Healing and Metamorphosis

By Pamela Zoslov

On a cloudy December day, Shelly Gracon walks through the garden at the Cudell Recreation Center on Cleveland's Near West Side. She is searching for the Madonna sculpture that normally presides, hands prayerfully crossed, over a group of tiny stone children's heads. “Here she is,” Gracon says, relieved. She picks up the toppled Madonna and replaces it gently among the babies.

This is the Butterfly Garden, created in memory of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was fatally shot by police on November 22, 2014 while carrying a toy pellet gun. It is adjacent to the gazebo where Rice was killed, and was created by and for members of this West Side community to help them heal. “The garden is about creating something beautiful out of something tragic,” Gracon says.

The garden, which will be in full bloom this spring, is part of the Butterfly Project, a program that also included community workshops and a summer camp for children.

Gracon, 40, who is pursuing a master's degree at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, was deeply affected by Rice's death. At the time, she was an intern with Ward 15 Councilman Matt Zone, whose ward includes Cudell. She recalls the day she heard the news. “My first thought was, Oh my god, a 12-year-old boy! I was in a state of shock. How could this happen?”

The next day, Gracon, who describes herself as “an activist at heart,” went to the gazebo. “I talked with some of the kids who knew Tamir,” she says. He was an artist, they told her. He loved to draw. He had a mischievous sense of humor. “He was so misunderstood by the media,” she says, “which was portraying him as a thug.

"It surprised me that there could be such a narrative, just because of the color of someone's skin.”

Gracon approached Councilman Zone about doing something to help the children handle their grief. At his suggestion, Gracon consulted with Tamir's teachers about creating a public art project and summer camp. With Zone's help, Gracon obtained a $5,000 grant from the city's casino-revenue fund.


Writing the grant proposal and getting approval was an arduous process, she says, but the camp, held at Cudell Fine Arts two days a week in July, was a success. Twelve children, including Tamir's sister, Tajai, participated. They learned yoga, meditation, drumming, and art. They formed tight friendships. They created the artwork displayed in the garden: concrete plaques embedded with buttons, beads and jewelry, and blue posts bearing painted handprints and epitaphs: “Young Black King Tamir,” “RIP,” “Love You.”

The garden was the project's final phase. In August, neighborhood residents and Tamir's classmates planted bulbs and installed the garden's decorative elements. The garden will be crowned by an installation by metal sculptor David Smith, a Buddhist prayer wheel adorned with tiles made by the children.

Shelly Gracon, at the Butterfly Garden she and Tamir Rice's friends and neighbors created in his memory.

The imagery of the butterfly, a symbol of metamorphosis, was Gracon's idea. “It's all about the transformation of trauma and grief,” she explains. The colors, predonimantly blue and white, were chosen by Tamir's mom, Samaria, who, with her family, was actively involved in creating the garden. “The garden was probably the most healing thing to the family,” Gracon says. “There's so much power in creating that sacred space in Tamir's memory.” Latonya Goldsby, Tamir's cousin, called the Project “the most beautiful demonstration of community love and healing I've ever experienced.”


On the first anniversary of Tamir's death, Gracon's teacher, Mandel assistant professor Mark Chupp, helped facilitate a “healing action” session including ritual silence, candle lighting and an opportunity for the Rice family to speak. Mandel students worked with small groups to help the family and community process their feelings and create a collage timeline of events that happened since Tamir's death. 

Nothing can erase the pain of losing a 12-year-old child, but Elisa Kazek, Tamir's art teacher — who recalls Tamir as a boy who was "always smiling" — said those who participated in the Butterfly Project found some healing. “They appreciated the volunteer effort and had a sense of community,” Kazek said, “from building the garden and going on the field trips. There's a sense of bringing the community together for something good."


Gracon's project took her beyond what she could learn from books and journal articles. It also sent her on a difficult emotional journey. “I'm very sensitive by nature, and I take on other people's emotions. There were days when I'd just cry. ” 

Being a single mom of an 8-year-old son informs her activism. “I've been through divorce and a lot of life changes, and I'm very focused” said Gracon, who enrolled at Mandel because she wanted a meaningful career. “I know what's at stake, and I don't want this world for my son.”



(Photographs by Pamela Zoslov)

Movie Review: Irrational Man

By Pamela Zoslov



In 2008, Woody Allen said that he isn't an intellectual. “I'm basically a low-culture person,” he said to a group of film critics, including me. "I'm not saying I'm an insensitive Neanderthal. But basically, I'm the guy who's watching the playoffs and drinking a Beck's. I'm not at the opera. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of people thinking I'm an intellectual." Here is what I wrote at the time:


If fans have mistaken a beer-drinking, Knicks-watchings shlub for an intellectual, it's understandable: Allen's movies are studded with references to Kafka, Freud and Tolstoy, and his filmography includes homages to Bergman and Fellini. But beneath it all, he insists, beats the heart of a comedy writer. During his nightclub days, audiences assumed, based on his bookish appearance, that he was an academic type, and the persona stuck. When he wrote jokes, he says, it seemed funny to drop names like "Kierkegaard." "I learned to utilize the intellectual patois," he says. "It's just a skill. People think of me seriously than I really am.” (Sadly, many people — myself firmly excluded — now have darker opinions of Woody Allen.)


Allen's new film, his 50^th by the way, is Irrational Man. It gives voice to Allen's lifelong philosophical questing, while also laughing at itself for doing so. The screenplay doesn't merely drop the names of Kierkegaard and Kant and Heidegger and Nietzsche, it wrestles extensively with issues of ethics, existence, morality and meaning.


The seeker is Abe Lucas, a philosophy professor played by Joaquin Phoenix. Lucas joins the faculty of Braylin, a liberal-arts college in Rhode Island, and his reputation precedes him. Dark, moody and handsome, Abe is said to be haunted by a divorce, or the death of his friend in Iraq, who was beheaded or, alternately, stepped on a land mine. Abe drinks to excess and broods ceaselessly. Jill (Emma Stone), a gifted undergraduate, is particularly taken with the troubled professor, to the annoyance of her boyfriend, Roy (Jamie Blackley). Roy predicts, accurately, that Jill will fall in love with Abe.


Jill, however, has competition for Abe's affections. Rita (Parker Posey), an unhappily married science professor, determines to get Abe into her bed. Rita also wants to run away with Abe to Spain, a destination she considers “romantic.”


