ACTING, PSYCHOLOGY GRIP US IN ‘FOXCATCHER’

By Dominique Paul Noth

Steve Carell works on the mental mindset of Channing
Tatum (right) in 'Foxcatcher.'

The excellence of “Foxcatcher” headlocked me. Not because I didn’t know the historic outline of the story (though many don’t and may be more blessed by surprise). Only partly because we have not been as inundated with ads and media goose-goose for this film as for the competitors.  (Indeed, some “Foxcatcher” interview hype turns out to be misdirected.) Mainly my positive reaction was to a film proud of its psychological nuance and fidelity to style, while not pretending in ads or attitudes to be explosive and epic, which so many studios think is the key to attracting audiences. 

Honoring the discipline of editing and the subtlety of acting, director Bennett Miller expertly captures the bright colors and darkening tones that move us  from the grubby world of workmanlike gyms and lonely meals -- endured in the 1980s by the world’s best freestyle wresters -- to the lure of Virginia estates, helicopter rides, protective security and all the prestige and largesse of America’s richest family, the du Ponts.

I hadn’t expected Miller deserved an Oscar nomination for directing but he does. I don’t think he will win but he is a far more acceptable Oscar choice than “Imitation Game’s” Morten Tyldum. Particularly since Miller’s original work was so detailed that the film is strengthened by expert shortening while Tyldum never seems to know when to quit. 

You would probably grab your wallet and head for the hills if someone came to you asking for money with the outlines of the “Foxcatcher” story.  I mean, come on! Two brothers, Olympic Gold freestyle wrestlers from the wrong side of the tracks,  running afoul of a rich man who wants to be called “Golden Eagle” and lards them with attention.  Sounds like a bit of masculine overkill of class clichés and Nixonian style establishment pretenses.  But this unfolding, while allowing us to revel in the greenery of the rich and grunt in the sweat of the gym, produces something deeper than peasant roots confronting aristocratic stock. 

Miller’s care with place and contrasts of values means he doesn’t have to spell out social messages, they just pop up and pop in.  How the rich in their wealthy isolation are not only catered to but rewarded when they come down from Olympus to back the routine athletes of the Olympics.  How family envy underlies disappointment whatever the class. How people obviously crazy but filthy rich are excused and even rewarded for the craziness. How the virtues of hard basic achievement can be corrupted all too easily. How the wealthy are allowed “idiosyncrasies” that on the street corner would be labeled dangerous nuttiness.

Even the casual cameos – Vanessa Redgrave as the matriarchal du Pont rich with stylish disapproval – further the emotional impact.

There is terrific physical control and emotionally exact acting from the leading trio.  There are also  liberties with the actual story to create growing tension, an emotional seduction by an aloof and demanding patron who wants to be a leader of men and must subtly destroy any opposing worthy. When he can’t, we sense impending doom that can’t be dismissed as random mental illness.

A revelation awaits those who only came to watch screen heartthrob  Channing Tatum flex his abs. His portrayal of Mark Schultz, the younger brother hungry for fame and resisting the supportive shadow of David, his down to earth brother, carries us from concentrated simple-minded focus on his craft to blind destructive devotion to a substitute father of great wealth and growing scariness,  then on into glowering hatred over what has happened to his central worth.

It is portrait internally believable but has angered the real-life Mark whose memoirs inspired the film. He has openly questioned where the director has taken his character (cocaine use, social and sexual naiveté) – but the character decisions actually allow believable inner conflicts to dramatically surface. The approach also gives Tatum the role of his life, and he meets every tic.

Tatum turns away from older brother Dave, played
by Mark Ruffalo in 'Foxcatcher.'

But as good as he is, Mark Ruffalo is better as the  family centered older brother. It is almost harder to make simply virtues real, but Ruffalo provides the self-assuredness of a husband, father and brother who is also a champion wrestler and teacher – a certainty about his place in life that increases the paranoia  of  John E. du Pont.

And that is the acting that is getting the most attention at awards time – Steve Carell as the quietly creepy du Pont, with his slow cadences, bizarre strains of thought, disturbing manners and spread-leg walk like a turtle pretending to be an athlete.  It is a fine performance that reminds everyone that Carell is more than the  comic actor that has brought him fame.  Yet  because he has a sense of comic timing he never misses an opportunity to evoke edgy laughter from the quirkiest remarks. A part of me thinks  he is getting  the award nominations  because of the great proboscis given him by the makeup department, but it takes a fine actor to turn that physical gimmick into a natural enhancement of the emotional realities.

It is wise not to reveal too much of the events, but in  “Foxcatcher” the characters circle each other in psychological arenas far more dangerous than a gym mat. It is a grappling of minds you don’t completely anticipate, but stunning to sink into.

Oscar confused? Check views on Whiplash, Wild, Into the Woods, Unbroken, Boyhood,  Theory of Relativity, Birdman,  American Sniper,  Imitation Game .

Film and drama critic for The Milwaukee Journal for decades, Dominique Paul Noth began his journalism career in the 1960s, first as international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then an editor at the Green Sheet, then combining criticism with stints as arts editor and later senior features editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combined Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and to serve as the first online news producer. He left voluntarily to run online seminars and write about Internet journalism and online newspapers, then served from 2002 to 2013 as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press and its online portal, milwaukeelabor.org.  The culture-focused Doms Domain has a political counterpart, domsdomainpolitics, and he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

TARGETS WORTH WATCHING IN ‘AMERICAN SNIPER’

By Dominique Paul Noth

Bradley Cooper in "American Sniper."

In discussing “Unbroken,” I chided director Angelina Jolie that, of all the people she’d worked with, she would be better emulating Clint Eastwood. He has shown a capacity under his cantankerous personality to explore the flaws in a hero, let the story unfold by trusting actors and conveying brutality without artificial hype.

I had not seen “American Sniper” when I wrote that, so I was taking a chance with what is now a clear contender for awards honors. Today I admit Eastwood -- though not as much as Jolie -- did push too hard on the technical cinematic effects and engaged in some story omissions. But largely as director he proved my case with a much better movie than hers.

