Mo de Profit for recommending this movie
to me. Movies do telegraph their worth in just the first few minutes.
Movies are made of light. You know this if you've ever tried to take a picture
of a meadow glowing with golden sun, your beloved pet, or a baby's smile, and
failed. The underexposed meadow looks like a dungeon, a shadow turns your baby's
nose into a trombone, and poodle Fido's eyes glow red like some fiend. If a
movie is getting light right, it might get other features right as well.
Boys opens with sunlight on rippling water. A river flows
between two wooded banks; above, the tracery of flying insects sparkles in the
mist. The score by multiple-award-winning Alexandre Desplat is buoyant, sweetly
playful, matching the play on light on the sun-dappled stream.
A boy is trying to manage a row boat. He
is overcome by the wake of a passing motorboat. An old man approaches. I swear
to deity, I started crying right then; I would go on to cry multiple times
throughout the film. I was reminded of the opening scene of Saving Private
Ryan, which begins, not with World War II combat, but with an old man, in 1998,
accompanied by younger relatives. I immediately got what director Clooney was
going to do with Boys. He was going to craft, as faithfully as he could,
an old-fashioned movie-movie, with a straightforward narrative of an admirable
but flawed hero who triumphs over hardship. And that, in Woke world, is
rebellion.
Clooney wasn't going to engage in the ambitious,
film class showmanship of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Clooney
wasn't going to give the old white man a black wife and an Asian grandson. He
wasn't going to include an obligatory scene where the male lead receives a
lecture from a superior black woman about his ancestors' presumed sins or has a
basic fact explained to him by a gender nonbinary waiter. Clooney, probably not
intentionally, was sticking his finger in the eye of Woke commandments. I sat
back to enjoy the ride.
After the contemporary opening scene
between the young boy and the old man, Boys shuttles us back into the
past. We see the headlines on a faded newspaper. A hand lifts the newspaper,
folds it, and places it inside a decrepit leather boot in order to cover a hole
in its sole. Joe Rantz lives in the rotting carcass of an abandoned vehicle.
And he is not alone. He exits his "home" and enters a smoky shanty
town of similar impoverished "hoboes."
Joe looks like an Aryan god. He's tall
and strikingly blond. We associate his appearance with wealth and power. But he
is poor. Again, this is transgressive filmmaking. We are about to witness not a
story of "white privilege" but of white poverty, white work and
sacrifice, and white endurance.
Before you arrest me for the above thought
crimes, please have a look at my review of The Woman King, here.
I loved looking at all the black heroine's athletic bodies onscreen. These
women were powerful and honorable. They worked hard and achieved high. Yes The
Woman King was historically inaccurate. I enjoyed it as a movie, not a
history lesson. I loved Boys at least partly because I loved seeing all
the white male bodies onscreen. Some critics felt differently, and hated the
sight of those white male bodies. More on that, below.
We watch Joe in an engineering class,
where a pretty blonde, Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson), flirts with him. Joe is
stoic. Joe's friend Roger Morris (Sam Strike) gets him in trouble by talking
during class. Joe is, again, stoic. He goes to the cafeteria, counts his meager
change, and stoically leaves without eating. Joe meets with the bursar, who
warns him that he is in danger of being ejected from the University of
Washington because he has not paid tuition. Joe begs for more time.
After Joe leaves, we see agony on the
bursar's face. She's just doing her job, but it's hard. The camera's dwelling
on the bursar's face after the main character leaves is one of the details that
makes Boys so rich. It renders her character more complex. This is the
Depression. She's had to do this before. She hates it. Clooney cared enough
about this very minor character, the nameless bursar, to give her a redemptive
onscreen moment.
Roger approaches Joe with an idea. They
can try out for the school's rowing team. If they are accepted, they will have
access to food and a room.
"How many fellas get picked?"
Joe asks Roger. Roger asks another applicant. "Eight" he tells Roger.
Roger says to Joe, "He doesn't know." Roger doesn't want Joe to know
that these desperate boys' chances are terribly slim.