Blocked as a writer and as a lover, Abe is too tormented to perform sexually with Rita, who offers to “unblock” him. For a while, Abe even resists becoming more than friends with his smitten student, Jill. The college community witnesses the depth of Abe's gloom when Jill and Roy take him to a party, where he plays a one-man game of Russian Roulette, spinning the cylinder and pulling the trigger not once, but twice.


His behavior is alarming, but it's catnip to Jill. “He's so self-destructive, but so brilliant,” she muses. “There's something about his pain that's exciting. He's truly an original thinker.” Allen winks at the romantic naïvete of young women, but also makes Jill the smartest person in the film, the only one who sees what's going on.


At a diner one day, Abe and Jill overhear a conversation that inspires Abe to consider something radical: committing a murder. With echoes of Crime and Punishment, Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, the plan to commit a seemingly motiveless murder rejuvenates Abe. Suddenly he has a zest for life and love and sex and hearty breakfasts. He even wins a prize for Jill at an amusement park (that setting also recalling Strangers on a Train). Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Abe feels like an extraordinary man, one whose act of killing will make the world a better place. He's thrilled to be making transition from “man of thought” to “man of action.” He stalks his prey, feeling fully alive while planning to take a life. What seemed like genius now looks like madness.


“Murder comedy” is something Allen does well, notably in the Marshall Brickman collaboration Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). This latest dark comedy is a little thinner, and a bit abrupt in its ending, but it's beautifully made, as always with Allen, whose basic filmmaking craftsmanship is often taken for granted. The plot is brisk and absorbing, the casting is perfection, and the music — classic mid-'60s jazz by the Ramsey Lewis Trio — could not be more apt. 

"He Didn't Have No Weapon"

On Friday afternoon, March 20, people slowly trickled by the Parkwood Grocery store in Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood, where Brandon Jones, 18, was shot and killed by police early Thursday morning after a reported theft. Standing next to a makeshift utility-pole memorial, his aunt, Michelle, talked of the pain of losing her nephew, and the shock of learning of his death. "My family were all screaming and crying, saying, 'It's him!'"

"He was wrong," she says of the young man who was known by his middle name, David. "But they didn't have to kill him. He didn't have no weapon." Her children are missing their cousin. "How do I tell my kids? They keep asking, 'Where's Dave? Where's Dave?'"

(Photos and text by Pamela Zoslov)

Movie Review: The Wrecking Crew

Coming of age in the '60s meant experiencing a lot of disillusionment. Cigarettes, it turned out, weren't good for you. Leaders weren't murdered by lone gunmen. Nobody attacked our ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. A president, despite his denials, was a crook. And, your favorite bands did not all live together in a house, and they didn't play on their own records.

Anyone over the age of nine knew that the Monkees, the made-for-television group, didn't play the instruments they mimed on TV, but what about the Byrds, a group revered for its musicianship? Wasn't Dennis Wilson banging the drums on the Beach Boys' “Good Vibrations”? What about the Association, Jan and Dean, the Mamas and Papas, Simon and Garfunkel and Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass?

The truth is complicated, and has more to do with the record business in the '60s than with the bands. Time is money, and producers, rather than herding the squabbling, less experienced band members, would hire the top studio session players, who not only could play the music brilliantly, but could also improvise and arrange, adding that catchy bass line, for instance, that would ensure a hit song. (Think of “Windy” and “The Beat Goes On.”) The practice harmonized with the music business' migration from New York to L.A., the land of swaying palm trees and illusion.

The top players, an anonymous crew of about 20 versatile virtuosos, became known latterly as the Wrecking Crew, supposedly because it was said their rock-and-roll playing would “wreck” the music industry. The group included some future solo stars: guitarist Glen Campbell, who played on “everything,” and keyboardist Leon Russell, who says playing on demos earned him $10 a song, which meant “I got to eat that day.” The talented session players are the focus of The Wrecking Crew, a marvelously entertaining documentary by Denny Tedesco. The film was completed in 2008 but delayed from general release because of record companies' exorbitant fee demands for the song excerpts.

Tedesco is the son of the late guitarist Tommy Tedesco, and the film is in part a tribute to his father, a humble, affable fellow shown in home movies giving funny musical talks about his session-playing days. Tedesco, known as the “King of L.A. guitar soloists,” had a long career even after the Wrecking Crew days, playing music for innumerable TV shows and films. His son's film features illuminating interviews with the musicians (many who have since died), producers and recording artists. Like Dorothy's Toto, it pulls back the curtain on the cynical machinery behind popular music. It is a companion piece to the documentaries Standing in the Shadows of Motown,  about the Motown house band the Funk Brothers, and 20 Feet From Stardom, about backup singers.

No one should be surprised that singing groups like Sonny & Cher, the Righteous Brothers or the Fifth Dimension were backed by studio musicians on their records, but with rock bands, there was sometimes wounded pride. Cheery Micky Dolenz, an actor before being recruited for the Monkees, always recognized that the group was a TV act, but Peter Tork, a musician, was disillusioned when he showed up at a recording session with his guitar and was told to sit in the corner. He was naïve then, Tork admits, adding that now he would do exactly what those producers did. (The Monkees did eventually learn to play their own live dates.) The Beach Boys were a chimera that might be better described as “The Brian Wilson Project.” Wilson relished working with the Wrecking Crew players, who could execute his visionary arrangements. When he was just Jim, the Byrds' Roger McGuinn was a session player, and he loved playing with the facile Wrecking Crew on the Byrds albums. That's Glen Campbell, by the way, playing the distinctive solo on “Mr. Tambourine Man.” 

The film profiles the individual Wrecking Crew musicians, many of whom are on hand to reminisce. There is Carole Kaye, the ensemble's only woman,who is one of America's most talented, prolific and least known bassists. She started out as a bebop jazz musician and contributed her genius to scores of records by the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Joe Cocker, Barbra Streisand, Ray Charles, Frank Zappa and many more. Think of her when you hear her distinctive bass line on “Wichita Lineman,” a song she says “meant a lot to me.”