“American Sniper” is worth watching and thinking about, reflecting in familiar military adventure form our controversial war culture that many question. But Eastwood questions it, too, exploring how the cost of war to patriotic Americans is the horror visited on what we think of as the good guys. In film, protagonists must avoid the one-dimensional caricatures of endurance and noble dedication, and the jingoism of the religion and society they are defending, and Eastwood did, opening our minds with his ambivalence while pounding our sensory nerves.

Leaning on Bradley Cooper as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, he has allowed a fascinating mixture of ignorance and warfare accomplishment, of acts regarded as bravery and medal-earning that on close examination turn into something far less laudable. And again he trusts the look in the eyes of the actor even more than the manipulations of the camera, though not as much as he should have.

As Kyle, Cooper shows a devout Texas macho man cheated on by his girl friend and inspired by his upbringing and sense of protecting us all from terrorists to head into war mode with extreme self-confidence in his family values.  He endures physical training and embraces psychological indoctrination by the US military – and Eastwood is not shy to let the officers parrot the messaging and manners knowing full well that historical events have since proved their patter excessive and unreliable.

But in this environment blindly endorsed by Kyle and most Americans  – 9/11 and its wake --  and during  four tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq (the film reminds us this is way too much for any human to endure while showing how few survive, which makes Kyle stand out even more), he proves the best of the best in calm sniping to protect his troops and anticipate the enemy, along with a devotion to protecting the weaker and a  steadfast embrace of the warrior myth that God and nation require of him, he fervently believes,  to kill to protect the American style of living. “I’m doing all for you, baby,” he tells his disbelieving wife.

It is largely a true story about Kyle, credited -- if that is the word -- with 168 battlefield kills, touted as a hero by the Pentagon. Viewers embrace the outlines of his heroism while also being forced by Eastwood and Cooper to confront how deeply in denial he has become, since we see in his remoteness and mental calculations how internally wounded the process has left him and his fellow soldiers.

The film omits elements of braggadocio and disputes involving Kyle after he left the military and leaves to hints and final titles his death on a gun range while trying to help a fellow troubled veteran. But it doesn’t duck the moral complications of his self-delusion.

This is far from a perfect film, but at least Eastwood is willing to raise some of the right questions.  This is what is making him a creative commercial film-maker since he is willing to look under the surface – maybe not far enough for some, but he is looking. 

Eastwood,  as he demonstrated at  the 2012 Republican convention where he endlessly talked emptily to an empty chair, still personally  reflects a school of tired ideology that has become as disturbing to me as the Wahhabism schools in Saudi Arabia that mislead Muslim students about the Koran.

It is rather telling about the American psyche that “American Sniper” is a big screen big box office attraction while the excellent documentary, “The Kill Team,” must rely on TV and Internet exposure to more accurately explain how this Mideast war turned nice American boys into brutal murderers.   Same lesson but far more truth in the documentary.  But far bigger audience for Eastwood, who grew to fame in spaghetti westerns and Dirty Harry movies representing the lone gunman killing for justice.

Only in the 1990s was he drawn to stories that more roundly confronted the ethical conscience of independent idealism and the supposed necessity and sure damage of the lone gunman mentality.

Such conflicts are now his intellectual balancing act between commercial viability and humane storyline, and it is quite a seesaw in an era of self-indulgent bang-bang epics, though his methods here bring down his insights. On the one hand he embraces the high tech protracted battles and on the other seeks those moments where Kyle’s humanity is vanishing before our eyes as he quietly explodes body after body from long range.  

Cooper and Sienna Miller in 'American Sniper.'

Some of the devices don’t ring true – especially on the domestic front despite some personable acting by Sienna Miller as Kyle’s wife. There is an inconsequence to her articulate confrontations with him. Then there is how she is listening safe statewide on field phones to what is happening to him on the distant battlefield. Somewhat more convincing as a plot fabrication  is when a maternity nurse pops a blood pressure kit on him to reveal that sitting quietly he is way too  tense, a neat way of contrasting his exterior calm with his interior tension. 

It all feels like screenwriter concoctions of convenience requiring Cooper mainly to 
humanize the character’s self-deception, confident at home and with his buddies but letting the deterioration peek out bit by bit. In fact, the actor’s sense of character progression justifies the film. When he stays focused and calm on the battlefield, as if the decision to stop a child with a grenade is not weighing on him and was simply logical, we see otherwise. The ethical dilemma is ticking underneath.

When he tells a doubting fellow SEAL that he would rather fight the  terrorists in Mosul than in San Diego, we later see the enemy come to San Diego in the form of maimed veterans that neither Kyle nor the community at large are ready to accept.

Some other storytelling devices are clearly more token than convincing, as if the film doesn’t want to offend its young male audience with too much moralizing. While there is no “Battle Cry” World War II moment, while the firefights are sometimes so blurred that we can’t tell one side from the other (which I take as a moral comment), and we are shown Kyle caring about some innocent Iraqis, there is still a one-sided vision of implacable enemies streaming over the hill no matter what the American soldiers mean to nobly do.

This protection of US stalwartness in the face of evil may have had some original validity, but it becomes the film’s most laughable conceit, setting up a super-villain Syrian sniper on the other side to serve as Kyle’s nemesis and prime target.

It is a clumsy throwback to Eastwood’s days of western strutting, the ultimate good guy versus the bad guy escapism.  This extended plot device almost destroys better aspects of the film, including  how Kyle is slow or even angry to recognized the maimed veterans as the new breed of helpless victims his America-first thinking requires him to protect. 

I am hearing from many women, who make up the majority of today’s movie audience, that this is hardly a date film and certainly not an exercise in masculine strutting they want to see. The Miller character is a rather typical Hollywood mix of sexual flirtation and moral compass, seen through chauvinistic eyes.  But put aside the appeal to men of the combat mode, Eastwood is at least giving notice to the ambiguity – we may think we need these warriors, but when we see the price they pay and that our values pay, do we? So all should appreciate the attempt to ask questions.

Moreover, there’s the hunkdom appeal of Cooper, though I would rather moviegoers recognized his disciplined skilled acting.  While respecting Eastwood’s interest in the moral dilemma, and feeling he leaned too heavily on the comic book Syrian sniper and other shortcuts, when he turns toward the humanity of the characters as the doorway to understanding, be glad that Cooper is there.