Crew Coach Al Ulbrickson, aka "The
Dour Dane," (Joel Edgerton) is unsmiling. Edgerton has told interviewers
that coaches always look unhappy, and during competitions, they look like they
are about to have a heart attack. They work very hard, but once their team is
in the game, they lose power and must surrender to fate. Studio executives
warned Clooney that Edgerton was not warm and fuzzy enough. Edgerton's
Ulbrickson reflects the values of a different time. This coach would never
award anyone with a participation trophy. Boys saves the warm and fuzzy
for the final scene.
Ulbrickson tells the assembled students
that most will not make it. "The average human body is just not meant for
such things," he says of the extraordinary demands of competitive rowing. "The
average adult man is carpetable of taking in roughly four liters of oxygen per
minute. An oarsman must be able to consume as much as eight. You will train
your bodies to do this," the trainees are told.
In his book, Brown reports that in
competitive rowing, "your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a
rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor … rowing a
two-thousand-meter race … takes the same physiological toll as playing two
basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes …
the body must immediately produce anaerobic energy. This, in turn, produces
large quantities of lactic acid, and that acid rapidly builds up in the tissue
of the muscles. The consequence is that the muscles often begin to scream in
agony almost from the outset of a race and continue screaming until the very
end … Pain is part and parcel of the
deal. It's not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will
hurt; it's a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while
pain has her wanton way with you."
The Washington recruits run, saw logs,
do sit-ups. After a day of that, Joe reports to a soup kitchen. He sees a
fellow recruit and leaves, without eating anything. Roger offers to buy him
dinner. Joe declines. He retreats to his abandoned vehicle, where, by the light
of a kerosene lantern, he reads an engineering textbook and glances at a giant
sore on his hand. He approaches Coach Ulbrickson, who at first says he is not
available for a one-on-one with a mere trainee. Joe persists, asking how much
he will be paid; he needs to pay tuition. Ulbrickson says he will not get any
money till he is accepted to the team.
"Ivy League coaches don't get asked
that," a reporter says to Ulbrickson.
That he won't get paid yet is tough
news, but the respect is evident. Ulbrickson refers to his trainees as "son."
Trainees refer to Ulbrickson as "sir." There is not a single f-bomb
in Boys. When the team wins a significant victory, one says, "I
could get used to this," and another says, "Not bad, huh fellas?"
They are understated.
Ulbrickson is writing the names of those
who made the team onto a blackboard. As he writes the final name, we are eager
to know if Joe made it. But Ulbrickson's shoulder blocks our view of the
blackboard. I actually craned my neck to see the invisible name. Masterful
filmmaking. Of course Joe made it; the point is that Clooney made us care whether
Joe made it or not.
Joyce, the ebullient girl who has been
trying to get Joe's attention, is at a desk studying. She hears a pebble strike
her window. She sees Joe. They go for a moonlight rowing lesson. Though sitting
close, they do not kiss.
We see Joe and Roger staring at
something that is pleasing them a great deal. We can't see what they are
staring and smiling at. The camera pans around as Joe and Roger move and we see
old-fashioned, indigo-and-white-striped "mattresses." These
mattresses are about as thick as a blanket and they are atop bare wire frames.
The room's walls are dirty cinder blocks. There are exposed pipes. Joe and
Roger are over-the-moon with joy. The mattress is too short for Joe but, as he
reclines, he smiles like the cat that ate the canary. To us, the room looks
like a prison cell in an impoverished country. Joe, though, rejoices at what
his hard work has won him.
After another grueling day of training,
when any normal person would rush to a hot meal and a warm bed, Joe sees a
light above the boat house. He investigates and finds a racing shell up on
wooden horses. George Pocock (Peter Guinness), an elderly man with a British
accent, enters. He is the boat's builder. He tells Joe he could always use some
help. Without hesitation, Joe takes a broom and begins to sweep wood shavings
from the floor.
"Your parents must be proud,"
George says. Joe merely snorts quietly but derisively. We in the audience have
not been told this directly, but from Joe's poverty and his derisive snort, we
conclude that Joe comes from a bad family background.
A university administrator, with an
insincere smile, threatens Ulbrickson. If his team does not win something, and
soon, Ulbrickson will be let go. With the trainees, Ulbrickson was the one with
the power. This serpentine administrator has power over Ulbrickson. George, the
boat builder, quietly suggests that Ulbrickson change the coxswain. The
coxswain guides the team's speed, direction, and pace with oral commands
shouted through a tin cone attached to his mouth by an over-the-head wire.
