Modern Film Classics: “Little Women” (Christmas Edition)

Everyone has their annual Christmas movie rituals. Most people favour It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34^th Street. Less orthodox but equally worthy selections include Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas, the riotous A Christmas Story, Die Hard (yes that is a Christmas movie and I will not argue with you otherwise) and two contemporary selections are Love, Actually and The Holiday. My choice has always been Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version of Little Women.

Filmed in and around Victoria, British Columbia, an afternoon’s ferry ride away from where I live, this version of Louisa May Alcott’s classic stars Winona Ryder in her career-best performance as Jo March. For all of the hoopla surrounding her status as the “It Girl” of the 90s, this was the one role that should have earned her an Academy Award (she received a Best Actress nomination). The magical cast includes Susan Sarandon as Marmee, Clare Danes as the ill-fated Beth, Trini Alvarado as prim-and-proper Meg, a very young Kirsten Dunst sharing the role of Amy with Samantha Mathis, Gabriel Byrne as Professor Friedrich, Eric Stoltz as the tutor Meg marries, the late comic actress Mary Wickes as Aunt March and Christian Bale as Laurie. There has, at no other time in history, been such a completely perfect cast assembled to deliver breath and life to Alcott’s beloved characters.

Call the neighbours! Spreading Christmas cheer

The tale of young girls growing into adulthood is a well-known one. The March family’s father is a general and often away at the front lines, fighting for the North in the Civil War. Money is tight in those days, and having sausages and tangerines at Christmastime were luxuries. Without career prospects available to women in that era, the March daughters bravely take on odd jobs, watch the home, attend school and eventually take on unorthodox but enterprising ventures for themselves in that era. None of the March girls sit around waiting for husbands, for they are too busy staging plays for their own entertainment, writing short stories for publication (this is Jo’s vocation), making do with what they have in terms of wartime supplies in the house, and generally supporting one another. Seeing the way the actors interact, one could imagine that this was the template in contemporary fiction for the concept of “sisterhood” (and that doesn’t include mani-pedis or shopping detox).

Bale (Laurie) and Ryder (Jo)

There’s a strong feminist undercurrent flowing throughout the film. Jo is played with the right amount of feistiness and enterprise by Ryder, the result being a pre-feminist hero doesn’t suffer fools, but who trusts herself thoroughly and able to take constructive criticism, no matter how headstrong she might be at times. When the film was released at Christmas 1994, critics complained that it was somewhat anachronistic due to the lessons Marmee imparts to her daughters. I always got the sense that it was mostly the male critics who were too busy worshipping Tarantino’s then-new Pulp Fiction and dismissing this version as being too much like Murphy Brown. What was wrong with imparting wisdom such as the now oft-quoted Dr. Seuss truism about never minding the people who don’t matter? I could always tell in some of the less flattering reviews that none of these critics have actually read Alcott’s original novel, or if they did, they dismissed it as “girls’ stuff”. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes on playing Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep remarked that her female characters are always described as being “strong-minded”, and yet this adjective never applied to male actors. Using that same logic, I deduce that perhaps contemporary critics when Little Women was released felt the same urge to use that descriptor needlessly and mistakenly assumed it was “anachronistically feminist” or some such nonsense. Perhaps Alcott herself was somewhat progressive to begin with, did you ever think about that?

Book of the Year: “Bossypants” by Tina Fey

I have officially given up writing my memoirs. I have thrown out all electronic drafts, random pieces of paper with quotes, notebooks half-filled with remembrances and deleted the backups. I have done this because no matter how much I try to conjure a hilarious, wise but pointed and still very true memoir, I just know that mine will nowhere nearly match the wit, humanity and genius of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, my favourite book of 2011.

Fey charts the course of her life from her humble beginnings in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Since her mother had her at 40, when it was a rare occurrence in 1970, she was referred to as “Mrs. Fey and her change-of-life-baby!” We follow her in high school summer theatre camps, which she said was not intended to be a training ground for future gay theatre nerds, but of which she says “you know how sometimes squirrels eat out of a bird feeder?” There are hilarious memories of her first period (“Modess! It’s coming for you!, it hissed at me!”); her first out-of-college job at the Boystown YMCA in Chicago (“the centre of all human grimness”); her days traveling throughout the country performing Improv for $75 a show; her arrival at Saturday Night Live and her first meeting with Lorne Michael (a friendship which evolved anywhere from Annie / Daddy Warbucks to Mr. and Mrs. Michael Jackson and back again); the creation of 30 Rock (“an experiment to confuse your grandparents”); the 2008 presidential election and Sarah Palin impression, motherhood and her hopes and dreams for her daughter. You are probably already well-aware with the gloriously brief chapter “A Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter”, which is likely posted on your fridge or on at least one co-worker’s cubicle at your office. And you’ll love her description of what it’s like to be on a magazine cover photo shoot (“With the wind blowing in your long extensions you feel like Beyoncé. The moment the wind machine stops you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and wonder, ‘Why is the mother from Coal Miner’s Daughter here?’”).

