Winter Diversions

We can’t spend all out time obsessing about the inflated ego in the Oval Office or the bloated prices on Wall Street. Luckily, as Eliza told Henry Higgins, “Art and music will thrive without you…without much ado we can all muddle through without you.”

I’ve been muddling through with belated movie arrivals to my backwater, two of them suggesting once again that the MPAAS is nuts. Andrew Garfield was nominated for an Oscar, but Michael Keaton in “The Founder” wasn’t, and Emma Stone, charming but little more in “La La Land,” actually took home the statuette while Annette Bening, previously nominated four times, was neglected entirely for “20th Century Women.” Unjust, but no reason not to run out out to appreciate the mastery of both.

“20th Century Women” is set in Santa Barbara in 1979 where 55-year-old, chain-smoking Dorothea (Bening) is a single mother living in genteel poverty in a dilapidated mansion and finding her liberal-mindedness an insufficient guide to deal with changing times and Jamie, her skate-boarding teenage son and his angst and unrequited love for a rebellious girl (Elle Fanning).

Her parenting includes having him calculate the daily fluctuations of her stock portfolio, but this doesn’t seem to address his emotional needs. She tries to grasp the appeal of punk rock, but is stuck back with the music of her own teens, like Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”

Flummoxed, she tries to get the girl over whom Jamie is gaga and one of her tenants, Greta Gerwig in an unusually fine performance as a sexually-liberated photographer with military surplus wardrobe and Day-Glo dyed hair, to serve as surrogate mothers. Gerwig introduces Jamie to nightclubbing and soon has him reading feminist literature as a guide to women’s sexual needs, which he insists on discussing at the dinner table to his mother’s horror.

Billy Crudup, always entertaining, is a handyman living rent free in exchange for keeping Dorothea’s house from falling down and car running, though he aspires to to be a potter. The cast is uniformly excellent. The tale is ostensibly a fey comedy, rather reminiscent in period details to “Tales of the City,” but with a melancholy undercurrent.

Nobody quite ends up with whom the audience thinks they should, but everyone muddles through. In short, a hugely appealing and humane film from writer/director Mike Mills who also gave us a mirror image of this film with Ewan McGregor befuddled by his 75-year-old father’s (Christopher Plummer) belatedly coming out of the closet in “Beginners.”

“The Founder” is the story of how mixer salesman Ray Kroc stumbled onto an innovative drive-in, talked the MacDonald brothers into letting him franchise the concept, little by little debased the purity of their operation into something cruder but mass produceable, broke his contract with them to do so, stole a franchisee’s wife and built an empire. Capitalism at its finest.

The movie, thanks to its star, pulls off he neat trick of having you rooting for the born salesman and obsessive striver to succeed, and then forcing you to watch as he demonstrates exactly what that takes. By the end you are left in the weird state of both admiring the drive and chutzpah of the man and appalled by the ruthless bulldozing it entails. In the end he allows the brothers to keep their flagship restaurant, but they can no longer legally use their own name to describe it.

Briefly, a couple of book recommendations. I have been slowly working my way though the eighteen novels of Ward Just who is very skilled at illuminating conflicted American lives, especially those of Washington, D.C. denizens in books like “Echo House,” “In the City of Fear” and now “American Romantic.’”

This one concerns a young foreign service officer in Vietnam who, over the course of a few days, loses the love of his life and his illusions about the war and American power. The rest of the book watches as the ripples of those events expand outward for decades. Like many of Just’s works, its telling is oblique, its conclusions inconclusive, its meaning elusive, but its effect on the reader lingering. Other fine Just books are “A Family Trust” and “Forgetfulness”

I am also slowly working my way through the six volumes of Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War series, which I felt I’d better read after learning that Anthony Burgess called them “the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer.”

The war in question is World War II, and the jury is still out regarding that high praise since Manning is competing, among many others, with Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. But so far these books (I am about to finish the third) are fascinating for their angle on the immense conflict because we view it from the periphery through he eyes of Harriet Pringle. She is married to Guy, a gregarious schoolteacher in his twenties who is offering classes in English in Romania as part of an imperial British outreach program.

The 19-year-old Harriet has married Guy after a brief courtship when he was back home and embraces the adventure of living abroad. In short order, however, war breaks out and the shocks of Dunkirk, the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain reach them by newspaper and wireless.

The hapless monarchy of Romania tries to remain neutral between Britain, Russia and Germany, but Britain is far away and the other two uncomfortably near. Soon the rise of a fascist Iron Guard and the impotence of the existing government means the country is under Hitler’s sway. Guy’s Jewish students are in peril, timid Romania pupils and friends begin to melt away and the isolated British colony is forced to flee.

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