Saxophonist Plas Johnson, a New Orleans-based jazz player, was recruited by Capitol Records in the mid-'50s after backing B.B. King and Johnny Otis, and played on countless records and movie soundtracks (that's him on the “Pink Panther Theme” and “The Odd Couple”). Guitarist Bill Pitman, now 95, a session man discovered and brought into rock and roll by Phil Spector. Pitman is known for the distinctive ukulele on “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head” as well as his work on numerous rock albums, TV shows and movies. Drummer Earl Palmer, an influential New Orleans jazz musician with a low regard for rock and roll, backed Fats Domino, Little Richard and other NOLA artists before joining the Wrecking Crew, playing and recording nonstop during the ensemble's heyday and going on to work continuously in film and TV. (Palmer died in 2008.)

Life on the Wrecking Crew had its  benefits, including steady work and high pay; Carole Kaye recalls that at one time, “I was making more money than the president of the United States.” But the nonstop session work also wreaked havoc on family life, leading to divorces and children rarely seen. Then there was the record companies' cupidity. A great many instrumental albums of the Wrecking Crews' music were released, bearing the names of fictional groups like The Marketts. The session musicians received no liner credit, and the album jackets featured photos of clean-cut young men purported to be the artists.

The revelations of studio legerdemain might be surprising, but the essence of the hit song is the song -- the gorgeous lyrics of the Byrds' Gene Clark, Jimmy Webb's transcendental poetry, Brian Wilson's aching yearnings for eternal summer. The studio polish just enhanced their expression. Many of the bands of the era were accomplished players -- just not up to the one-take perfection producers demanded.

The early '70s were more artist-driven, and such fakery was no longer acceptable. Musicians began bringing their own sidemen to recording sessions. The golden decade of the Wrecking Crew came to a close. “It was never meant to last, this magical bubble,” songwriter Jimmy Webb says wistfully. -- Pamela Zoslov 2015

Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story

Michael Lee Nirenberg says he had no idea his dad, Bill Nirenberg, had been “a pornographer.” The senior Nirenberg worked for many years as art director of Hustler magazine, and is one of the sources for Michael's excellent documentary, Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story, playing this weekend as part of the Cleveland International Film Festival. The film provides a riveting history of Hustler's raunchy empire, from a four-page black-and-white newsletter to a multimillion-dollar media enterprise, and an insiders' view of what it was like to work for the mercurial, volatile and very shrewd Larry Flynt.

Nirenberg has asssembled many of the prominent players in the skin-mag trade to reflect on Hustler and Flynt, including porn star/mogul Ron Jeremy, photographer Suze Randall, friendly competitor and collaborator Al Goldstein of Screw magazine, a slew of former staff artists, writers and editors, even the Cincinnati prosecutor who brought Flynt to trial on obscenity charges in 1976 and still thinks the 25-year sentence Flynt received – since overturned – was fair. A news clip of anchorman Tom Brokaw contemptuously pronouncing Flynt a “smut peddler” is retrospectively amusing.

The speakers provide interesting insight into what made Hustler, the unreservedly crude, calculatedly tasteless magazine, unique. Ron Jeremy provides this assessment: Playboy models represented “the girl next door,” who the average male reader considered unattainable; Bob Guccione's Penthouse featured the “rich bitch” fashion model, also unattainable; and Hustler proffered a “raunchy, horny,” more down-market girl, who might be at home on the back of a motorcycle. “I got a shot with this girl,” thinks Joe Average, the one-handed reader.

The magazine built its notoriety on “pink,” the spread-legged, gynecological photos the “classier” magazines wouldn't run, as well as the tasteless but admittedly funny cartoons. (A former staffer aptly describes Hustler as “National Lampoon with more titties.”) One reason Hustler could publish these pictures, as well as bold political exposés, gross and violent imagery, nude pictures of Jackie O., and scabrous features like “Asshole of the Month,” was that Flynt eschewed mainstream advertising, relying almost entirely on adult ads and newsstand sales. He also refused cigarette ads, so was free to print sharp ad parodies like the one that read “Welcome to Marlboro Country” over a photo of patients in a cancer ward.

There is much ground to cover in the story of Larry Flynt, and Nirenberg puts it together in a swift package, interspersing the revealing interviews with fast flips through Hustler's back pages, as well as the many headlines accrued by the notorious Mr. Flynt, Hustler's seemingly immortal clown prince. We hear about Flynt's conversion in 1978 to evangelical Christianity, under the auspices of Ruth Carter Stapleton, in 1977; he remained “born again” only briefly, later declaring himself an atheist. In the film, he says he has bipolar disorder.

There is his marriage to his much-loved fourth wife, Althea, a former stripper who ran Hustler with an iron fist while Flynt was recovering from injuries suffered from an attempted assassination, and died in 1987 of AIDS. Flynt, partially paralyzed, has required a wheelchair since the 1978 shooting. He was in almost constant pain for years, which caused him to become addicted to painkillers; multiple surgeries finally eliminated his pain, but medications caused him to suffer a stroke, which has made his speech slurred. There were insane, coke-fueled years at the magazine, vividly described by former staffers, insane, wildly extravagant photo shoots, explosive editors who threw things at employees. There was Flynt's short-lived run for President. And there are many more astonishing episodes in the life of Flynt, some only glancingly touched on in this film.

The most interesting chapter of Flynt's life concerns his emergence as an unlikely First Amendment champion. His high-profile legal battles made him the subject of famous Constitutional law cases. One argument resulting from the Cincinnati prosecution reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and became the subject of the movie The People vs. Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson. Another legal triumph was Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, in which Jerry Falwell sued Hustler for libel over a parody ad that described the evangelist as having lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Though the page was clearly labeled “ad parody,” Falwell sued, and the Court held that public figures cannot recover damages for emotional distress based on parodies, an important Constitutional precedent that is still, as Flynt points out, taught in law schools today. (Interestingly, Falwell and Flynt later became friends.)

There have been several films, fiction and non-fiction, about Flynt, but Back Issues provides a unique behind-the-scenes view of the stressful day-to-day workings at Hustler — not, save for the “pink” and the fake excrement, so different from other magazines. "It was a lot of fun and a lot of pressure," says Bill Nirenberg, who went on to do other things but, he says, "nothing as exciting."