Other notable end of year reviews:  Whiplash, Wild, Into the Woods, Unbroken, Boyhood,  Theory of Relativity, Birdman,  Imitation Game.

Film and drama critic for The Milwaukee Journal for decades, Dominique Paul Noth began his journalism career in the 1960s, first as international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then an editor at the Green Sheet, then combining criticism with stints as arts editor and later senior features editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combined Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and to serve as the first online news producer. He left voluntarily to run online seminars and write about Internet journalism and online newspapers, then served from 2002 to 2013 as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press and its online portal, milwaukeelabor.org.  The culture-focused Doms Domain has a political counterpart, domsdomainpolitics, and he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

THE ENIGMA IS WHY ‘IMITATION GAME’ TANKS HALFWAY THROUGH

By Dominique Paul Noth

Benedict Cumberbatch in "Imitation Game."

For the first 50 minutes of a nearly two hour movie, “The Imitation Game” has the qualities we associate with a crackerjack historical thriller, mixing dramatic invention with World War II attitudes in England  as it explores the long-hidden role of Alan Turig in saving millions of Allied lives with his innovative machine that broke the Nazi Enigma code.

There is some acceptable fictionalization and character development early on as the aloof anti-social mathematical genius who relishes crosswords more than people displays his knack for offending academic colleagues and the military establishment. The cinematic devices are acceptable because they hold our interest and  it’s past time to tell the hidden story of his breakthrough in machine intelligence (today we call that computers) that saved millions of lives.

There was real drama in Turig’s fight to create his brain of dials rather than labor futilely to solve the code line by line before a new encryption flipped in at midnight. Initially, he was not at war against the Nazis as much as the hidebound British military. Any hint of exposing his homosexuality (a continuing plot element) would doom him and his beloved machine to destruction. As it was, his oddball manners did put him in danger of being accused of spying for the Soviets.

Then there is massive  fictionalization in how the movie uses Keira Knightley as the unexpected mathematical genius whose mere presences softens Turig and his male colleagues.  It is true that society of the era didn’t believe women had the competence to escape the kitchen or thought any camaraderie a sign of sluthood, so Knightley’s plucky British manner and concern about decorum provide a way to humanize Turig – and initially we almost accept the overall fabrications.  Frankly, though, despite chauvinistic attitudes, computer explorers even in the 1930s relied on women for mathematical skills.  So eventually as weird as the era seems to modern audiences, this plot bridge becomes shaky.

But where the movie really  goes awry is in overly concocting eureka moments  – that “bulb lights up in the head” that has become a movie cliché.  It then concocts a situations to humanize the ethical dilemma (once Enigma was broken, the success had to stay secret to mislead the Germans, which means many innocents would continue to die) and further exaggerates into Shakespearean tragedy the manipulations that did happen – how Turig gets caught up in the spy game, conveyed in stunned looks at the camera and exaggerated moments of betrayal and class arrogance.

Director Morton Tydlum and screenwriter Graham Moore (from a book about Turig) are authentic to the times and manners, but there is a sort of Games of Throne scheming (not a totally random allusion since you’ll spot several actors from HBO’s Games of Throne) in the growing sneers of the upper class, the violence motif  and the militaristic mannerisms. The director and screenplay go  off the rails to pound the points home about homosexual secrets, human betrayal and the British caste system, overusing the actors to make the larger points.

Which brings us to Benedict  Cumberbatch,  an excellent actor who has illuminated many films and handled many characterizations over recent years with a technique that usually surprises and engages.  But this film relies so heavily on his gifts for robotic aloofness -- with a stutter and a  tiny creeping smile to break the coldness -- that he could pretty much retire that method from his repertoire for a decade.

The film need not have signaled  so heavily how badly Britain treated its gay population and how oddballs of all stripes were mistreated. The film holds us better with gentler discovery than telling us time and again how to react.  It’s not surprising that Cumberbatch couldn’t resist every opportunity to convey that quirkiness, but someone should have called a halt to this side of  “The Imitation Game.”

Other notable end of year reviews:  Whiplash, Wild, Into the Woods, Unbroken, Boyhood,  Theory of Relativity, Birdman. 

Film and drama critic for The Milwaukee Journal for decades, Dominique Paul Noth began his journalism career in the 1960s, first as international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then an editor at the Green Sheet, then combining criticism with stints as arts editor and later senior features editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combined Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and to serve as the first online news producer. He left voluntarily to run online seminars and write about Internet journalism and online newspapers, then served from 2002 to 2013 as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press and its online portal, milwaukeelabor.org.  The culture-focused Doms Domain has a political counterpart, domsdomainpolitics, and he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

CINEMA FLIES PAST COMIC REALITY IN ‘BIRDMAN’

By Dominique Paul Noth

A bored Alfred Hitchcock some 66 years ago decided to push the technical envelope of film as it existed, which was limited to 10 minutes for a continuous take, so he wheeled actors, cables and drama around furiously to make “Rope.”

Today Alejandro González Iñárritu is making Hitchcock look like a wussy. 

'Birdman' Michael Keaton exposed in Times Square

Famous as one of the Three Amigos whose magical visions and technical prowess have changed international cinema, he has set out to stretch patrons’ minds and expectations with “Birdman,” pushing what cinema can now do to imaginative extremes.

“Birdman” (subtitled “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”) is filmed as if it were a single continuous shot careening down the narrow corridors, cramped dressing rooms and walkways of Broadway’s St. James Theater, then wheeling high above the city through day and night (an homage to Truffaut?) and through windows (an homage to Michelangelo Antonioni?).

The single take styling combined with long walking-talking dialog dominates to create such vertigo and claustrophobia as to mesmerize viewers.

It’s not just a technical style but a way of forcing us into “no time to escape” and little time to evaluate the meanings, It also, unintended, takes away from our ability to laugh, empathize and understand.  We are just supposed to give over to a great throbbing  ride. The drum score of Antonio Sanchez should win every award in sight, the unknown SteadiCam operators deserve huzzahs and the technical accomplishments including costuming are simply astounding.