Bobby Moch will be the new coxswain. He is ballsy, hungry, and willing to go
against Ulbrickson.
The Washington team must compete against
better funded teams from more exclusive universities. Crew members from these
schools are "senator's sons," who are "in boats before they are
in shoes." Ulbrickson gives morose pep talks including "They are
legacy. You? Try not to make a mistake. Don't tip the boat over." Coxswain
Bobby is outraged and tells his crew to defy Ulbrickson's lack of faith. Yes, Washington
is an underdog. But under Bobby's wily strategies and demanding commands,
Washington defeats the University of California at Berkeley.
The crew celebrates. Impressed girls
invite crew members to "someplace quite so you can explain to me how
rowing works." "Someone wanted to do my algebra homework!"
another crew member says.
Don Hume rarely speaks, but he is the
team's "stroke seat," a key position. He is also an accomplished
pianist. He is sitting alone. Bobby tells Don that tonight is his night. It
will never come again. Don is too shy to make eye contact with a girl. But
Bobby does get him to play piano for the celebrants. Don plays, "Ain't We
Got Fun?" The partiers sing along. "Not much money, oh, but honey,
ain't we got fun? There's nothing surer, the rich get rich and the poor get
poorer … Even if we owe the grocer … tax collector's getting closer … Ain't we
got fun?"
Joe and Joyce finally come close to
kissing but a chaperone intervenes.
Joe recognizes, in the street, the
father who abandoned him. His poorly dressed father is delivering lumber. Joe
approaches. Joe reminds his father that he abandoned Joe when Joe was a just a
child. His father replies that he was a solider when he was 14. He offers Joe a
job delivering wood. "Or do you prefer your boat?" Joe's father
sneers. Joe feels depressed, confused, and humiliated. He malfunctions in the
boat and quits the team.
George, the boat builder and sage, asks
Joe for help on a boat. They are rubbing whale oil into the hull. The boat has
to shine "till you can see your freckles reflected in the surface."
George counsels Joe. "You are not your father. You do not have to quit."
Joe begs Ulbrickson for his spot back. Ulbrickson explains, "It's not
about you. It's about the boat," meaning not just the craft, but the unity
that is required for victory. Looking unsure, Ulbrickson allows Joe to rejoin
the crew.
A crew member calls Joe "hobo."
Joe grabs him. The other team members pull the combatants apart. The team
member who called Joe a hobo apologizes, and admits that he has shoplifted from
Woolworth's the clothes he is wearing. Joe shrugs and can't make eye contact. "Doesn't
matter," he mumbles.
The team wins a key match and, thereby,
qualifies to represent the US at the Olympics. But they can't go. There is no
money to send them. The Olympic committee will, after all, send a "legacy"
team of "senator's sons," a team fully funded for the trip.
Ulbrickson asks how much they need. "Five
thousand dollars," he is told. Ulbrickson's shocked face tells the story.
It's an impossible sum. Ulbrickson realizes he can harness the media to make
this story public. Average citizens will donate. When the money is due, they
are still three hundred dollars short. The Berkeley team coach shows up and
offers Ulbrickson that amount.
The team goes to Berlin. Hume, the
stroke seat, becomes ill. He competes anyway. The Germans cheat. The team is
given a bad, distant position and does not hear the start called. The team wins
anyway. And we return to the old man and the young boy. The boy says to the old
man, "Did you like rowing eight man crew, grandpa?" and Grandpa Joe
Rantz, slowed by time, replies. "We were never eight. We were one."
By the time the credits rolled, my
handkerchief was completely damp.
I want to mention just a couple of the
scenes that were so beautiful that I really want you to see this movie on a big
screen.
The trainees are on the floor of the
boat house doing sit ups. The diagonal line of their bodies occupies the lower
right quadrant of the frame. Above them the sleek shells they will soon row are
stacked in a horizontal line. Across the right middle of the frame, a
horizontal line of another group of trainees exits the boat house. The upper
left quadrant of the frame is white light from the sun outside. It's a
composition worthy of a photography classic.
