IF ‘WONDERSTRUCK’ HAD ONLY STRUCK AT END AS IT BEGAN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Millicent Simmonds in the black and white segments
of "Wonderstruck."

Two-thirds of “Wonderstruck” is fascinating film-making, teasing us with skilled cinematography and a haunting sound mix as it flips between journeys 50 years apart – one in black and white, one in color.  

The 12 year old girl’s destination is New York City of 1927 and then we see the boy on the same quite different central Manhattan streets in 1977.  The ‘70s color is often garbage-strewn garish until the magically calming halls of the museum of natural history, which are also roamed in the 1920s period. 

Cinematographer Edward Lachman has made doppelganger contributions.  Without using silent film limitations but mimicking the mood, Lachman models the 1920s period’s pace and crowds in a remarkable black and white virtuosity aided by revealing soundtrack.   The stark visual bounce between decades almost tells the story by images alone.

In the 1920s, the face of the young actress playing Rose, Millicent Simmonds, conveys not the sentimentality of her search for a beloved silent screen actress but an intensity and anger.  In the 1970s Oakes Fegley as Ben is equally determined and centered on his search, though the backgrounds looks different. His mother has died – except in flashbacks by Michelle Williams – without revealing to him what has happened to his father.  That’s why Ben has run off to New York from Minnesota to search -- and 50 years apart the two children touch the same meteorite at the museum.

Technically this story is a mystery.  We don’t know what will connect these two children so far apart in generations, the girl naturally deaf, the boy stricken deaf by a freak lightning strike at age 12, though obviously deafness and a passion for museums are elements in common. 

What ties these two together, for those who have not read Brian Selznick’s book, is not explained for a long time, only dropping hints. Yet there is a mood of mutual similarity as each roams the streets on a mysterious mission. We are fascinated by the differences as well as the steps in common. 

In this storytelling sense, “Wonderstruck” is quite striking film-making, forcing the eyes and ears to work harder on the nuances than any dialog could alone. I expect the failure to reveal what this is all about will frustrate some in the audience, but I loved the intellectual confusion.

However, director Todd Haynes has made the puzzle more emotionally satisfying than the resolution, as if dancing around the subjects with the full technical glories at his disposal was more interesting than explaining why we are on these journeys. Turns out the explanation is a plot-heavy letdown.  That extended fault keeps the film from becoming a masterpiece.

For a time, the best time in this film for my money, we understand the children more from the hypnotic leisure of their searches and the wonderful contrasts and similarities of Manhattan in these generations.

Julianne Moore in color portion of "Wonderstruck."

When the plot catches up with the intellectual playing and starts unraveling, the film’s power is reduced into melodramatics.  The ending lacks much of the panache and mystery that kept us in the game, though it seeks to retain the same overview that life is like a mysterious cosmos of desires closing in on all of us – the falling stars of the end reminiscent of the museum meteorite.

Another youngster, Jaden Michael, provides personality as Ben’s sudden friend. All the children are excellently cast to go directly after their goals. Some performances are finely conceived. Conquering the plot simplistics built into both her roles, Julianne Moore plays Rose’s actress mother and Rose herself in old age. It takes two actors to essay Rose’s brother – Cory Michael Smith, carrying a Harold Lloyd look and manner in the 1920s and then Tom Noonan as a bookstore owner.  

It is a shame the ending doesn’t maintain the punch “Wonderstruck” set us up for.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

GET INTO “GET OUT,” PEELE’S MISCHIEVOUS HORROR FILM

By Dominique Paul Noth

Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya in "Get Out."

If all you know of Jordan Peele is the broad but devastating social comedy of Key & Peele, which became a Comedy Central must-see and poured a spotlight on Keegan-Michael  Key as Obama’s anger translator (a gimmick the president himself used alongside Key at a press banquet), you are definitely not prepared for Peele’s masterfully  sly directorial touch and social commentary  in a horror movie known as “Get Out,” which has eaten the  2017 box office alive and probably will have a leading place in end of the year awards.

Not that there isn’t more than a touch  of the satirical Peele in the perfectly modulated opening sequence and in the twists he creates when “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” runs headlong into “The Stepford Wives.”

If you think back on the words and shadows thrown around, you will sense that Peele has thought long and hard about the racial experience and our genre expectations.  He is ironically justifying what is often dismissed as stock Black Lives Matter stereotypes, with a depth on such issues that flies by almost unnoticed in the thriller motif.