Iñárritu has also sought out remarkable actors and challenged them into impossible elongated sequences and surprise peeks around the corner interplay, attempting black comedy without the crutch of cuts and inserted close-ups, taking his second language (English) to endlessly winding heights of commentary on celebrity, tweets, randiness and artistic intents.

He has created a deliberate tour de force not just for himself, but his crew and cast -- and for the public at awards time that means the cast is getting the salute for Olympic endurance and degrees of difficulty, surpassing what the rating judges could expect.

Those with the clearest through-line and most understandable desires strike the hardest:  Naomi Watts as a would-be Broadway star, Emma Stone as a drugged-out daughter, Zach Galifianakis as the ultimate say-anything do-anything agent, Andrea Riseborough as the on-again off-again pregnant interest, Amy Ryan as the injured but enduring wife. All grab their moments in a hurricane of motion as opening night disaster approaches, echoing the passionate excesses of the play they are doing. 

Popping in constantly as the last-minute stage replacement, a Broadway draw  trying to take over the play,  is Ed Norton, having the time of his acting life as the most outrageously methody actor in captivity  who can never decide whether his ego or his penis controls his behavior.

But the tour de all tours most  remarkably relied on and carried out belongs to Michael Keaton as Riggin, once a Hollywood star as an aviary  superhero now  trying to reclaim artistic greatness as director and star on Broadway. Except the voice and powers of Birdman, the hero he abandoned, pound in his head and on his doubts and behavior.  Few actors have even been asked to show such range so interminably. Other actors can only admire how deftly and intensely Keaton rises to not just endure but succeed in a role that is meant to be deliberately destructive and myth bending.

Intellectually as well as emotionally, Iñárritu is attempting suggestive layers upon layers – Mexican colors in a liquor store, Macbeth echoing in the interior voice as well as from a madman on the street, a gun motif that turns realism into horrific unreality, metaphors for every actor’s worst nightmares (such as running near naked through Times Square), the inner jokes about George Clooney, Robert Downey and even Broadway’s Spiderman, all cases of  people moving back and forth in media comfort between art and commerce.

I think Iñárritu is also laughing at the pretensions of faux artiste fascination with super-realism (the entire film smells like a riff on the pretentious).  The messaging suggests we all really live in a fantastical interior life that must cope with the physical earthbound. The device of the one-shot tricks us into a finale of flight into the comets anchored almost casually by the real world. It may be advertised as a comedy but only in the same way “Tempest” is a comedy. It is a dream of what fools we mortals be over what we consider success.

Ten years after “Rope,” Hitchcock dismissed his incredible planning as a stunt. I doubt that 10 years from now Iñárritu will admit the same. But he is expanding our concept of what cinema can be even more than what it can reveal.  For him over-the-edge existence is the revelation -– and fascinating to watch. 

Other notable end of year reviews:  Whiplash, Wild, Into the Woods, Unbroken, Boyhood,  Theory of Everything. 

Film and drama critic for The Milwaukee Journal for decades, Dominique Paul Noth began his journalism career in the 1960s, first as international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then an editor at the Green Sheet, then combining criticism with stints as arts editor and later senior features editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combined Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and to serve as the first online news producer. He left voluntarily to run online seminars and write about Internet journalism and online newspapers, then served from 2002 to 2013 as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press and its online portal, milwaukeelabor.org.  The culture-focused Doms Domain has a political counterpart, domsdomainpolitics, and he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

TWO GREAT ACTING OUTINGS SPUR ‘THEORY OF EVERYTHING’

By Dominique Paul Noth

Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in a publicity still
for "The Theory of Everything."

Movie awards seem to have a great affinity for infirmities and the physically crippled and the ability of healthy actors to take on such roles. Honorable efforts have been rewarded, such as Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot” but sometimes it’s just a star willing to disguise natural allure into a physical limitation, such as Jane Wyman in “Johnny Belinda” (I just named two Oscar winners decades apart – feel free to create your own list, there are many examples.) 

Sometimes it’s needed recognition of how stirring when humans conquer physical setbacks.  But then comes the danger – honoring the infirm by honoring the actor who may not deserve it. That is a constant worry at awards time, since awards also translate into box office come-ons. It sure raced through my head January 11 when Eddie Redmayne won best actor at the Golden Globes for portraying Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”

But then I saw the film. Now my only question is why Felicity Jones didn’t win equally big as Jane Hawking.

Granted she had no crippling disease, except British stiff upper lip. But she actually has the bigger role in this human take on the accomplishments and the larger emotional journey, displaying Cambridge patience over things Americans would scream about, tapping reservoirs of feeling into a glance or a movement.  I have not seen all the nominated leading performances, but it is hard to imagine one better. In fact, in acting diligence and emotional appeal you will not find a better pairing.

I’m saying all this about a film that is quite restrained and intelligently handled by director James Marsh, but not quite a masterpiece except for the performances.  Scientific genius is hard to simplify for the screen, forcing equivalencies that don’t quite make it and straining screenwriter Andrew McCarten to no end of compression and combinations.  Human relationships are the easier cup of tea, yet this one is hardly a straight line and while cleverly distilled we sense the distilment where it should just flow over us. The quality of the acting creates the flow.

 “Theory” also explores the most significant real life imaginable on the contemporary screen, guiding us with an unconventional romantic thread and an optimistic determination that reflects its characters and leaves us staggered with their perseverance. There are also some unusual provocative technical elements including a surging emotional score by Danish composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Hawking, if you have been living inside a distant galaxy, is the cosmologist whose theories and constructs involving black holes, the universe and time have illuminated scientific thinking for 50 years – more remarkable by his example of the mind conquering physical deterioration.  The motor-neuron disease (ALS) hit him so hard in 1963 that physicians gave him two years to live, but he not only lived but thrived with a series of mathematical and geometrical conceits and theorems more amazing for the acts of memory and transcription involved as his faculties deteriorated to a cheek muscle to maneuver an artificial voice and a series of motorized wheelchairs to haul him from place to place – while also fathering three children and displaying an antic sense of humor.