Late in the film, the interviewees provide a wistful lament for the way things used to be, before the Internet made pornography so easily accessible, and people could still be shocked. “We were lucky,” says photographer Suze Randall, “to have taboos to break.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel

 

 
By Pamela Zoslov

“Love/hate relationship with Wes” and “Can't stand quirky for quirky's sake” are the titles of two contentious comment threads on the movie website imdb.com. Participants in these conversations vociferously debate the merits of director-writer Wes Anderson, who is known for his quirky, stylized films, the eighth of which is The Grand Budapest Hotel. Set in an aging, once-elegant hotel in the mythical Republic of Zubrowka, it is perhaps the apotheosis of Anderson's stagebound, confectionary style. And, like the Courtisane au Chocolate, the fancy pastry that figures in the movie's Byzantine plot, it may be too cloying for some.

Typecasting: "Populaire"

By Pamela Zoslov

The clack-clack-clack-ding! that punctuates Régis Roinsard's Populaire sets off pleasant waves of nostalgia, if, like me, you miss the satisfying sounds and feeling of a manual typewriter. A stylistic and thematic hommage to American romantic comedies of the late 1950s, the movie tells the story of Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François), a shy young woman from a Normandy village who, tired of working in her father's general store and unwilling to marry the son of the town mechanic, dreams of being a secretary. She practices tirelessly on a portable Triumph typewriter. According to Rose, “A secretary means being modern.”

Jane's Addiction

Movie Review: Austenland

By Pamela Zoslov

Keri Russell and her would-be suitors.

I'll be honest: I never really "got" the obsession with Jane Austen. I read the novels required in high school and college — Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, some others I've forgotten — and found nothing magical in their themes of love and courtship among the landed gentry and genteel poor in 18th-century England. I realize Austen's prose is prized for its ironic tone and wry commentary on marriage as a way of elevating a young woman's social standing, but if I want social satire, I'll take Anita Loos. I have never been a fan of costume drama, and the “Janeite” cult that has spawned innumerable Austen film adaptations and meta-books and movies about women obsessed with Austen, eludes me.

  
I can understand, though, why Jane Hayes, the heroine of Austenland, is fixated on Austen's novels, in particular the aloof romantic ideal of Mr. Darcy as portrayed by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Jane (charming Keri Russell of Waitress fame) is in her thirties, unmarried, and all her boyfriends have been disappointing. None of them, of course, can compare to the fictional Fitzwilliam Darcy, a life-size cardboard standup of whom — in the guise of the chin-challenged Colin Firth — stands proudly in Jane's frilly, Austen-bedecked bedroom. So frustrated by Jane's fixation is one suitor that he hauls off and punches Firth's smug paperboard face.

Austenland is adapted from Shannon Hale's novel of the same title, a breezy “chick lit” story that has Jane Hayes inheriting from her wealthy aunt a paid trip to Austenland, a kind of Jane Austen theme park offering an immersive “Austen experience” at an English country estate, complete with Regency gowns and manners, pheasant hunting, needlepoint, games of whist, and a simulated romantic happy ending with one of several hired actors. The movie was directed and co-scripted (with the book's author) by Jerusha Hess, creator with husband Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite, and the pairing of her absurdist sensibility with the novel's light premise is promising. Humorous energy pervades the opening, which dispenses with the story of Jane's aunt's bequest and has Jane, in romantic desperation, spending her last dollar on the Austenland adventure, with the help of a sleazy-looking travel agent reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite's stuck-in-the-'70s uncle.

Hess' absurdist style surrenders all too quickly to bland silliness as we meet Jane's fellow Austenland visitor, a blowsy middle-aged doyenne calling herself “Miss Elizabeth Charming.” Elizabeth, who is looking for sexy fun rather than an Austen experience, is played by Jennifer Coolidge, whose outsize manner and looks have added amusing punctuation to several Christopher Guest comedies. Coolidge's character here, spouting witless lines in a stagy Eliza Doolittle accent, is cartoonish rather than funny, though I did laugh when she gushed, “Look, a car from the 1800s!”

Elizabeth and Jane are whisked off to the estate and Jane learns from the evil proprietess, Mrs. Wattelsbrook (Jane Seymour), that because she's paid only for the basic package, her accommodations are considerably more humble than the others guests'. Each client is given a scripted narrative, and Jane, owing to her lack of funds, is cruelly cast as “an orphan of no fortune.” She's dubbed “Miss Erstwhile” — another way of saying “has-been” — and relegated to sleeping in the servants' quarters and wearing drab gray gowns. Jane's experience, it seems, is to be more Jane Eyre than Jane Austen.

The gentlemen who populate this fantasy retreat are Col. Andrews (James Callis), Mr. Wattlesbrook (Rupert Vansittart), the proprietess' old, libidinous husband; and Mr. Henry Nobley (JJ Feild), the supercilious “Mr. Darcy” type. Jane, ostracized by the other guests and players, takes her romantic fantasy where she finds it, in the arms of the stable hand, Martin (Bret McKenzie). Jane thinks she's having a defiant“off-plan” romance as Martin shares with her his love of Billy Ocean songs and enables her to witness the birth of a foal — “the miracle of life” he says in his New Zealand accent that Jane somehow mistakes for British. After enlisting Elizabeth to fancy up her hair and gowns, Jane becomes an object of desire, pursued by some of the other actors, including Mr. Nobley. Who is real and who is acting in what Nobley calls “a dangerous game”? In this story, the lines between fiction and reality are blurred.

The funny movie lurking in this premise, suggested by a goofy end-credits sequence set to Nelly's “Hot in Here,” is never quite realized. The film is wobbily paced and only fitfully amusing, relying too heavily on Coolidge's malapropisms and heaving bosom. And yet the movie has its charms – a likeable cast, a zesty spirit and a blithe optimism that's balm for the romantically wounded.

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The Place Beyond the Pines

By Pamela Zoslov

The surprise of Derek Cianfrance's second feature, The Place Beyond the Pines, is that it is three films in one. The first section of the triptych, shot in the moody, azure-tinted style of Blue Valentine, centers on Luke (Ryan Gosling), a drifter and stunt motorcyclist who adopts a life of crime to support his baby son. The second, shot in a more traditional style, is a police drama focusing on Avery (Bradley Cooper), a rookie patrolman who has a fateful encounter with Luke. The third, and least successful section, set 15 years later, focuses on the now adolescent sons of the criminal and the cop. Cianfrance, who also co-write the script, has attempted a multi-generational saga, with linked sections reminiscent of Stephen Soderbergh's Traffic (or, less flatteringly, the Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas). Ambitious in its sweep and running just under two and a half hours, the film promises greater significance than it delivers. But it is not without stylistic flair and thematic interest.