Chris, a laidback black photographer (a perfectly measured Daniel Kaluuya), has mild trepidation mixed with amusement at meeting his bubbly white girl friend’s parents at their isolated estate.  The first joke is that she, played terrifically well by Allison Williams in a great reprieve from her TV Peter Pan, seems to have underestimated the discomfort he will feel at the pretentious oh-so-progressive superiority of this white class – an apparent lapse of awareness by her of how even these supposedly attuned white people can offend and actually scare her black boy friend.
  
Her parents are perfectly cast icons of sensible society, Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener, in performances that grow gently creepier on every visit, aided by Caleb Landry Jones as the most frightening brother of a love interest since Christopher Walken in “Annie Hall.”

Further lulling us into accepting this world is the hysteria of Chris’ best friend, a TSA worker who explodes in street jargon about how white demons are coming to steal black souls.  It’s a great showpiece for LilRel Howery, ending with a joke about the TSA that cannot be repeated in a family review.

Obviously there is a point of plot revelation that a review can’t give away. But the build-up is the key to the success of mystery and horror. If the build-up grips us as strongly as these actors and Peele’s style assuredly do, we tend to excuse some twists and revenge satisfaction that normally would be beyond believability.

What Peele pulls off is comically and psychologically poised on the knife’s edge of slash ‘me horror flicks and inverted social observation. He is using our expectations about movie genres to both capture us and make us reconsider.  As a result, we scream when he wants us to and think when we least expect to.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

HOW TO MAKE WISCONSIN GREAT AGAIN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Today’s Wisconsin has become the hind leg of the United States on economic, social and intellectual fronts –a strange backseat for a state that once led the nation in industry and intellect.

Terese Agnew outside her new exhibit

The proof is there for all to see in a cultural exhibit touring the state. The continuously updated Writing in Stone grasps what we’ve lost.  It’s not intended as a political screed, but an art-based reflection on the past with historic use of the term progressive in law, society, science and personalities.

“I find it amusing,” creating artist Terese Agnew told me. “There is a historic truth to the term progressive that gets all mixed up in today’s politics, without looking at the strides forward it originally meant.”

On its tour, “Writing in Stone” keeps expanding, piling up collaborators under noted artist Agnew, adding sections on Wisconsin’s legendary lessons that most citizens still don’t realize. Today it is far more expansive and artistically presented than its nascent outing last January in Milwaukee. 

After showings in La Crosse and Oshkosh, “Writing in Stone” will set up expanded shop – in presentation, participants and vision -- at the James Watrous Gallery in Madison through Nov. 6, with gala opening 4-7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 23.   The gallery is providing a hypnotic blue environment with spot-lighting aimed at enhancing the journey through various monuments of words and images. New banners created just for “Writing in Stone” add to the background appeal.

There are five new exhibit areas. One contrasts -- almost inevitably-- the Grand Old Party of today to the group that formed in Ripon 163 years ago, angered by both slavery and a new law that would prevent new immigrants from becoming citizens.  The group was named after the Latin for “equality and the common good” -- Res publica.  Today we call them Republicans. Re-imagine the human and political impulses that fashioned the origination.

Actress Flora Coker during a Milwaukee
performance.

The state’s most famous politician came out of that Republican tradition -- Robert La Follette (1855-1925), whose name has been appropriated by the annual progressive Fighting Bob forum. But “Writing in Stone” gives actual life to his wife, Belle Case La Follette, whom the New York Times called on her death in 1931 “the least known yet most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs.”  A book club formed in her name has helped gather material but Belle comes alive as a speaking living statue at the opening reception – in the person of noted Milwaukee actress and Theatre X co-founder Flora Coker. 

She is only one of several living statues at the 4 to 7 p.m. exhibit opening Sept. 23 at the Watrous Gallery, a notable home for contemporary Wisconsin art located on the third floor of Madison’s impressive Overture Center for the Arts.

Writer Paul Hayes

Another guest at the opening will be Paul Hayes, noted award-winning science reporter at the old Milwaukee Journal whose new book with Martha Bergland, “Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham,” provides much of the textual basis for another exhibit. It is built around a representation of Increase Lapham’s desk and study.

This naturalist pioneer not only anchored conservation science but also pushed such creations as the National Weather Service, whose existence continues to benefit us all.  It is another of the many ways Wisconsin ideas once spread throughout the nation.

An expanded monument to voting pioneers incorporates a reminder of when the Wisconsin Supreme Court was highly regarded and struck influential chords for the disenfranchised, such as supporting former slave Ezekiel Gillespie’s pursuit of the right to vote.

