Knowing

The film Knowing is about precognition of terrible events, but not, alas, its own production. Hollywood has packaged director Alex Proyas’ new offering as a sci-fi film because stuff happens that cannot be explained by science. But the only real sci-fi bona fides this film can claim are the coat tails of the director’s 2004 box office bonanza, I, Robot (2004). Knowing is more of a thriller/mystery/drama/action picture with some sci-fi window dressing, a showcase for yet another of Nicholas Cage’s earnest, iconic performances. I find it creepy to witness another episode in Nicky’s serial murder of the talent, agile freshness and promise he showed in films like When Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. What a loss; he was a great actor.

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … science fiction films relied on the viewer’s imagination more than traditional story telling elements like character development and plausible plots. That’s one of the things that made them uniquely compelling to the initiated and pathetic escapism to those who didn’t have the chops to get off-world on their own. Contemporary sci-fi takes the sigh out of science fiction by doing all the imagining for the viewer. Chalk it up to the wow factor of computer generated special effects. Yes, some of this stuff is truly awesome (and the plane crash in Knowing is truly spectacular) but I find it upsetting that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on making hi-def spectacles out of horrible explosions and crashes. What is this hunger for catastrophic destruction that brings hordes of people to mediocre films like Knowing? Actors have become props, mere set-ups, for the special effects that are the true stars in these films. That’s the most sci-fi thing about them, and the scariest.

Back in the day, the best pre-special effects sci-fi films, like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952), used the arrival of superior alien intelligence on earth as a foil to prod our species along the evolutionary gyre. Kubric’s 2001 (1968) flipped the idea by taking human beings off-world in search of alien intelligence. The story in these superb films and their progeny [Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator (1984) to name a few] is built by laying high entertainment value over a fully realized alternative world which quietly meditates on the quirks and perks of our species. How and whether we’ll survive evolution’s crap shoot is the unspoken subtext.

Knowing is a different breed entirely, part of a recent run of guilt-free apocalyptic movies where the earth dies but it’s not our fault. Yes, our cavalier abuse of mother earth has mucked up the ecosystem pretty good but ultimately it won’t be the smoking gun of global immolation and human extinction.Old Sol’s erratic behavior is the bad guy in Knowing, not greenhouse gases. Could happen, of course. That's the bad news. The good news is that we can go back to polluting as much as we want because, hey, the really big decisions are made in another galaxy, far, far away.

Two Lovers

30 something Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is trudging along the crowded sidewalks of Brighton Beach, delivering dry cleaning from his family’s store. Then, astride a pier by the bay, he suddenly climbs over the railing and drops into the sea, plummeting downward with express elevator speed. Hitting bottom, he bounces back up toward the glint of surface light. He scurries away from the people who pull him out of the water, shoulders hunched like gargoyle wings. He reminded me of furtive, haunted Peter Lorre but also John Belusi, the samurai stunt pilot. I wasn’t sure what to think.

As the film unfolds, we learn that the force which drove Leonard off the pier, ironically and tragically, is rooted in the good life his Holocaust-surviving parents have worked so hard to tee up for him. He lives with them now in film time because he’s recovering after “hurting himself” (there are puncture wound scars on his forearms) after his fiancee ended their relationship.

Ruth, Leonard’s mother (the ever classy Isabella Rossellini), is the archetypal Jewish mom: a hygiene queen, totally devoted to her son but also compulsively nosey. She’s the kind of gal who gets down on her knees to look under Leonard’s door to see what he’s up to at night, just for his own good. Reuben, his father (Moni Moshonov), is a gentle, sweet natured man who gently and sweetly wheedles Leonard every day to come into the family business and finally make something of himself.

Leonard loves his parents and is nice enough to gently deflect their ceaseless meddling in his affairs rather than tell them to take a hike. But, to be fair, he doesn’t take it upon himself to take a hike either. His truth is that he doesn’t want to be where he is but doesn’t know where else to go. He is an eternal stranger in lands that are all too familiar.

And so the stage is set for this suicidal but reasonably nice Jewish boy from Brighton to meet Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a nice Jewish girl from the ‘hood. She’s pleasing enough to the eye but doesn’t turn him on. Still, here’s a woman of child-bearing age from a well-off family who is attracted to him and, perhaps more importantly, is not his mother. Unfortunately, she is also officially pre-approved by his parents and this automatically fogs the window of any real feelings Leonard might have for her.

Enter salvation: a silky blond shiksa named Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who just happens to live almost next door. Unfussy, easy going, non-judgmental, Michelle is the perfect antidote for the over-determined, hot house world of Jewish material world ambition. She’s the moral equivalent of olam ha ba, the promised messianic world where Jews finally get to kick back and enjoy themselves like everyone else.

Poor love starved Leonard dives into the promise of happily ever after with Michelle in the same way he jumped over the side of the pier, a lost soul seeking wholeness through losing the pieces of himself that don‘t play nicely together. But Michelle thinks of him as a brother, not a lover, and she clings to her love for Ron (Elias Koteas), a married man who doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave his wife for Michelle.

Suffice it to say that the plot works itself out with some bright spots along the way. Paltrow plays Michelle with remarkable sensual ease, beautiful inside and out, as they say.She’s fun to watch, and I think that will hold up even for non-Jewish men and women.