In the first section, Gosling is a laconic antihero, a man with no background, copious tattoos and cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips. Cianfrance, who also directed Gosling in Blue Valentine , is evidently enamored of Gosling's bleached-blond outlaw image, framing him against a blurred night background of carnival neon. Luke, a stunt cyclist of legendary reputation, is performing in a carnival in upstate New York, where a beautiful ex-girlfriend, Romina (Eva Mendes) approaches him. Luke visits Romina's house and learns,from her mom that he is the father of Romina's baby son. Father-son relationships are a central theme of the film; one of the few things we learn about Luke is that his old man wasn't there for him (there's an original theme), so he wants to be there for his kid. Toward that end, he lets a low-life pal talk him into a new career: robbing banks.

Luke ignores his friend's advice to commit the robberies without violence. Instead, he robs banks maniacally, like Batman's Joker, wearing a Darth Vader helmet and leaping atop the tellers' windows, shouting and threatening employees and customers before making a fast motorcycle getaway. Not surprisingly, his criminal career hits a dead end, happy news for the viewer weary of Sean Bobbitt's mannered cinematography, the heavy, ominous score, and dialogue mixed too low to be intelligible. The poignancy of Luke's fate is muted by the fact that apart from his love for his newly discovered son, Luke is kind of a dick.

In section two, not only is the dialogue more audible, the story is also more interesting. Patrolman Avery is a law-school educated cop, new on the beat, who ends Luke's crime spree in the line of duty. Hailed as a hero, Avery has lingering guilt feelings about Luke's year-old son, the same age as his own boy. The father-son issue folds in as Avery, who has political ambitions, tries to live up to the expectations of his dad, a retired judge. A straight arrow with a conscience and a Medal of Freedom, Avery becomes privy to police corruption and makes dangerous enemies on the force (one of them played with suitable scariness by Ray Liotta). Shedding the first section's mannered, mumblecore style, Cianfrance displays a sure hand with the police thriller genre; too bad the entire film isn't as solid as this section. Part three introduces Avery's son AJ (Emory Cohen) as Avery is campaigning for state attorney general.  The kid is a muttering suburban “wigga” whose chief interests are getting high and scoring Ecstasy and Oxy. He preys on classmate Jason (the excellent Dane DeHaan), son of hapless "Moto Bandit" Luke. Would-be thug AJ enlists innocent Jason in his criminal adventures, setting in motion a chain of retributive violence.

The tripartate film doesn't quite cohere, but it does contain strong scenes. It also enables comparisons between Gosling and Cooper, two popular, good-looking leading men, In this cage match, Cooper is the victor. He continues to demonstrate impressive range and sensitivity, and in emotional scenes, he's the cinema's best crier since another Cooper, the famous 1930s child actor Jackie Cooper. 

Film Review: Not Fade Away

Review by Pamela Zoslov

I believe “Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly is the best song title in rock and roll. It's also the name of Sopranos creator David Chase's feature film debut, which refreshingly isn't a gangster story but a paean to 1960s rock and roll. That sounds promising, but the movie is a disappointingly patchy piece of work, entertaining in places but strangely lacking overall coherence. The movie does feature some great vintage TV footage (The Rolling Stones on “Dean Martin's Hollywood Palace”!), a first-class soundtrack curated by “Little Steven” Van Zandt (who played Silvio on The Sopranos), and a handful of arresting scenes.

Chase's affection for rock music was amply displayed in The Sopranos, woven into the series' ominous landscape, the haunting mood set by Tony Soprano driving on the New Jersey Turnpike to the sounds of Alabama 3's “Woke Up This Morning (Chosen One).” And Not Fade Away is at its best when portraying the electrifying effect of the early rock bands on ordinary suburban teens, with images of teens sitting transfixed by images of a swaggering Mick Jagger singing “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” on TV, or discovering Bo Diddley and Leadbelly and Robert Johnson through the British rock musicians who popularized them. “How is it the English knew all about the blues and we didn't, even though it was right under our noses?” wonders Douglas (John Magaro), the curly-haired young lead singer of an aspiring rock band in suburban New Jersey. If only Not Fade Away focused more on the transformational nature of music in the '60s, rather than trying to tell a desultory story about some sulky teenagers, it might really have been something.

The movie, which spans a period from 1963 to the late '60s, is anchored by Douglas' family, headed by gruff paterfamilias Pat (James Gandolfini, in a role that's hardly a stretch), who disapproves of most things, including “The Twilight Zone” (“Send that one back to the Indians!”) and the rock and roll that has captivated his son Douglas, who plays drums in a band with his friends. Douglas' mom is basically a cartoon, ironing clothes in curlers like Hairpray's Edna Turnbull and occasionally crying out in exasperation, “I'm going to kill myself!” and its equally unfunny alternate, “I'm going to slit my wrists!” A neighboring family is similarly lampoonish, but wealthier: the Dietzes, headed by Jack (Christopher McDonald), who loudly expresses racist and pro-war attitudes common to the era — not much shading or complexity in this screenplay. The Dietz daughters are pretty, doe-eyed Grace (Bella Heathcote), who becomes Douglas' fickle girlfriend, and her older sister Joy (Dominique McElligott), a budding hippie and conceptual artist who's branded a lunatic by her parents.

Chase manages to address so many issues that affected Americans in the '60s – civil rights, Vietnam, long hair, free love – but the film is defeated by its focus on something relatively boring, the desultory ambitions of a skillful but directionless garage band. In this way it's reminiscent of the inferior Sopranos episodes focusing on Meadow and her college friends rather than Tony and his entertaining mob cohorts. Only two scenes really capture the viewer's attention, and they seem like sketches for other movies: in one, Joy is hauled off on a gurney to an asylum, and little sister Grace runs tearfully down the corridor. In the other, Gandolfini's Pat, who's dying of lymphoma, has dinner with his son in a restaurant and reveals some hidden truths about his life.