Updated as well is the exhibit area devoted to Obreros Unido and the migrant workers movement. An early map of North America in the exhibit portrays the vast Mexican migration spots before there even was a US for a community that sometimes feels treated today like aliens in their own land.

Returning is the sound cave in the forest – the musings of Ojibwe environmental pioneer Walter Bresette in looped audio recordings.

All join sections ranging from civil rights activist Lloyd Barbee to Wisconsin Gov. Lee Dreyfus; from Caroline Quarils, the 16 year old slave who first used the Wisconsin Underground Railway, to John R. Commons, a noted UW economist and labor historian; from earth science activists Aldo Leopold to Gaylord Nelson, and much more in the land of monarch butterflies, Door County innovators and even Theodore Roosevelt, who was actually shot in Milwaukee when campaigning for president. 

A remarkable collection of artists, artisans and core crew have worked on this vital artistic anthology of  Wisconsin, including  Diane Dahl, Elliot Medow, Rob Danielson, Peggy Krzyzewski, Gene Lombard. Lynette Lombard, Henry Klimowicz, Jeri Mehne, Ellen Nimo, Chris Jarosh, Tom Bamberger, Dick Blau, Paul Gaudyinki, David Giffey, Lisa Stone, Bonnie Norwood, Jeff Redmon, Ken Clark, Jim Brosek, Cathy Williams and Billie Jo Scharfenberg.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

BARBARA COOK -- HEAR WHY SHE IS SUCH A LOSS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Barbara Cook circa 2016

Thank God for YouTube! Were it not for this time machine open to all on the Internet, there would be generations that could never understand the self-transformation of Barbara Cook and why she earned legendary stature in vocal artistry. 

At age 89, Cook died August 8 of respiratory problems – and that was only six years after being honored by her nation and today’s most famous Broadway divas at the Kennedy Center honors, with then president Obama and first lady Michelle watching. 

It was two distinct careers that brought Barbara Cook that prominence. The second evolved after a decade of what she describes as a broken marriage and alcoholic slovenliness. The brilliance of her return in the late seventies, at an age when most singers expect a downward arc in their careers, has added to the awe. She battled poundage all her later life, but decided that artistry conquered weight, and she knew how to control the artistry.

YouTube lets us dip into both worlds of Barbara Cook. The first is the sudden and almost unbelievable way she captured Broadway in the 1950s and 1960s with a lyric soprano that combined clarity and delicacy with an attractive, perky farm girl naturalism and the power to pin audiences to the back wall.

Composers were aghast and  clamoring – including Rodgers and Hammerstein  for revivals of “Oklahoma” and “Carousel.”  Without subscribing to special music services,  YouTube has excerpts from several original cast albums  including “I’ll Show Him” from “Plain and Fancy.”  


Perhaps most enduring is the high standard she set in a box office flop that is  now regarded as a virtuoso showcase,  Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” in 1956. Under Bernstein’s direction, Cook originated the role of Cunegonde and its ungodly difficult “Glitter and Be Gay.” It demands a flair for comedy and for impossible coloratura trills isolated at Bernstein’s insistence note by note, something like cough by cough.

Musical training has advanced in 60 years, so teachers offer “Glitter and Be Gay” where most singers in the 1950s wouldn’t dare, some of today’s singers can and most really ought not try.   Singers escape by camping up the comedic elements and sliding by the singing.  (In my experience, only Kristen Chenoweth seems to combine the ham and vocal power to carry it off as something casual).

"Music Man" in the 1950s

During this early period Cook leaped to fame as the original Marian the librarian in “The Music Man” opposite Robert Preston. Her original album greatness can be found, not only in a duet with the Buffalo Bills but also “Goodnight My Someone”   and “Till There Was You.” 

She was so good and so appealing she was  considered by Hollywood for the 1962 film. Typically producer Jack Warner wanted stars --  Cary Grant instead of Preston. But Grant violently declined, so the movie celebrity as well as singing attention  went to Shirley Jones.  YouTube has a Bell Telephone Music Man medley by Cook that may also have served as Hollywood audition in 1960.  No offense to Shirley Jones, who can sing and  acted the part notably well, but Cook would have sung it better. 

In the 1960s she was still in demand, originating the lead in “She Love Me,” a musical recently revived on Broadway, live-streamed on the Internet and moved to London.  (She has revisited the music on her concert tours.)

By the late 1960s and throughout the early 1970s, as she has related, the bottom dropped out of her marriage and her self-confidence, finally resurrected in the late 1970s by pianist Wally Harper, now deceased.