Even as his body deteriorated, even as his fingers twisted into knuckles and his limbs went from contorted walks to wheelchairs, he and his wife ignored realities to tirelessly provide a semblance of family life until the constraints of his illness forced a parade of helpers and intruders into her strength of character.  Meanwhile, to oversimplify, both sought emotional attachments in other places without destroying the essential bond – something fictionalized a bit but still factual in the movie. 

There are themes of love and ideology at work here, from the place of God in the mutual universe to the place of Penthouse in Hawking’s sexual dynamics.  Director Marsh employs considerable skills in weaving the tale, always with great taste often oversimplified for the masses.

When Hawking conceives an insight into black holes through a hole in his sweater, this is a cinematic visualization exaggerating reality, much as saying that Einstein saw his theory of relativity in a swirling coffer cup. Well, he did but that was barely the start. Cinema needs such stuff as  cream circling  in coffee employed here again to help us understand the Hawking ideas  The need to compress and simplify sends the movie down several paths that injure  conviction, which should underlie our appreciation of what the actors didn’t do, even more than what they actually do so wonderfully.  There is no prolonged agony or extended dragging climb up and down stairs, just what the art of editing and acting can do in combination.

Let me go way out on a limb. I am predicting that Redmayne is about to explode as the new great figure of acting in the English language, likely to surpass Olivier in legend and Guinness in variety – and believe me I know what a daring statement that is to make about a largely unknown 33 year old who doesn’t even enjoy the female camp followers of his eminent colleague and friend, Benedict Cumberbatch, another fine actor many make the same prediction about.

But I have been watching Redmayne in his film outings where he combines considerable technical skill with a direct human sincerity mainly in ensemble forays, not showcases. I hope that continues if he doesn’t fall into celebrity adulation.  I didn’t much like the film “Les Miserables,” but his Marius was the best I’ve seen in both acting and singing. He almost stole “My Week With Marilyn” because he goes right after the material, worries it to death, but doesn’t show the worry so we just appreciate the diligence. There is an underlying honesty to his approach combined with enormous technical gifts.

Both are on display as Hawking, confusing many viewers into thinking he has lost some six inches in height and 40 pounds in weight. No such thing. When needed full visual span he has carefully studied how ALS has twisted and shrunk Hawking’s body but the actor understands the personality does not admit deformity but fights for normalcy. The intellect and humor is conveyed not just in director Marsh’s choice of angles around Hawking’s eyeglasses but in Redmayne’s understanding from the start how a twisted grin and particularly communicative eyebrows can convey both the alert mind and the flirtatious romance.

It is fine work matched totally by the methods and manners of Felicity Jones, whose growing love for Stephen and then affection for her choir director, yet her completely honorable British mannerisms and sense of domestic propriety, are a remarkable human orchestration. You emerge from this movie loving and admiring both.


Other notable end of year reviews:  Whiplash, Wild, Into the Woods, Unbroken, Boyhood  

Film and drama critic for The Milwaukee Journal for decades, Dominique Paul Noth began his journalism career in the 1960s, first as international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then an editor at the Green Sheet, then combining criticism with stints as arts editor and later senior features editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combined Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and to serve as the first online news producer. He left voluntarily to run online seminars and write about Internet journalism and online newspapers, then served from 2002 to 2013 as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press and its online portal, milwaukeelabor.org.  The culture-focused Doms Domain has a political counterpart, domsdomainpolitics, and he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

HYPE DOING AN INJUSTICE TO SMALL PLEASURES OF ‘BOYHOOD’

By Dominique Paul Noth

Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane near the start of "Boyhood."

If there has ever been an example of a quiet thought-inducing movie blown out of proportion during awards season, it is “Boyhood.” Its honorable ambition and unusual concept disguise its excesses in dialog and a sort of literary desperation to suggest universal depth in everyday American life. 

There is certainly something faithful and accurate in much of how it uses familiar family activity and the white America pursuit of middle class education and comfort. All films must draw from specifics to touch us with the larger human circus. But these qualities have been elevated by an overwhelming number of critics and insiders who share the movie’s background, call it the echo of their own boyhood and apparently rule the decision making at the awards shows. 

So while “Boyhood” opened last summer to rave reviews and indifferent box office (which in these days of cgi spectaculars and heavily promoted lousy films could be a source of pride) the hoopla has increased almost violently, with some 90% of big media critics calling it so special to be  worthy of an Oscar. 

The accolades reached a high January 11 at the televised Golden Globes, a usual precursor to the Oscars. After winning best picture and best actress (for Patricia Arquette), it is now likely to return to theaters despite a January DVD release, and it may finally make enough money to reward the care of its makers.  Frankly, it should. The financiers were daring and there is good stuff in there, though not as consistently worthy as you’ve been hearing.

One thing to admire about the movie is how backers were willing to wait some 14 years for any return (hardly proof of artistry but certainly proof of belief). The concept from suggestion back in 2000 was to follow one boy – a personable Ellar Coltrane who grew up to remain good-looking and natural on camera – from age 6 to college, getting the same cast together for 12 weeks over 12 years (including the director’s daughter, Lorelei Linklater, as a first impish and then aloof sister) to improvise around an outline and add their own personal history as childhood friends ebb and flow, families change fortunes and interludes range from living room videos to camping to partying to hiking.

That could have become a gimmick but it was an audacious enterprise by a director, Richard Linklater (also a Golden Gloves honoree), famous for his concern about natural everyday life, around which he had built his previous films. So “Boyhood” chooses moments of broad identify (the revel around a Harry Potter book signing, the parade of haircuts, the mischief of  playmates, the sexual banter of adolescent boys) that parents and perhaps film patrons automatically bond with. It also provides a needed slap to political myths about single parents and broken homes, which often produce the best of the best, and it celebrates as should long have been celebrated the singular dedication of a caring parent caught in such circumstances.

Thus there  is no sudden shocking murder or home invasion but normal observations and clues about how we all have weaknesses we need to  rise above, all framed in alluring landscapes,  snippets of living and the stunned looks children give each other  over the behavior of alcoholic adults.  Toward the end, the maturing Coltrane has a series of encounters with the opposite sex that also are quite watchable as we wait to see the more modern courtship dances.