Entertaining movies have been made about rock bands pursuing fame and fortune, but Not Fade Away doesn't seem to find much of a story in that experience. There's an interesting drama lurking in the band's typical rock-band clashes — conflicting egos, styles and ambitions – but they are barely explored. Early on, Wells (Will Brill) decides that Douglas, the drummer, should replace Eugene (Jack Huston, handsome grandson of John) as lead singer; Douglas' vocals are “more soulful,” and Wells, while a fine guitarist, is flamboyant and a bit of an embarrassment. (In my view, they should have kept the tall, good-looking guy rather than the short curly-haired nerd as lead singer, but no one asked me.) Later, Wells is betrayed by his ambitious bandmates, and is especially hurt by Wells, who's his best friend from childhood. There are missed opportunities aplenty here. Nothing that happens over the film's span of years has much consequence — not the demo record the band makes, or its chance to sign a record contract, or even the serious motorcycle accident suffered by one of the band members.

All of this —not to mention Pat's cancer and Joy's commitment — amounts to no more than a shrug, and certainly much less than the testament to the “enormous power of rock and roll” spoken of in the curious narrated afterword that closes the movie, just before Douglas' little sister dances weirdly down a Los Angeles boulevard to the Sex Pistols' cover of “Road Runner.”

The Campaign

Read my review of the Will Ferrell/Zach Galifianakis comedy that pissed off the Koch brothers here.

Hope Springs

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Vanessa Taylor was battling a case of writer's block when she penned the script for the feature film Hope Springs. Taylor, a writer and producer of HBO shows including Game of Thrones and Everwood, wrote a story about a middle-aged couple who seek counseling to revive their faltering marriage. Taylor imagined it as “a tiny indie movie” until someone showed the script to Meryl Streep, who jumped aboard and enlisted The Devil Wears Prada director David Frankel. With Sony's backing, the tiny movie became a major release starring Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell as the therapist who helps the couple rekindle their love.

That the movie got inflated into a star vehicle means that viewers are treated to a virtuoso duet by two seasoned actors. It also makes for a top-heavy film, with A-list acting receiving tenuous support from a C-list script.

Streep and Jones play Kay and Arnold, a fiftyish couple married for 31 years. Their last child having left home, their relationship is distant, almost wordless. Arnold has moved permanently into the guest bedroom, ostensibly because of a bad back and sleep apnea. Kay, mousy and bespectacled, makes some sad attempts to revive their sex life, but even her new blue negligee (do people still wear negligees?) fails to lure Arnold back to the marital bed. When their children ask what presents they exchanged for their 31st anniversary, Kay responds with embarrassment. “We got each other the new cable subscription!” Kay, who works at a clothing store, asks her friend Eileen (played by Jean Smart, who I would have liked to see in a bigger part) if she thinks marriages can be renewed. “You married who you married, you are who you are” is Eileen's no-nonsense reply.

But Kay is determined: “I want to have a marriage again.” She picks up a book by Dr. Feld (Carell), whose kindly therapeutic face reassures her from the cover of his book, “You Can Have the Marriage You Want.” Kay signs up for Dr. Feld's intensive counseling retreat at Hope Springs, spending her own $4,000 to enroll. Arnold, an accountant, objects strenuously, but eventually agrees to make the trip.

Arnold is a piece of work, a nasty, cynical S.O.B., but we can't help but agree a little with him that Dr. Feld's program seems like a bit of a racket. Every other visitor to the quaint seaside town of inns and lobster restaurants seems to be there for the same purpose. “The 10:30 with Bernie?” a diner waitress inquires knowingly. Sitting across from her grumbling husband, Kay looks enviously at a couple holding hands, who tell her they come back for frequent “tune-ups.” But the film's attitude toward expensive therapy retreats is not at all satirical. It's a straight-faced narrative about how Arnold and Kay get their groove back, with the help of the wise Dr. Feld. The lone moment of genuine comedy occurs when Arnold, at dinner with Kay, makes fun of Dr. Feld's sober, measured tones, imagining the doctor speaking that way while having sex with his wife.

I get a little tired of Meryl Streep's ubiquitous acclaim, but it can't be denied that she can really disappear into a role. She invests Kay with little gestures and vocal mannerisms that are unexpected and delightful. Because the movie's characters are from Nebraska, or the writer's idea of Nebraska, Streep gives Kay a soft, subtle Midwestern twang. “When was the last time you touched me that wasn't just for a picture?” Kay asks her husband during a counseling session, her pronunciation hovering between “picture” and “pitcher.” When Dr. Feld asks about her sexual fantasies – a subject on which he dwells to the point of prurience – Kay reflexively fastens the buttons on her demure flower-print cardigan.

Jones, in a role that was initially offered to Jeff Bridges, has the challenge of humanizing the curmudgeonly Arnold. Jones is always interesting to watch (especially the topographical map that is his heavily lined face), but the character is so rigid and irritable it's a wonder anyone, let alone the sweet Kay, could love him. Dr. Feld's prescriptions focus almost entirely on sex, but the narrative suggests that the couple's problems go beyond insufficient blow jobs (Kay at one time buys a bunch of bananas for practice) into the realm of emotional abuse. Consider Arnold's estimation of Kay's intellect. When they first met in college, Arnold recounts, he was a teaching assistant in accounting, and she was a student. What did he notice about her? “She was pretty, and she probably shouldn't be majoring in accounting.” Evidently that's why all she can do now is cook eggs and fold sweaters at the mall.

Taylor's ideas about what happens in an older marriage seem to derive from television. Arnold gives Kay “practical” gifts rather than jewelry. She talks about boring things. He watches too much golf on TV. Oddly, the couple seem to be not just from Nebraska, but from Nebraska in the 1950s. She's scandalized by talk about sex, but they have cable, laptops and high-speed Internet, and presumably are of the Baby Boomer generation. Apparently the sexual revolution entirely missed the Cornhusker State. Do people who live on the coasts imagine Middle Americans still posing for American Gothic?

It is refreshing, however, to see a film that celebrates people of mature years. As the success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel demonstrated, there is a market for these kinds of films. A quiet chamber piece like Hope Springs is a good counterweight to the summer's dark and violent movie cacophony, as well as a chance to see two veteran actors deploy their considerable talents.

Woody Allen's "To Rome With Love"

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Woody Allen, who has just released his 43^rd film, To Rome With Love, has become like that elderly uncle you remember from your childhood for his brilliant sense of humor, but whose increasingly feeble jokes you now laugh at out of polite nostalgia. He remains a formidable filmmaker — last year's Midnight in Paris was a thoroughgoing success — but his insistence on making a film every year means that lately there are more misses than hits, and the misses are all the more disappointing.