In another scene, the new trainees, now
graduated to full-fledged team members, carry their twelve-foot oars into the
doorway of the boat house for a group photo. This brief, beautiful shot is
choreographed like a ballet.
I totally forgot Edgerton the actor and
saw only Coach Ulbrickson. Callum Turner is superb as Joe Rantz. Luke Slattery
is dynamic, charismatic, and charming as Bobby Moch.
Director George Clooney's goal was to
create a film that followed the aesthetics and behaviors of the time of the
film's setting. His actors, after winning a race, high-fived each other. No,
no, no, Clooney instructed his cast. High fiving had not been invented yet.
When Joe and Joyce finally kiss, an hour into the film, Clooney directed them
in an "old movie" style of kissing. No visible tongue. Joe and Joyce
kiss goodbye before Joe leaves for a competition. They are in a station, next
to a mint-condition, vintage train engine. I immediately thought of Judy
Garland and Robert Walker in the poignant 1945 movie, The Clock.
Back in the day people didn't chatter on
and on about their psychological state – not in movies, and not in real life.
They coped. Clooney recommended films to Turner. Turner told HuffPost, "Gary Cooper in High
Noon and Mr. Deeds, watching movies like that. Spencer Tracy and
tapping into Woody Guthrie."
I thought for sure that Rantz was a
composite character, meant to represent Depression hardships. In fact, Joe
Rantz was a real guy. The film is telling a true story about real people. Rantz
did look like an Aryan god. Rantz was temporarily abandoned by his father when
he was ten, and, permanently, when he was fourteen. Joe came home one day and
found his father, his stepmother, and their children packed into a car with an
oval rear window. As they drove away, leaving Joe behind, Joe could see his
younger sibling through that oval rear window asking, "But what about Joe?"
All Joe could remember of his mother,
who died when he was four, was the handkerchiefs she stained with blood as she
succumbed to cancer. At times, he had to forage for food in the forest. Rantz
earned a chemical engineering degree and worked for Boeing for thirty-five
years. He remained lifelong friends with his fellow rowers. Joyce Simdars
really was pretty as a picture and she and Joe were married for 63 years.
Don Hume had worked, as a youth, in pulp
mills. This work damaged his lungs. He became ill with a respiratory problem in
Berlin and lost 12 pounds. The New York Times says Hume was "ill
and nearly unconscious" during the race. He rowed in spite of this.
Brown told Amy Wilder of the Columbia Daily Tribune, "These
were really wonderful guys, the kinds of guys you'd want your daughter or your
sister to marry. They were humble, good-hearted, earnest, hardworking kids."
And, as a group, they became greater than any one of them apart from the
others. Brown met Rantz shortly before Rantz succumbed to heart failure at age
93.
"When Joe first mentioned 'the boat'
to me, I didn't understand what he meant. But he quickly made clear that it
meant what all of them had done and what all of them had become together. It
was a term he used for the single entity that rowed for a gold medal in Berlin
… These guys were incredibly bonded together … Crew is a sport that is all
about mutual trust and close cooperation."
Brown continues. "I get emails all
the time from readers, and certain things come up over and over … people on
both sides of our political spectrum … say basically, 'If only people on the
other side would read this book, the world would be a much better place.' … if
there is something in the message that appeals so much to both sides and tends
to bring us together, then I'm all for it."
Filmmaker George Clooney was conscious
of the story's power to inspire people. In a director's cut interview, Clooney said, "I think we've all been
worked over the last few years … We've all felt like people have been separated
into one side or another and gotten angrier and angrier and angrier … When I
read the book, I was really inspired by the idea – we can't do this without one
another. We can't get through it without one another. That's the feeling you
get by these kids who were torn by the Depression, and forced together, and
somehow ended up being George, John, Paul and Ringo."
Luke Slattery, who was so compelling as
Bobby Moch, told the Denver Gazette, "The sport
of rowing itself [is] a metaphor: You can only row well when you pull together.