Award winner Arquette is a magnetic understated actress whose appeal kept the TV series “Medium” alive for more years than it should have.  Here she is the mother determined to become a college teacher, devoted to psychological practice, tireless to guide her  two children into a college bound path, yet choosing what she hopes are stable social climbing  breadwinners to  help her family without realizing they are unstable. Their natural wastrel father (Ethan Hawke) himself is maturing way too late into a good father, and the dialog reminds us of his improvement every step of the way, which I suspect Hawke himself helped overwrite. Much better acting comes from Marco Perella as the initially likable and then loathsome second husband. 

Arquette’s acting has been magnified in these awards since her best moments are observant and her worst are being forced by the haste of cast reassembly to overly demonstrate a sense of loss when she realizes she has not paid attention to herself during her son’s journey into manhood. It is a true observation somewhat artificially realized, and the film is once again getting recognition for the observation more than the execution.

Hawke is not alone in inflating self-attention. Every signpost on this journey is captured in dialog that makes everyone sound like Dostoevsky studying for a college sociology test.  

I understand why the critics went ape. First it is important for the independent film movement when a movie concerned about fidelity to normal life gets such cinematic attention.   But saying that the attention is wonderful and spotted with genuine feelings is not the  same as saying it is creatively mature and lasting.

I’ve been wondering why supposedly thoughtful critics went so far overboard in the embrace, though this overreach in reviews is not a new phenomenon. I’ve been part of it myself.  There are times film makers come along that the critics fear will not be recognized by the general public so they overstate to draw a crowd.  (Directors from Bernardo Bertolucci to Robert Altman to George Lucas have benefited and suffered from this tendency.)

Beyond that, most of these praising critics are, like me, white men (middle aged,  though I am well past that) who survived similar family circumstances, went to college and think “Boyhood” has such a special hold on their own formation that the public will similarly embrace. 

A surprising many can’t even state specifically in their reviews the attraction of the film or define it, except to say “this is my childhood” as if that means “this is your childhood” And while there is something hypnotic about following the growth of one child on the screen and surrounding him with a family of actors and non-actors constantly adjusting their behavior to the idea – well, that is also a description of something predictable. We know where it’s headed and wish it had better editing and writing to remove the self-indulgence.

As long as viewers go in with a little caution about the praise, “Boyhood” is worth some of the efforts to make every wandering on the journey deeply revelatory. At this point Linklater has got to be a bit overwhelmed by the response since he must know that not all American kids from broken homes in Texas grow up with this attention, much less is he trying to have Texas suburbia stand in for black, Hispanic and more heavily urban families who may all claim a different sort of boyhood broken home in the journey. He dealt with his experience and where it fits us all. He presses a bit in filmic techniques, which is his style, but I think he may be surprised at how that pressing seems to have escaped consequence.

Take what’s there, but I’m biting my lip at awards time. Neither the concept, the directing nor the acting are so special as to overwhelm the competition. The belated rejoicing over the film has become misleading.

Other notable end of year reviews:  Whiplash, Wild, Into the Woods, Unbroken. 

Film and drama critic for The Milwaukee Journal for decades, Dominique Paul Noth began his journalism career in the 1960s, first as international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then an editor at the Green Sheet, then combining criticism with stints as arts editor and later senior features editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combined Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and to serve as the first online news producer. He left voluntarily to run online seminars and write about Internet journalism and online newspapers, then served from 2002 to 2013 as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press and its online portal, milwaukeelabor.org.  The culture-focused Doms Domain has a political counterpart, domsdomainpolitics, and he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

PRIMARILY A FAMILY TRAGEDY BUT WHAT A BLOW TO NEWSROOM IDEALS!

By Dominique Paul Noth

Pierre-Rene Noth, the Rome
News-Tribune final portrait.

A lot of what journalism should be has passed away with my brother, Pierre-Rene Noth. He died peacefully at age 78 on January 3, 2015, surrounded by family at his home in Rome, Georgia, after a long struggle with cancer. 

Rome was his adopted hometown, though it could have been Milwaukee where he was a top influential editor for 15 years at The Milwaukee Journal.

He moved to Rome in 1986 to become first the deputy editor and then editorial page (opinion) editor of the Rome News-Tribune, and he had such influence on that  growing community that the Rome newspaper through changes and reorganization kept his name on the masthead after formal retirement and until his death, though for a half year he had battled illness that prevented any writing. 

For the publisher, Burgett H. Mooney III, it went beyond friendship into the lasting influence of “a great newspaperman.” 

“He praised, pushed, suggested and, yes, scolded, when needed, using the editorial page of this newspaper to help a community he loved be the best it could be everyday.”

What sounds familiar to many former colleagues in Milwaukee is the scolding and pushing part. It’s not something emphasized in the florid tributes at the time of death, especially since the older Pierre prided himself on balanced temperament and even the younger Pierre could be unusually calm and instructive during a deadline tempest.

But Pierre the lovable and Pierre the taskmaster were inseparable. Both his obstinacy and his accessibility are remembered by many, including longtime Green Sheet editor and author Dan Chabot, now living in Florida. “One of the unforgettable characters that made The Journal so exceptional,” Dan wrote in an email. “Many of us were fortunate to work under his tutelage.” 

My email has been flooded with those who recall him as a ferocious example and a mentor, with several surprises about his calming image as he moved up in the journalism world. 

A cartoonist of  the 1970s recently recalled "an editor unlike others"
 who not only offered "collegial respect  to such a scruffy
beatnik type as me" but put this cartoon on the Waukegan front page.

A young free-lancer peddling his drawings -- now a noted cartoonist and voice actor -- remembers the relaxed pipe-smoking managing editor he worked with at the Waukegan News-Sun, describing him as “more like a college professor than a managing editor. Nothing ever seemed to rattle him.”

“Was that a relative?” P.S. Mueller one day asked fellow New Yorker cartoonist Paul Noth in an email. “Yes, my uncle,” said Paul.

“My memories of Pierre are filled with how wide both his interests and abilities ranged, from speed-reading all the wires, to writing headlines (good ones) faster than just about anybody,” recalled Carl Schwartz who retired from JS as top news guy and now edits the Badger Birder among a million ornithological things. “From his chess prowess and rock music appreciation and his abilities to write about all these topics, a true man for all seasons.”