Phoenix’s best scene is with Michelle at a crowded dance club. While she gyrates obliviously, arms raised above her head, he buries his face in her hair, inhaling her with an animal intensity right up there with Brando’s “Stella” from A Streetcar named Desire.Truly great acting.

Films like Marty, Rebel Without a Cause and Lost in Yonkers, among many others, reenact the struggles of sons or daughters to get free of the rules and regs of well-meaning but over-protective parents. Some, like The Graduate, do it with wit, others, like The Chosen, do it with soul. This film, written and directed by James Gray (We Own the Night, Little Odessa), does it with leftovers, making little new of old hash.

Happy Go Lucky

Happy Go Lucky bursts onto the screen, elbowing the credits to the side. It opens with tracking shots of a long-skirted young woman riding a bicycle through labyrinthine contemporary London, her eyes bouncing off the built environment like a sliver of sunlight in a dark forest. She’s an adult experiencing the child's pure delight of balancing on rolling wheels, the terrestrial creature’s close encounter with flight.

Still in the credits, the woman parks her bike, runs an errand and returns to find her bike boosted. After peering quizzically up street and down, as most of us would, her lower lip cantilevers out to the right and the first of a series of self-amused wisecracks bubble out of her mouth. If she feels sad or angry at having her bike ripped off, we never know it. It’s not clear whether she does either. Some Alice in Wonderland process kicks in for her, draining gravity from trouble so it seems absurd or inconsequential. She literally skips away from the scene of the crime as if she is still astride the now phantom two wheeler.

Her name is Pauline but everyone calls her Poppy. She inhabits the psychological realm somewhere north of Eliza Doolittle’s winning cheek and south of Mary Poppins’ logical positivism, wardrobe courtesy of Annie Hall. In the ‘60’s she would have been Georgy Girl or a flower child dancing in the moon shadows. Here she’s a 30 year old primary school teacher, played by the excellent Sally Hawkins, who comes across as a more tomboyish Ann Hathaway with her appealing, wide-eyed effervescence.

Outside school, Poppy has a very cheeky but affectionate relationship with almost everyone, but her connection with Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), her roommate, is built on firmer foundations of understanding and trust. (Initially, I thought Zoe, who is about Poppy’s age but looks older, was Poppy’s mother) Poppy’s defiantly acerbic sister and another female friend studying to be a lawyer round out Poppy’s inner circle. The gals are all single and in varying stages of coping with that. Except for Poppy, none are fulfilled in their work. As a group, they’re tight in the way the boys were in Diner, townies who have lost the will to move on but not yet the dream.

The camera right floats in the middle of the action during the several Ya-Ya Sisterhood scenes early in the film. It feels almost like a documentary about female bonding. I felt a bit voyeuristic, like I wasn’t supposed to be there, but thought that women would probably love these scenes. My wife Myrna told me that she thought it looked like a man trying to show what womens' intimacy was like. You’d think Mars would already know that about Venus. My favorite segment was where the ladies dissolve repeatedly in hysterical laughter while comparing the size, shape and appeal of each other’s breasts. To be honest, it had never occurred to me before that tits were funny. It’s a life changing experience to be sure, but here, at last, I think modernity has gone too far.

In the classroom Poppy has a real enthusiasm for educating her students and a talent for getting down with them. This is where she lives most fully, the boundaries between adult and child vanishing into freedom. One scene has her strutting around her class room in a home-made chicken mask, flapping her wings and crowing, reveling in the activity well beyond the statute of limitations for even playful adults. For Poppy the lessons about how the world works are really lessons in how to be happy in the world. She transforms the most mundane instruction, such as the commuting distances for migratory birds, into odes to wonder and joy. And what an ode her performance is to teachers, those dedicated, creative, loving folks who teach our young people to be human beings!

Ultimately, alas, Poppy encounters people who aren’t so happy go lucky. The film pivots on a scene when she sees one of her students angrily wrestling another boy to the ground. Here, for the first time in the film, Poppy is not able to bubble, charm or fix this bump in the grind of human existence, the indelible rites of competition, jealousy and anger.

Mike Leigh’s narrative arc for the subsequent education of Ms. Poppy was a tush-squirmer for me. There’s something about his diffusive, almost watery style that kept me from engaging enough to suspend disbelief. That said, the scenes with her driving instructor (Eddie Marson), alternately a raging lunatic and a buttoned-down Brit, were quite vivid, both Monty Python funny and Taxi Driver scary. I was truly on edge, dreading that this lovely, totally harmless woman-child would be savagely attacked and/or brutalized by this man.

Ditto Poppy’s attempts, in a back alley way after midnight, to reach out to a very large, verbally dexterous and vaguely dangerous homeless man (Trevor Cooper, who looked to me like Stanley Kubric doing a spoof on Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

In the end, Mike Leigh takes pains to make the medicine go gently down poor Poppy’s throat. She learns that she can’t make everyone happy and doesn’t have to. And, lo, a very nice guy shows up who adores her just the way she is. The film ends with a beautiful aerial zoom out of Poppy and Zoe in a row boat on a summer lake. Poppy is talking to her new beau on her cell phone, giggly and squealing as ever, a silly Zen master of the eternal moment no matter what form it takes.