Her voice may have darkened somewhat over time but if anything increased its power and Cook now turned to the cabaret world and a masterful ability with lyrics. She now preached getting inside the lyrics and the mood as essentials. The big and gentle voice was still there. It requires, of course,  the sort of vocal talent she has, to dip and soar at will, combined with  the life experience she earned to know what the composer was trying to say and how to say it. 

“Masterful,” incidentally,  is no hyperbole because premier music schools such as Juilliard turned to her to teach master classes to their professionally-minded students. Since appearance or sex appeal matters so much in popular culture, her artistry has been limited to cabarets, Broadway appearances and in these days of music services, audio listeners everywhere.

Her albums drew more fans as did her Carnegie Hall concerts in 1980 and 2006,  along with a  PBS hour from the 1980s still rousing on You Tube. 

Believe me, we are not exhausting YouTube on Cook selections, plus you can learn more if you like reading -- it was only last year that she co-wrote her life story: “Then and Now: A Memoir.” Or you can hear the other famous singers pay tribute to her repertoire.

But on her own, learn how smooth and easy she was with Gershwin  and why so much of  her fame stems from status as the definitive interpreter  of Sondheim. She became central to his Broadway musical showcases even into  recent years. 

I can only think of two singers who have had such live performance impact over 70 years and they are quite different except for work ethic and determined self-improvement  – Tony Bennett, who still performs, and Barbara Cook, who remains alive to me because of the Internet.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

SAM SHEPARD, THE O’NEILL AND 1969

By Dominique Paul Noth

Shepard in his 20s

The death of Sam Shepard brought back the summer of 1969 when my bride and I were housed on the same dorm floor as Shepard, then in his 20s and already a force in experimental circles though his most famous  plays – “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “True West” -- were still a few years away. In his New Yorker tribute, critic Hilton Als rightly describes Shepard as close to being America’s first hip-hop playwright.

Even then, coming from Ellen Stewart’s off-Broadway stew at La Ma Ma, he was something of a sensation at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut – dressed in black with a cowboy hat, handsome and taciturn. The handsome and taciturn he kept all his life as playwright and actor. 

I was flattered to be invited because I was merely the second-string drama critic at The Milwaukee Journal.  (In those days, no one at our newspaper had any title, much less first or second string, but I only got the theater reviews the music critic Walter Monfried didn’t want and since he didn’t want Harold Pinter, Brecht, Ionesco, Becket or that “dreadful French pervert” Jean Genet, I was much in reviewer heaven – making enough of a mark that the now defunct New York Theater magazine tapped me as a correspondent). 

The most memorable event of that year was my marriage. Part of our extended summer honeymoon was being invited to the O’Neill where I sat in and contributed to meetings with Philadelphia’s Ernie Schier, New York Herald Tribune’s Judith Crist (then noted movie critic but previously, as she put it, “Second string to God” – God being Walter Kerr) and several others who were supporting the National Theater Institute and would later found the American Theatre Critics Association.

I enjoyed running into Shepard in the hallway but cannot say I had  intense conversations with him. I don’t think many critics ever had. I also found the young writer John Lahr hard to approach, but I did speak with a newcomer actor named Michael Douglas (attending with his mother) and also had some delightful chats with New York stage actor Earle Hyman, later best known as the Huxtables grandpere on “The Cosby Show.”

My memory going back is somewhat blurred because I am not sure if Hyman was there for some scenes that were staged by O’Neill artistic director Lloyd Richards or was  part of the Trinidad troupe gathered by late poet and elegant conversationalist Derek Walcott – whom I was also in awe of.  Here I witnessed the first US production of his “Dream on Monkey Mountain,” still a great work of poetry and drama but then unknown to the assembled critics.  I recall liking it with an enthusiasm others blamed on my Midwest roots. 

I confess being most impressed at the welcome as an equal by theater writers whose names I knew well – Henry Hewes, Eliot Norton, several others  and Schier, who was inordinately kind to me and Louise. Even Crist put up with my disagreements about movies.

Why did these memories flood back with Shepard’s death? I’ve interviewed enough celebrities that I am long past name dropping.  Besides, with the exception of Douglas, most of these names would mean nothing to outsiders.

Partly it was because I wish I had the foresight to get to know Shepard better and that twinge of regret was there when I last saw him in a movie, where the brevity of his role perfectly fit the story but had me wishing for more, “August: Osage County” (2013).