I told my friend Mark Ainley at The Piano Files recently that Bossypants is my choice of book of the year and that I intended to blog about it. I read aloud from the section where Fey thanked Joyce DeWitt for “not looking like everyone else” (and not just like “a Liza Minnelli doll damaged in a fire”) in the 1970s, when the era of Suzanne Somers and Farrah Fawcett set the beauty standard for everyone else (“Do you remember a time when pop culture was so white that Jaclyn Smith was the chocolate?!”). Mark put it simply to me: “the funniest people see the most clearly”. And it’s true. Everything Fey puts in her hilarious memoir is not the recycled product of numerous remembrances from instantly-made celebrities on reality TV series. What she brings to the page are her insights from years of struggle and hard work, shaped into perfect sense by perspective. No one will come away from Bossypants with easy catchphrases or delusions of going on spiritual quests (remember that Eat Pray Love was as much a marketing concept as it was a spiritual awakening for its author). Fey didn’t grow up thinking she was “special” or felt entitled to anything. She is not a self-proclaimed “artist” who excuses bad behaviour or poor judgment with that easy label. Fey is just a really funny person who liked to write, perform and share that love with everyone. She didn’t get famous for being on a reality show. Tina Fey got to where she is now through sheer hard work behind the scenes. This includes but is not limited to years of working in summer theatre, university acting seminars, night classes, writing on SNL and putting in 16-hour days on set before she traded that in for another 14-hour-a-day-gig running 30 Rock.

And she’s not even done yet. What keeps Fey going on 30 Rock is not just her love for her work, but also all of its attendant and necessary responsibilities. She realized that if she were to have quit the show a year or two into it that she would have royally corn-holed her entire staff. She admits that not everyone working on the show is at their dream job, and they had mortgages to pay, just like she does. This perspective keeps Fey from pulling any diva-like antics and sticking to the work at hand. She did, however, hint that the show might end before too long, as she indicated that “it was time to start looking for parachutes again” after the show’s low-rated yet long, critically acclaimed and culturally relevant run, but you don’t get the sense that she would end the show on a whim. She’s above that.

Summer Reading: Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad"

The Blogger has been watching far too much House Hunters International lately and pining for waterfront property in Mykonos, the Amalfi Coast and the like. The image of Penelope waiting on the hills in her home, keeping watch over the Mediterranean, comes to mind. But since Odysseus was away for twenty years, one can’t help but wonder if his wife maybe had better things to do with her time.

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad falls into the area of post-modern literature written to given speculative (and often fun) insight to established literary works from the object’s point of view. Homer’s The Odyssey discusses all of his Odysseus’s exploits as he takes ten years to return home to his wife from the Trojan War (what, he didn’t have Mapquest or GPS back then?). The title is a pun on Homer’s epic poem The Iliad.

Penelope is no shrinking violet, although she seems to be that initially. Betrothed to Odysseus at page 15, she does not love him but they bond quickly and eventually grow to love one another. There is much discussion of how their household ran, and in particular the central role the women play in the household. The home has a dozen maidens at any given moment and a housekeeper or two, to run the entire estate. It illuminates the following comment made by Alan Bennett:

“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. History is women following behind with the bucket.”

One of Penelope's maidens, tortured
and killed

Atwood’s touch here, unlike in heavier works such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, is a light one. Everyone knows that Penelope had dozens of suitors waiting to swoop in and marry her, with the express objective of acquiring her real estate, but not everyone knows that she had maidens who charmed them and slept with them just to keep them away from Penelope. According to Atwood’s narrative, the maidens were slaughtered along with the suitors, for perceived treason and crimes against the household. The maidens are given their own chapters in the text as a Greek Chorus, and they are a singing, teasing, vengeful and comical lot, speaking from beyond the grave. At one point, when they speak, the narration is written as a play, with express stage direction instructing the maidens to dress in sailor outfits. There are also appearances from Odysseus himself, Telemachus as a power-hungry lad with slight Oedipal tendencies, and Helen of Troy as the classical equivalent of a Mean Girl.

The Penelopiad, while a thin novel in terms of volume, is an outstanding exercise in style and is surprisingly, refreshingly comic for an Atwood work. The maidens’ chapters are presented in a variety of styles, including ballad, poetry and traditional folk song metre. One of the chapters reads as a court trial transcript. In fact, it’s their presentation of the narrative, both in traditional and contemporary literary readings, that is the real revelation of the text.

Cinematically Inclined: Midnight in Paris

Want a little intellect with your cinema? Woody Allen’s latest concoction, Midnight in Paris, is a joyful piece of tantalizingly literary cinematic candy.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a Hollywood screenwriter engaged to a Park Avenue princess (Rachel McAdams). They are on holiday in Paris with her moneyed Republican parents. Mother and daughter are the sort who enjoy art not for art’s sake, but for its acquisitional value. They run into a couple she knows, in particular a dilettante (Michael Sheen) who enjoys correcting local tour guides on the information they provide in their tours. Needless to say, this is the type who does not take kindly to being corrected, even in the face of irrefutable evidence.

One evening at midnight, Gil is wandering around and comes to a stop at a particular street corner. A car pulls up and invites him to attend a party. He accepts, unaware that the party acts as a time machine to the 1920s. How does he know about that the party takes place in that era? He meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at that party, that’s how. Soon, every night, he is at that same street corner and whisked away to drink with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), take editorial meetings with Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and hobnob with the Surrealists. Tampering his enthusiasm somewhat is the angelic Adriana. She is a flapper girl who blithely declares that Paris in the 1920s just isn’t that great, not compared to the belle époque of the turn of the century. Pretty soon, the future in-laws suspect that Gil’s up to something and the fiancée is spending increasingly more with the dilettante …

  

At this stage in his career, Allen has moved beyond the confines of his nebbish New Yorker persona. Gone is the neurotic, therapy-heavy, self-deprecating humour that tied so much of his previous work to Manhattan. Given the continuing propensity of Hollywood to make craptcular, mass-marketed action films, Allen wisely makes all of his films in Europe, with European money. It’s a great decision that has rejuvenated his creative spurt. Since 2005, he has produced the Bergman-esque thriller Match Point, the sexy ménage-a-trois comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and now Midnight in Paris. It’s appeared that The Old World has released new creative juices in our favourite neurotic Manhattanite.