To Rome With Love, set in the colorful Italian capital because backers put up the money for it to be shot there, is based on a collection of half-developed ideas Allen had tucked away in his desk drawer. The randomness and mustiness of the stories is evident.

Allen toyed with several ideas for the movie's title, including The Bop Decameron, a nod to The Decameron, a 14th-century Italian novel consisting of 100 tales, and Nero Fiddled, before settling on the one that evokes the late-'60s TV series starring John Forsythe.

To Rome With Love features a handful of unrelated stories about tourists and residents of Rome. One story involves an ordinary businessman, Leopoldo (Roberto Begnini) who suddenly becomes a celebrity for no reason — “famous for being famous.” Paparazzi follow him everywhere, beautiful women throw themselves into his bed, and he's ushered onto a TV talk show to talk about what he had for breakfast. The point of this minor vignette, presumably, is to comment on the shallowness of modern celebrity culture, something Allen explored in more depth 32 years ago in Stardust Memories.

Another story involves a Roman mortician (played by Italian tenor Fabio Armiliato) who can sing opera sublimely, but only in the shower. Allen plays a retired opera director whose daughter is engaged to Giancarlo's son. When he hears Giancarlo's shower aria, he devises an unconventional way to bring him to the stage, a visual punchline that's not particularly funny, but is nonetheless repeated twice.

A clumsy bedroom farce has a pair of Italian newlyweds, Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) have their honeymoon interrupted by a gorgeous prostitute, Anna (Penelope Cruz), who shows up at Antonio's hotel room by mistake, just ahead of the arrival of his very conservative family. Both Antonio and Milly, who is meanwhile wandering the streets of Rome, having lost her way in search of a beauty salon, experience unexpected erotic awakenings.

The most successful of the stories has Alec Baldwin as John, a successful architect revisiting the city where he spent part of his early career. He is recognized at a street corner by Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a young architect who idolizes him. Jack takes John to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Sally (Greta Gerwig). The street corner is analogous to the metaphysical Paris alley where Owen Wilson was whisked into the 1920s; John becomes a kind of ghostly presence in Jack's life, a mentor-advisor who comments on the action and warns Jack about the danger to his relationship posed by the impending arrival of Sally's supposedly sexy, irresistible friend Monica, an actress. “Can't you see that the situation is fraught with peril?” John warns his young, naïve protege. (John functions like Humphrey Bogart in Allen's Play It Again Sam).

Monica is one of those patented pseudo-intellectual Allen heroines, mouthing sophomoric pronouncements and quotations from Kierkegaard, Pound, Yeats and The Fountainhead. As embodied by Page, her vaunted sexiness is overstated, but her manipulative seductiveness works on Jack, challenging his loyalty to the level-headed Sally. (A younger, precocious brunette often tempts an Allen hero away from his sensible blond mate — art imitating life imitating art, I suppose, in Allen's case.) Baldwin, the funniest presence in this not very funny movie, comments sardonically on Monica's pretensions as she speaks (“Oh, God, here comes the bullshit”), a conceit not unlike Marshall McLuhan's walk-on in Annie Hall. This story also goes nowhere special, but there's a certain amount of fun in getting there.

To Rome With Love is Allen's seventh European-made film, something he calls a “happy accident, because I couldn't raise money any other way.” The 77-year-old filmmaker spoke to the New York Times about his lifelong affection for Italian cinema, citing four films that influenced him: Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine, Antonioni's Blow Up and Fellini's Amarcord. Even before his European cycle began, he was channeling Bergman (Interiors) and Fellini (Stardust Memories). Allen's latest film is a pretty anemic tribute to the films he admires; worse, it even fails to recapture the magic of his own best work.

Wanderlust

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The comedy of David Wain, who comes from Shaker Heights, Ohio, is not for everyone. After the preview screening of his latest movie, Wanderlust, some older audience members made their way out of the aisles shaking their heads and saying words like “disgusting!” Well, I certainly wouldn't recommend it to my 86-year-old dad. But tastelessness is a style choice, and has long been the hallmark of sketch comedian Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten) and his longtime writing partner, Ken Marino. If you don't mind a lot of gross absurdity, Wain and Marino's comedy can be pretty hilarious.

With Wanderlust, Wain weds his signature scattershot humor to a more traditional romantic comedy format in the style of Judd Apatow (whose company produced this movie). The stylistic marriage is not an entirely happy one. The romantic story, grounded in recognizable reality in Manhattan and Atlanta, and the silly comedy, located in a fantasy hippie commune, compete for prominence, and both emerge rather worse for it.

The movie reunites Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston, who co-starred in The Object of My Affection, as a Manhattan couple struggling with declining job prospects. George, who works in finance, loses his job after the Feds shut down the firm he works for. Linda, a dilettante whose latest venture is making documentary films, tries to pitch her latest film (described as a cross between An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins) to HBO, which pronounces it too depressing. Rudd and Aniston make a credible and appealing couple, and the New York scenes, centering on the tiny, shoebox-sized apartment (or “micro-loft”) George and Linda buy before their fortunes decline, have a gentle satiric charm. Sadly, the movie marches into fantasy-land when George and Linda stumble into Elysium, an anachronistic commune in Georgia, on their way to Atlanta, where George's nasty brother Rick (Marino) has agreed to give George a job (as it turns out, in the Port-O-Potty business).

The commune, owned by the aging, wheelchair-riding Garvin (Alan Alda), is home to a motley group of unreconstructed hippies who strum guitars, smoke pot, shun animal foods, drink hallucinogenic tea, grow organic vegetables, make wine in the nude, and engage in “free love.” The leading hippie is Seth (Justin Theroux, Aniston's real-life boyfriend), a long-haired guru type who has designs on Linda. The commune's ideas are wacky, retro-'60s stuff – they don't believe in doors, so in Wain's world, that means that a horse might wander into their bedroom, and that various commune members casually visit George while he's on the toilet. Yet the commune embraces George and Linda so warmly, and the vibe is so relaxing, they decide to move in permanently and find paradise not as perfect as they'd hoped. (In a way, the movie is like Couples' Retreat with better jokes.)