I recall those 1969 times because of what they represent of the American theater scene in what were then my salad days and the shaping environment for so many who made theater vital to their lives. 

The regional theater movement was taking root, experimental playwrights of quite different weight like John Guare, Edward Albee and Shepard were trying their wings, and theater  reviewers were being challenged nightly to stay with or stay ahead of what was happening in theater (not to mention film). And what was really happening was, like in modern music, often more daring than their editors were willing to hear about.

Today we are going through a remarkable Renaissance of writing talent streaming onto the stage from many mediums. They are not all designed to be as memorable as the touchstones of the past but it will be hard to say now which  will endure in the future.  All seem sturdily connected to the pulling threads of our society even as our society is being pulled apart in terms of cultural icons. 

We may never again be as uniform in our judgment of art or great theater, but I recall how in 1969 we leaped toward the unknown, really without knowing what would endure.  We  have to do that even more today.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

THE SILENCE SURROUNDING ‘SILENCE’

By Dominique Paul Noth

Liam Neeson in "Silence."

On paper, everything about “Silence” grabbed the wheelhouse of my interests – a favorite director, important novel, serious cinema and global moral dilemma.

It is faithful to the intentions of a renowned novel from 51 years ago -- the master culmination of the themes of Japan as a swampland of repression written by celebrated Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo. 

Or should that more clearly be Catholic Japanese? Because Endo reached into 17th century Japan with a semi-historic novel to make his emotional and theological point – unspeakably cruel rejection of Christian villagers (but not too cruel for the cinema).  They were forced into secret cults and then boiled, beheaded, crucified in the ocean or hung upside down like pigs to die.  Yet this was nothing compared to the elaborate physical and  mental torture inflicted on the Portuguese Jesuits who attempted to minister them, so ferociously did the dominant Japanese society reject the faith of the outsiders and compromise its leaders.

The mental chess match between priests and inquisitors, using the Jesuits’ own intellect and agony against them, becomes after the first hour the centerpiece of the film. So it was onstage in 1995 when the Milwaukee Rep collaborated with Japan’s Subaru Acting Company.  That production of “Silence” also asked whether a western religion could take root in Asian soil (much like people today ask if our western form of democracy can take root in the Middle East) and whether there wasn’t self-destruction in a religion built around blood and suffering. 

The priests of the story are seduced by their own concern for the lives of the faithful.

Another lifelong attraction is director Martin Scorsese, who has been exploring the nature of guilt and defiance since I admired his first film more than 40 years ago, “Mean Streets.”  Endlessly versatile, enamored of American and Japanese film history, Scorsese provides a nearly too perfect sheen of fog, unforgiving landscapes and grubby villagers, trying to marry the postures of Japanese behavior to the depths of physical discomfort the Jesuits – played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver – must submit to in missionary zeal. 

Liam Neeson has an elaborate cameo as the fallen priest they have come to rescue – a mouthpiece for the nobility of compromise. The Japanese co-stars are effectively cast for looks and behavior, both malicious and noble. Tadanobu Asona, an incredible one-man theater comic, is a standout as the amusingly grim Inquisitor. The movie has its own Judas figure who again and again encapsulates the internal dilemma of the devout Christian’s belief in forgiveness while standing firm when God himself remains silent.

So in depth of purpose, nobility of style, cinematography that is its lone Oscar nomination and intent, the film cannot be questioned.  But as a film it can be questioned.

It is laboriously long, more to be studied than felt. Despite the brutality of its images the movie keeps us inspecting its protagonists more than sharing their conflict and pain.

At times, such as the head of Jesus shimmering in the water, the directorial choices can be misrepresented as selling Catholicism when the attempt is to dig inside the minds of the Jesuits.  It is something like Alfred Hitchcock thinking that superimposing opening doors in the head of Ingrid Bergman in “Spellbound” was saying something the actors couldn’t, but it still comes off as way too obvious.

“Silence” is a spectacular exercise in admiration more than the dive within characters that marks the best of Scorsese’s work.

No strong audience has found this film, though its hopes for coronation were high. It wasn’t even released until two days before Christmas of 2016 to be Oscar eligible and then generally released in January.  Within weeks despite the names involved, it disappeared from the nation’s main screens.

Other recent film reviews include “La La Land,” “Moonlight” and “Lion,” “Florence Foster Jenkins,” “Jackie,” “Hidden Figures,” “Fences,” “Manchester by the Sea,” “20th Century Women” and “Loving”.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 

HOW LOVING AND FRIENDSHIP HAD LITTLE PLACE IN OSCARS

By  Dominique Paul Noth

Ruth Negga is the lone Oscar nod despite Josh Edgerton's strong
performance in "Loving."