I don't want to sound naive when I say this, but there were moments in our
history where differences were put aside and we pulled together for a common
goal … I'm just proud to be a part of something that tries to uplift. This
movie has this pure-hearted impulse to give people the belief in themselves
that they can overcome tremendous adversity. It's rocket fuel for perseverance."
Callum Turner told HuffPost that, just like the original
"boys in the boat," the actors playing them also discovered how hard
work toward a common goal can transform men. "You know what's crazy,
without sounding too sentimental – it's impossible not to – I created a bond
with these guys that's going to live with me forever … We rowed together, we
ate together, we went out together, we watched movies together … And we were
all pulling in the same direction to try to achieve something that was
seemingly out of reach … We set the target of reaching 46 strokes per minute,
which is what the guys did in the last race to win the gold. We all moved at
different paces, the process was up and down … We got to 46 and we were
shocked. There was … this euphoric feeling that we'd set out five months ago to
achieve something … we were all so proud of ourselves … I'm just so proud of those guys. I'm proud to
be friends with them."
How did our Woke overlords respond? Many
professional and amateur reviewers and commentators condemn The Boys in the
Boat as "stoic," "old-fashioned," "traditional,"
and "boring." Professional reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give
it a low score of 58%. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score, on the other
hand, is 97%.
The Woke condemn Boys in the Boat as
sexist and racist. Siddhant Adlakha at Mashable condemns the film's
whiteness. "The Nazi swastika represents nothing for the movie's white
characters." In fact Bobby Moch was Jewish. Don Hume and George Hunt
served during World War II. The film's white characters, according to Adlakha,
are "fighting for" "little." Because they are white, doncha
know. White people never struggle.
The Lainey Gossip website calls Boys
"a mawkish sports story … a weird 'don't forget the white dads did a
thing, too!' plea." Joe's poverty is "comical." Depiction of Joe's
poverty is "pornography." "This film knows it has a race problem
yet has no interest in meaningfully addressing it!" Rather, it's a film
about "white men" "rowing their little boats."
Newsweek reported that merely the release of the
film's trailer "caused quite a stir online, with many criticizing its
apparent lack of diversity." Newsweek quoted comments like "Toxic
masculinity and no diversity. This just won't do!" and "Wow. That
white pasty skin out in the sun is hard on the eyes," and "White
people working together toward a common goal can accomplish anything. No
diversity required."
The Next Best Picture website
reports, "The submissive role of the film's female characters and no
substantive characters of color … are still startling to see in a film in 2023."
Fish Jelly Reviews condemns every aspect of the film, including Desplat's
musical score. The Boys in the Boat is
for grandparents because it is "incredibly boring."
Now you understand that in telling,
through beautifully crafted images, a straight line narrative that focuses on a
compelling character who achieves in spite of impossible odds, The Boys in
the Boat is the most transgressive, revolutionary film of 2023.
There's an ironic coda to our Woke overlords'
objections to Boys as too white, too male, and too inspirational. I had
never heard of "the boys in the boat" who won gold at the Berlin
Olympics. Until Brown's book came out in 2013, their story remained obscure.
When asked why, Brown told an interviewer that Jesse Owens' story overshadowed
others' accomplishments. Owens was "the fastest man in the world,"
"the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history." As
the New York Times reported in its 1980 obituary, "A member of what
the Nazis mockingly called America's 'black auxiliaries,' Mr. Owens achieved a
feat unmatched in modern times." Americans were too busy paying attention
to the achievements of a black man in 1936, so they overlooked the achievement
of eight white men.
The Peasants is the single most beautiful movie I
have ever seen. The soundtrack by Lukasz Rostkowski is an hypnotic,
kickass, chthonic orgy of agony and ecstasy emerging like a geyser from the
Polish earth. The Peasants is the most Polish movie I have ever seen. In
being so very, very Polish, it ends up being utterly universal. Viewers around
the world can see themselves and the negotiations they must navigate to get
through the day.
The Peasants is animated. First, live actors in real
sets performed the story. Then, those images, frame by frame, were turned into
oil paintings by over a hundred painters in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and
Serbia. The process is so difficult that another film like The Peasants may
never be made again. The Peasants, in spite of its great beauty, is as
grim as the grave. But, like life itself, The Peasants provides one hell
of a trip before the final destination.