“Just a brilliant guy, so far ahead of all the rest of us,” wrote Robert Sheridan who left The Journal for 33 years at the New York Times. “Tough to work for at first, but he let people know that he respected them -- a rare quality in the business.”

There is a tendency in obituaries by relatives and colleagues to suggest sainthood, but the Mother Teresa of Fourth  and State -- Pierre was definitely not. He had a terse angry side -- all these  Noths were nasty in the early morning.  To be accurate, Pierre may have stormed in barely on time but turned quickly into a pleasant workaholic with exemplary judgment and guidance skills. His commitment to principles and ethics is what has become most remembered.

The teenage Pierre on his way to the University
of  Oklahoma journalism school in 1953.

At first he clung to his Oklahoma libertarian defiance, particularly a dislike of urban crowdedness. He was a Goldwater Republican taking root in a Democratic big city. (This dilemma was not his exclusively -- Hillary Clinton started as a Goldwater acolyte.)

But the First Amendment was his beacon in a blaze that  created followers. The Milwaukee Journal of his decades reflected a more polished mix of what was important to the readers.  Granted this was a newspaper of a different time (highly popular) and slow to embrace diversity. But despite higher staffing for local, local, local there was a determined worldliness that actually appealed to the readers. National and international coverage was not free of American jingoism, it didn’t subsume the local emphasis but the system forced editors to pursue balance between the global and the local in a particularly Milwaukee way. This was actually an attraction in a city of many ethnicities and world views.

In 2015 people are choosing Internet sites that largely reinforce existing prejudices. Expect such conformity from chain buyouts. It is quite likely that to save money at some 14 Scripps newspapers including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the decision will be made to combine national-international choices for all papers into one wire desk operation that reflects the corporate philosophy and frees local editors from having to argue in person with editors of a different outlook.

The old Journal and old Sentinel so valued neighborhoods that local coverage was more heavily staffed. But even the local reporters would have to fight for space against an active restless group of centurions for balance who would raise essential questions about local and state reporting while arguing that the readers needed to understand national and international occurrences.

Pierre was one of those centurions. He was my brother and my tutor, which biases me, but I have been learning how profoundly he had mentored so many.

Pierre and Bonnie attending a
Milwaukee wedding in 1976.

Several children were with him when he died but so, always,  was the constant Bonnie. She had worked at The Milwaukee Journal in “the library,” as the nearby actively used archives were known, before they married in 1967.  She probably won’t shoot me for saying that she spotted this handsome intense guy mumbling into his string tie and squirming in his Western attire at the news desk -- and she set her cap for him.

It’s been a great marriage and they have six diverse adopted children, now all grown. They also helped raise Pier, his child from a previous marriage.  At work he ruled the copy desk but at home she ruled.  They and my kids are roughly the same age and all knew him as sweet, kind and tolerant -- virtues that many who worked with him had to pluck out from under a veneer of intensity. 

Criticize the old Journal for tunnel vision and slowness to change, but it had advantages readers want back – including a fierce independence from pack journalism. It was a feisty newsroom of gallows humor built around hard-nosed editing standards – not just chitchat but loud discussions. There were always editors who had the clout for more staff trips around the globe other than to war zones, for language specialists built into staffing, for tearing apart a wire service story to mix and match and force local input.  Pierre pushed for such detail.

This created a valuable yin-yang. The metropolitan editor – within talking distance of all copy editors and the news editor --- had to compete with highly articulate and knowledgeable editors about what was really important for readers to know about.  The various copy desks for decades stood cheek to jowl, the sensibilities of one rubbed against the other, with often interchangeable staffers.

Even with more space than today, the combat for the prime space was intense – and across ideological lines. Everyone could point out the resident conservative flame-thrower or the wild-eyed liberal, but they all pursued government and business corruption regardless of stripe. With this bickering opinionated crowd of editors you could always make a case on merit. 

Localizing was not always about whether anyone from Wisconsin died in a ferry sinking off Manila (though always researched) but on what was significant as well as sensational.  There was a belief that Milwaukee was better not just for local coverage but for the sense of a newspaper certain that readers wanted broader knowledge.

Let’s not pretend there weren’t tensions about proportionality. If there was a fire or a robbery or a murder in the city it got play but too much play was laughed away. That modern TV adage (if it bleeds it leads) carried little weight.  If the police set up a peephole sting for homosexuals in the men’s room of a Downtown hotel, and they did, the local assistant editor who loved that couldn’t run roughshod over the state budget bill or the House tax debate. If the managing editor had an unseemly passion for a local murder case, he usually won the coverage, but even he had to fight. 

Those standards permeated,  including five sets of critical eyeballs on each piece of copy.  No ideological cotillion of editors could prance away with the direction of the newspaper because there was always someone of solid mind standing at the gate, not always right or heeded but always to be worked around. 

I was ignorant of the methods when I joined The Milwaukee Journal in 1966, lured from stringing about the arts for Time and regional magazines while also working as actor and theater consultant in New York.  The lurer-in-chief was that powerhouse editor named Pierre. Quietly powerful by example. He was boss of what was called the Telegraph Desk, mainly the decision maker on what national and international news would be covered in the daily and Sunday paper and its various sections and how that tied into the overall news choices.

He was valued -- to the point he somehow convinced the managing editor, Joe Shoquist, the associate editor, Arv Schaleben, and the emerging top editor, Dick Leonard (all now deceased),  to hire this green kid, a younger brother to boot, on the strength of his writing but  without any practical newspaper experience. His gimmick was that they would soon need a culture expert to replace aging feature writers like Walter Monfried and the green kid would start out – for two years it turned out (!) -- on the local and national copy desks to learn the fine points.

Did I ever! Pierre drilled me not just in the nuances of copy,  but in the kern count, how in hot metal you must count exactly what mathematical combination of letters could fit in a specific type headline. I learned never to mess with Harry Pease’s copy but always mistrust the syndicated  pundits.  I was taught that as a paper of record we should value not discard the hours spent marking up the birth, divorce, bankruptcy  and marriage records, and you would be amazed how many front page stories could be gleaned from those cumbersome lists.