One measly nomination for “20th Century Women”? That  was not the intention of producing companies Annapurna Pictures, Archer Gray and Modern People, as this reviewer has discussed. 

It’s awards that help keep East Coast financiers interested in an era when most films need these multiple sources.  That’s  why most movies’ introductory logos convey a multitude of unknown investment companies, many of whom are also doled out “executive producer” credentials.

It takes a lot of cooperative money -- sometimes strange money. As hedge fund manager, new Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin invested some $500 million in films, but he also  used the fortune he amassed on Wall Street, and  working for Goldman Sachs,  and running his own bank,  to finance other movies well into 2016, earning constant executive producer designations.

He actually has  one film in the Oscars – a sound editing nomination for “Sully,”  directed by Clint Eastwood. It also clearly had broader Oscar hopes and pumped in vain for Tom Hanks as best actor.   

The “20th Century Women” partners carefully released the film in New York and Los Angeles in December before turning to  general release the following year -- clearly hoping for deeper Oscar  recognition at the last minute for more nominations than the one they got.

Similarly  “Loving” chose a November release though ready six months earlier.  Its Oscar hopes were barely realized, not even a best picture nod in an expanded field of nine despite director-writer Jeff Nichols’ previous credentials and an entertaining cast.  

Joel Edgerton is remarkably good as the strong silent type --  Richard Loving, a reticent reluctant public figure even when sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for interracial marriage. But only Ruth Negga landed an Oscar nomination as his wife in a performance of luminous compassion and determination – and recognition that she is a star in the making. 

Negga’s Mildred, as seen by writer Nichols, is factually  fabricated to make her environment  friendlier and her heritage not the partial American Indian the real Mildred claimed in interviews but more outspokenly “black.” But the performance contains its own truths about human behavior even more than about the landmark Loving  case.

The Lovings couple took their 1950s  legal troubles to the Supreme Court in the 1960s and won an end to miscegenation laws nationwide -- certainly a timely reminder of the importance of the courts in social progress. The acting, the historical significance and the truthfulness of government indifference have kept the film around, which is not the fate of other 2016 entries that failed to win big respect at the Oscars.

(Looking back and being blunt, the producers of “Captain Fantastic” -- a July release that landed a best actor nod for Viggo Mortensen --  and crime thriller “Hell and High Water,” August release yet four Oscar nods and strong box office, are probably wishing they had pushed Hollywood voters even harder.)

Documentary and foreign film specialists can probably signal Oscar overlooks (though bravo for the documentaries including “I Am Not Your Negro”). But credit the Academy voters generally for coming down to mostly respectable choices (except for the strange placement of star Viola Davis of “Fences” in the supporting actress character and inserting Octavia Spencer there, the weakest performance but biggest female name in “Hidden Figures”). 

Never pretend there isn’t a lot gamesmanship behind the scenes -- nor how obvious it is  when studios give up despite positive sounding press releases.  A case in point is  “Love & Friendship” despite the awards  track record of films based on the  works and late blooming popularity (after more than two centuries!) of Jane Austen (“Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice”). The clarity of that times’ class structure and the pertinence of Austen’s verbal skewers always hold out great opportunity for film-making.

Kate Beckinsale as the venom-dipped Lady Susan.

Faithfully adapted by director Whit Stillman from the Jane Austen novella “Lady Susan,”  the production promised elegant 18th century fashion and humorous dissection of the battle of the sexes, focused on an endlessly scheming penniless widow who uses her looks and shy daughter to force a lucrative outcome.

It was plugged hard in June . . . then  quietly  moved to Amazon’s DVD market by September. The industry pretty much knew then  the  producers had given up hope that either well-known Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan or Chloe Sevigny as her gossipy confidante would gain awards  attention. 

Quite right, too, because Beckinsale is concerned more with elegant style than internal conviction about  Lady Susan’s powers over men, an essential dramatic element even in comedy. Sevigny’s amused arched eyebrows are similarly not enough.

The film cannot be saved by some inventive visuals to keep the complicated plot from tangling – or  even by those delicious Austen bon mots. (Lady Susan’s vicious wit is on constant display: one targeted husband is  “too old to be governable and too young to die”; a miscarried scheme brings the Trump-like complaint, “Facts are horrid things.”) 