Wladyslaw Reymont (1867 – 1925) was born
into an impoverished noble family. Beginning in 1904, he published his
four-volume, ethnographic novel detailing the lives of Polish peasants.
In 1924, Reymont was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
Directors DK and Hugh Welchman followed
up their 2017 animated film, Loving Vincent, with an animated Peasants.
The film's plot is simple and timeless. In this small village, under
Russian colonial domination, peasants are completely interdependent. They need
each other for day-to-day survival. They sow, harvest, and celebrate together. A
wagon gets stuck in the mud; neighbors must arrive to push it out. The cabbage
harvest is good; everyone celebrates while gathering together to process it for
kraut. One person's business is everybody's business. Any coloring outside of
the lines is quickly quashed. One can cause trouble simply by being too
beautiful.
Teenage Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is too
beautiful. And not just that. She spends hours creating wycinanki,
elaborate paper cutouts. She uses primitive sheep shears to create delicate
images of flying birds. She holds these up to the sky and moves them to and
fro, as if giving them flight. The villagers assess Jagna's obsession with
creating pretty things as contrary to their work-oriented values.
Boryna (Miroslaw Baka), the wealthiest
peasant, is an old widower. He claims the best of everything in the village
already, so of course teen Jagna will be his property. Everyone in the village
wants to see Jagna's wings clipped. Her beauty is too provocative. Jagna is
forced to marry Boryna.
Antek, Boryna's son, also wants Jagna.
The competition between Boryna and Antek is a literal tug of war, with each man
grabbing her and pulling her close, as the village gossips. Soon every man in
town is bragging, falsely, that he has had sex with Jagna. This braggadocio, no
matter how false, upsets mothers and wives. Someone needs to be lynched, and
someone is. It's a sickening scene. It reminded me of actual stoning videos one
can see on the internet.
After we left the theater, my
movie-going companion, a man, asked, "Was the point of this movie that men
are pigs?" Indeed, the women in the film say that, "Men are pigs who
stick their snouts in any trough."
I responded, "Did you see the women
in that movie?" These village women are drama-obsessed gossips and
troublemakers. They kill with their tongues and through shunning. They use even
folksong lyrics to lacerate their targets.
My friend then asked, "Doesn't this
movie support every negative stereotypes of Poles that you worked against in
your book Bieganski? These Poles drink
vodka, fight, and have sex. They work like oxen."
No, I explained. It's all about
pronouns. When people stereotype Poles, the operative pronoun is
"they." They get drunk, they bicker, they are like animals. In The
Peasants, the operative pronoun is "we." The magic of art is that
viewers see themselves and their world in the sometimes vicious, sometimes
loving, sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideously ugly village of The
Peasants.
The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest are all
about communal life. In The Peasants, community is like Kali Durga, the
Indian goddess. Community gives life; community destroys; in a cycle as never-ending
as the seasons themselves, as planting and harvest. The Peasants is a
closed system. There is no escape. If you want to survive, you have to play the
village's game, or die.
In The Zone of Interest –
reviewed here – Auschwitz Commandant Hoess and his
wife Hedwig are, they believe, members of the Master Race. As such, they have
no responsibility for the million plus human beings whose murder Hoess supervised
just over the wall of his lovely garden. Hoess' Nazi community is perhaps the
most evil humanity has ever created.
The Boys in the Boat are beneficiaries of a community we
should all keep alive. In this community, you face hardships but you don't
complain; you do your best under the circumstances life handed you. You work
hard. You deal with pain. You support your teammates. This community is so
threatening to Woke that cultural arbiters must denounce The Boys in the
Boat.
Each of these films would be reduced to
a joke had they adopted color-blind casting. In February, 2024, Google's image
generator, Gemini, created controversy. Users asked for an image of Marie
Curie, a Polish, woman scientist, and Gemini responded with an image of a black
Muslim man. Asked for an image of a Gestapo officer, Gemini responded with an
image of a black Nazi. Had these films presented us with a black Joe
Rantz, a black Auschwitz commandant, or a black Polish peasant, the films would
be laughing stocks or worse. Color blind casting works with some stories, but
in others it simply can't, and we shouldn't demand it.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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