I learned so well I won awards for headlines,  advanced on the features  side for editing, layout and  instincts about coverage even more than critiques  – and fought for changes and less complacency than was the features custom.  I was taught to value dispute, respect writers and enforce brevity (a skill I was always better at teaching than doing).  

Some of his faith in me was our intellectual heritage.  Our father, a literary prodigy  and best-selling author that  Pierre was closer to, and our mother, a Jewish opera singer I was closer to, were rabidly anti-Nazi and escaped from Germany to France in the 1930s and then to the US in 1941 when Pierre was five.  Father was the alcoholic raconteur, mother was the classical and domestic anchor. Their  historic escape from Hitler  produced some of Pierre’s best columns in Georgia, which you might not think natural ground until you understand that he fashioned his memories alongside those of Georgia’s World War II families. Another clever Pierre touch.

Pierre in the 1970s with his mother, Elena

But Pierre became more interested in his own heritage as the years advanced. He even took his wife to Aix en Provence in France in 2011 and  to the Camp des Milles internment center he had endured as a child with his mother and brother Jean. There are files in his home  filled with research into the family heritage – many known dead ends but many uncovering live wires. For instance, contrary to family legend, Pierre discovered it was his mother, Elena Fels, not his more hunted father, Ernst Erich, who worked with the legendary Varian Fry network to escape to America. The large Noth family is alive today because of her determination. 

He became more open in his passions and he had an authority with the public in Rome that the public in Milwaukee got few chances at (largely because of an unhappy chapter I’ll get to in a moment).

That libertarian streak fashioned his opinions about the corruption of journalism when it becomes big business, which made him odd man out at The Journal. Today there is little value in Journal stock but for decades it created thousands who  live well today because they lived frugally to hoard it. Journal Stock was conceived in the 1930s as a way to make employees comfortable in retirement, easy to buy during employment, returning dividends several times a year and split and split again to reward those who accumulate it.  After retirement, employees were allowed years to sell the stock back during which it  split again and again, always increasing, at least  into the 1990s.

There was a night wire clerk at The Journal who retired wealthy, reporters who left their heirs millions, columnists who can’t get an obit today for their years of service but lived for decades in retirement comfort because of that stock. 

Pierre loudly would have none of that.  He  said the temptation of making money off the success of a newspaper could influence what decisions an editor made about what to cover and how to treat advertisers. He didn’t want to downplay a story because it might hurt a local business or a tax policy. If there was a national story about the danger of company pension plans or a federal court decision against the Journal Stock plan, and sure enough there was, he didn’t want stock ownership to influence him.

Surrounded by people who lived and loved the stock,  his stance at best caused a moral twinge and more usually a shake of the head at this crazy purist.  Decades after his departure from Milwaukee his warnings about independence from profits may have come to pass. Many now speculate as he did that protecting profits warped the coverage while killing the profits.

Few remember that Pierre started the nation’s  first rock n roll record review column in a daily paper in the late 1960s, introducing readers to Jimi Hendrix and the  Moody Blues. Called Sounds of the Times, Pierre’ Green Sheet column  ran until he left the paper in 1977 to become ME of the Waukegan Sun.

On a Milwaukee visit in 2009,  Pierre in the middle with
 siblings Jean and Malou at the ends and Dominique's children Paul and Maria.

What makes that column surprising in its quality is that Pierre was the first to admit he couldn’t carry a tune.  Almost tone deaf, he sensed the freshness of the rhythm, the power of the lyrics and the styling and he could write  quite influentially about an album movement that became popular before most journalists took it seriously.

Pierre and a few other editors were also masters of editing “on the stone,” of being able to read hot type back to front and upside down --  and order linotype gouging on deadline. There were other editors who could do this, I’ve been reminded, but Pierre was  wicked fast.  Pica pole in hand he paused over the metal columns and told the composing room what to cut and where – even off the front page!  

This required trust from a tough union that always warned editors they couldn’t touch the type but tolerated Pierre leaning in and breathing all over them. One steward told me that Pierre once physically edged out a word with his metal strip (a no-no never reported by the union because his intensity was excused). Technology no longer requires this set of deadline skills but I suspect it is not only a skill but a care with the product that has long departed, if you consider the typos of today.

The unhappy chapter was a brief one  in the mid 1980s after the Waukegan paper was bought out from under him  – unhappy as it reflects on diseased Journal management when you look at how Pierre the opinion writer, researcher and historian was so influential a few years later  in Georgia. Could have had that here. 

Pierre was in pursuit of a job, but was treated like crap by a new breed of editors who had once worked under  him. Ignoring his experience, required pay level and proven leadership they assigned him to one of those forgotten regional  zone editions.   Typically he performed without complaint and with great skill and mentored several other editors, while living as far away as he could from the big city -- a farm in Ixonia -- until the Rome offer came in.

Pierre downplayed  his importance to The Journal. About 15 years ago, when he hoped the Internet was the answer for journalism, he argued with me  against the international stamp he provided to a local community, which he knew I cherished.  “Stop being a fan,” he wrote me.  “I’d rather see two inches about a chicken dinner at a local Rome Baptist church to two inches about a coup in Tanzania.” I reminded him that in Milwaukee he insisted that Tanzania get more than two inches and that the Internet was treating world events more shamefully than he ever did.  He just lit his pipe and chuckled.

Even on his deathbed he was still concerned about the best ways to gather and present information.  Body and hearing failing over Thanksgiving, yet mind alert,  he pushed me with details about  his unfinished research. 

Given our own stormy domestic  uprooting,  I’m sure Pierre was mainly glad that he succeeded as a stable caring father and that will be the center of his funeral service.  But his children and mine need to know that there was vital substance and influence in that restless brain and devotion to standards, an ethical hunt that may be fading from newspapers but never should from memory.

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   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 combined Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and to serve as the first online news producer. He left voluntarily to run national online seminars and write about Internet journalism and online newspapers, then served from 2002 to 2013 as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press and its online portal, milwaukeelabor.org.  The culture focused Doms Domain has a  political partner, domsdomainpolitics for local and national issues. He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.