The epigrams cluster like locusts but except for Tom Bennett’s amusing turn as a rich ignoramus, what should have been a comedy of manners becomes a comedy of mannerisms.

Recent film reviews include La La Land, Moonlight and Lion, Florence Foster Jenkins,  Jackie, Hidden Figures, Fences, Manchester by the Sea and 20th Century Women.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 

OSCAR SENSIBILITIES AND 20TH CENTURY WOMEN

By Dominique Paul Noth

The curious but understandable Oscar neglect of Annette
Bening in "20th Century Women."

A release date reveals a lot of what producers and studios are thinking about Oscar nominations – or lack of them.

Not seasonal perennials of course. The “Star Wars” franchise routinely locks up the family holiday audience ever year in December, not expecting much from the Oscars (good thing, too -- only a visual effects nomination for “Rogue One”). Action and superhero films think similarly, throwing in Thanksgiving. 

But more serious, explorative  and  socially comedic  films are given release times that will help them leap out of the pack and force industry Oscar voters (and the foreign press association, and the Screen Actors Guild and other much televised exercises) to pay attention.  These releases are often placed at the end of 2016. The studios don’t have much belief in their own industry’s attention span.  

Such was “Nocturnal Animals,” given a limited sneak peek for New York City and Los Angeles in November  (this big city  release is a condition of the Oscars) before entering general release December 9.  Try to find it now.

Supposedly a suspense film in which a violent rape in a novel affects the writer’s former wife, forcing her out of her  cocooned luxury, Tom Ford’s film is flat pretentious in its visually elegant stylings  and only partially believable in plot. 

That did result in one surprise and rather strange  Oscar nomination (supporting actor Michael Shannon as a cancerous quixotic sheriff) and an equally surprising  Golden Globe for Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a showy sometimes naked extreme villain, a role any good actor would kill for (figuratively).  There is strong screen presence from veterans Jack Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams (Amy in particular keeping us interested in a boring woman). But the film’s producers clearly hoped for much more.

Amy Adams (in "Arrival") failed to register with Oscar
in two films.

It is Adams’ misfortune that another Oscar hopeful starring her also  opened in November, partly to stir Oscar but mainly for Thanksgiving sc-fi attention  – “Arrival,” something of a cross in plot between “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Adams’ work in that seemed Oscar bound -- a linguistic professor with guts and curiosity (and a hidden mental insight) willing to risk exposure to alien visitors. Her acting keeps the movie palatable even more than the extensive visual effects – and remember, she has been much nominated in previous years.  This time she came a cropper despite (or maybe because of) two films in the crucial final months.

 The film got recognized in the best picture, best director, best director and five technical categories, but it wanted Oscar to fall in love with Amy, who one day will win one of these things.

But Adams is not the one cited as Oscar’s major oversight. That belongs to the frequently nominated   and always interesting Annette Bening. Her tabloid fame may come from domesticating Warren Beatty but her acting prowess has made her the most reliable inhabitant of diverse characters next to Meryl Steep.

She picked a doozy keeping  “20th Century Women” humorously afloat – as a mother who came of age well before feminism and open talk about sex in the 1970s. Clinging to old habits (chain-smoking Salems) she seeks to help adolescent son Jamie (played engagingly by Lucas Jade Zumann) safely navigate this raucous new world of punk dress and music,  jackass stunts and promiscuity. 

Director-writer Mike Mills has long tapped his personal experience and added playful memories. (A humorous moment comes when a devoted punk artist captures every moment in her day with her Polaroid, something hardly unique  today --  everyone has  a smart phone.) The movie dances among visual extremes (fast motion, acid blurrings and straight naturalism) with some blunt dialog that won Mills the film’s single Oscar nomination  in a category where he is outranked (best adapted screenplay).  Would you like to go up against Fences, Lion, Hidden Figures and Moonlight?

Elle Fanning (with Bening) in "20th Century Women."

Neglected were  pleasant but mainly behavioral acting exercises from Greta Gerwig as the punk artist and Elle Fanning as the object of Jamie’s unfulfilled desires.  Billy Crudup circles the feminist and documentary undertones as a securely hippie and hedonistic handyman. But the film becomes lost in episodic incidents and overly obvious social commentary. Where it should fly it swoons and even a final image intended to keep the film afloat drags the audience down to earth.

For these reasons, I don’t consider the general exclusion of “20th Century Women” a mistake --  though it is curious that Meryl Streep is again nominated for a film that is already on pay TV, “Florence Foster Jenkins.”  But hers  was a more impressive acting job. 

Bening’s character is a  less attractive acting challenge -- as much an object of helplessness as intended hopefulness.  The actress loved unearthing the contradictions and invests meaning even when there doesn’t seem much of a purpose. I would have preferred her in a New York minute over Natalie Portman, but the mystique of  Jackie won Oscar voters over the slightly comic portrait of a confused 1970s mother.

Recent film reviews include La La Land, Moonlight and Lion, Florence Foster Jenkins,  Jackie, Hidden Figures, Fences and Manchester by the Sea.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com

MANCHESTER MORE A DIRECTOR'S TRIUMPH THAN AN ACTOR'S

By Dominique Paul Noth

Lucas Hedges and Casey Affleck in "Manchester by the Sea"

Manchester by the Sea is being touted as an actors' movie (particularly one actor,  Casey Affleck), as a sad but gripping  excursion through a lost soul redeemed by having to care for his nephew, a meaningful and highly rated film about overlooked everyday reclamation.

Missed in that description is that it  is really  a director’s film  -- Kenneth Lonergan. It only works so well because he refused to gussy up the story with dramatic flourishes, letting the quiet reality unfold in flashbacks and careful revelations, trusting the audience to do the empathetic work. It is rooted in working class values so we can feel the New England cold, the drudge of snow shoveling, the blocked toilets, the gray highways,  the pain of a common hospital ward where sad news is delivered.

He keeps the cast and a fine technical crew completely at the service of the mood and the  writer –  Lonergan – staying true in story choices and interaction. This invests small variations  in character Lee Chandler’s focus that bring him not to redemption  but to the hint of changing back into a mensch (the Yiddish word for a good person). In other words, a truly believable reluctant change. 

We watch Lee (Affleck), a stoic uninvolved Boston custodian clearly smarter than his circumstances,  emptying trash and fixing plumbing in walled off manner, occasionally erupting over beer into fistfights -- clearly a lost human being with a dark hidden side.

Then his brother dies and leaves him sole guardian of 16 year old nephew Patrick (played by Lucas Hedges), at which point we get touches of his past life and tragedy that led him to this state of isolation and self-imposed emptiness.

Only in contemplation do we realize his late brother’s motivation (a role of observant watcher played  in flashbacks by Kyle Chandler, in quite a departure from TV’s “Friday Night Lights”). Only after absorbing Affleck’s haunted eyes and locked off behavior do we comprehend the depth of the  family tragedy and self-loathing that have driven him to this stoic façade and his determination to stay there.

The story was apparently suggested to Lonergan in a down period  by friend and now an executive producer on the film, Matt Damon, who couldn’t star and suggested Casey Affleck (younger brother of Ben).  Damon couldn’t have made a better suggestion because Affleck becomes Lee with his vacant eyes, darting subdued looks  and hesitant hand gestures, refusing to break  open but clearly tempted to when encountered by his ex-wife (naturalistic fine work by Michelle Williams).  He has the stillness, the accent and the man of few words delivery needed for Lee.

We reach the point of understanding a more life-loving Lee in his past,  an indulgent belief in life that may have led to his tragedy.  We long for a smile to break that sullen face. That elevates our intensity in watching the performance. We are finally satisfied only when Lee is out on his family boat --   on the life-enhancing sea, the smooth glass ocean off of Manchester that fulfills the story’s contrast with Lee’s emptiness.

Never overlook how carefully director  Lonergan (also Oscar nominated) has modulated these performances, never stop appreciating what he left on the cutting from floor. The observation of people and of landscapes is expertly achieved by  cinematography from Jody Lee Lipes  and delicate film cutting from Jennifer Lane (neither are Oscar nominated).  

The film has also earned a supporting actor nomination  for  Lucas Hedges, who at age 20 perfectly captures the insolence, rebellion and budding sorrow of nephew Patrick.  I think the votes  in that category are going to lean to the screen magnetism of Mahershala Ali of Moonlight or rising star Dev Patel of Lion. But the largely unknown  Hedges deserves to be in such company.

Affleck is also nominated for best actor, amid some controversy because of  past sexual allegations that had been settled out of court.  Despite media comparisons to Cosby and Trump, it should be his performance that matters not speculation,  and he has been reputable in the past. But I’m not sure this isn’t a perfectly orchestrated one-off. I prefer the proven gifts and realizations of Denzel Washington in Fences. 

Other recent film reviews include La La Land, Moonlight and Lion, Florence Foster Jenkins,  Jackie and Hidden Figures.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.