There's a subplot about a planned casino development on the commune property (the group's future depends on Garvin locating his misplaced deed, which one would think was filed at the county recorder's office). But the story is entirely in the service of the gags, and there are many of them. Some are hilarious (a giant, Kafkaesque fly that strikes up a conversation with George) and others groaningly bad or, as the old people said, disgusting (parents of a newborn carrying around its placenta in a pan and promising to make soup of it).

At this historical juncture, jokes about hippies are pretty old hat. The strongest parts of the movie are the saner, human moments, sans hippies – Linda pitching her “penguins with testicular cancer” doc; George and Linda singing along to the Doobie Brothers in the car; Rick's depressed wife confronting him about his infidelities; George's nephew's sarcastic retort to his uncle's greeting; Linda and Garvin sharing a secret feast in a diner; a running joke about a novel written by the naked winemaker Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio). If I were writing a structural assessment of the movie, I'd say, “Strong start. Strong finish. Sags in the middle.

But Wain is committed to silliness, and likely has no desire to be Judd Apatow. As he said in this 2007 interview with me, “My comedy doesn't stem from anger and pain so much as looking at things from a silly perspective.”

In the Family

Patrick Wang's In the Family was rejected by 30 film festivals before making its premiere at the Hawaii International Film Festival and being distributed independently. The film, a remarkably stirring drama about the changing definition of “family,” has some technical peculiarities that may have kept it from initial consideration: it's long (nearly three hours), glacially paced in the early scenes, and some of the camera work is decidedly eccentric (actors shot at the edge of frames or moving out of frame). And yet the story is so powerful that these concerns are swept away; it draws you in and never loosens its grip. The film has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

Set in the small town of Martin, Tennessee, the story centers on a gay couple, the soft-spoken Joey Williams (Wang) and his partner, Cody Hines (Trevor St. John), who are raising Cody's precocious 6-year-old son, Chip (Sebastian Banes). When Cody dies in a car accident, Joey, known to Chip as “Dad” (his natural father was “Pop”), finds himself in a battle with Cody's sister Eileen (Kelly McAndrew), whom Cody had named as Chip's guardian. Cody's family, whose mistrust of Joey – based on their non-acceptance of Cody's gay relationship, and perhaps also on ethnic prejudice – remove Cody from Joey's house, leaving Joey, with the support of his friends, to find a way to reunite his family, despite the fact that the law does not favor his position.“You do not have a child custody case,” says one of the many lawyers who refuse to take his case.

Much of the film's power resides in Wang's sensitive, naturalistic screenplay, which effectively illustrates the everyday domestic life of a nontraditional family -- extraordinary for its sheer ordinariness. Cody, a math teacher, and Joey, a talented architectural designer, have a dedicated interest in young Chip's development. Chip is fond of dragons, so “Pop” Cody helps him research them online, while “Dad” Joey fashions him a special wooden block depicting each day's dragon. (Any child would be lucky to have two such attentive dads.) The acting, too, could not be better. Wang, a stage actor with a low-key manner and incongruous Southern drawl, is wonderfully sympathetic, and classical actor Brian Murray is superb as the retired lawyer who agrees to represent Joey in his improbable case. The scene in which Joey stands up to harsh deposition questioning about his background (he was an orphan whose foster parents also died), and his reasons for wanting to fight for Chip, is quietly shattering. -- Pamela Zoslov

The Iron Lady

Last week I had the opportunity to review two films about Western European political leaders – The Conquest, about the rise of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as erstwhile British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Of the two, the Thatcher bio, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is the more satisfying dramatically, yet neither film provides a complete picture of its subject's politics and importance. Where The Iron Lady does excel is in its sensitive portrayal of the experience of dementia. Having suffered a series of strokes and suffering from memory loss, Thatcher, 86 and frail, now seldom appears in public.

Admittedly, the prospect of another impersonation of a famous doyenne by America's anointed top actress, Meryl Streep, was not an attractive one. But, as it happens, she is superb, particularly as the aged Mrs. Thatcher, whose husband, Denis (the excellent Jim Broadbent), regularly consoles, cajoles and encourages her, even though, as her daughter, Carol (Olivia Colman), points out, he has been dead for years.

The familiar, loving interaction between Margaret and Denis' ghost is a clever framing device, launching a series of flashbacks as the intermittently lucid ex-PM sorts through her late husband's possessions. Abi Morgan's imaginatively structured narrative uses inventive avenues for recollection; for example, while autographing copy of her book, Margaret inadvertently signs “Margaret Roberts,” her maiden name, which launches a flashback to the her girlhood days as the daughter of a grocer in Grantham. (Her father owned two stores and was mayor of the town). Young Margaret (Alexandra Roach), mocked by her better-heeled classmates as she sweeps up at the shop, wins a place at Oxford, from which she emerges with fully formed conservative ideology – free market economics, anti-union, anti-Socialist – and a burning political ambition. Margaret's father was a Liberal, but the film's , the narrative offers no insight into the origins of her views. A Thatcher biography reveals that she was influenced at Oxford by Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 work that argued that government economic intervention is a precursor to authoritarianism. Though she was not a strictly doctrinaire Conservative (she supported a bill to decriminalize homosexuality, for example), she also was known, while serving as Education Secretary, for denying schoolchildren free milk.

Her determination impresses young, bespectacled Denis Thatcher (Harry Lloyd, who is Charles Dickens' great-great-great-great grandson), who asks her to marry him. She happily accepts, and the couple enjoy a comfortable life. (Denis, a wealthy businessman, financed his wife's studies for the bar and her political career; the film doesn't mention her early career as a research chemist and as a barrister specializing in tax). The two become the parents of twins, Carol and Mark, who are shown as children running helplessly after “Mummy” as she drives her fancy car away from the family estate and toward her Parliamentary career. Before she agreed to marry him, Margaret warned Denis that she refused to be simply a housewife – like her mother, presumably – and did not intend to “die washing a teacup.” (In a moment of sad irony, a later scene has the aged Margaret, all alone, washing out a teacup.) In her old age, Margaret is depicted as still proud and tough – she haughtily rebuffs her doctor's inquiries about her health and state of mind – the story allows her some sentimental reveries: her lifelong courtship with Denis is punctuated by the couple dancing to “Shall We Dance?” from their favorite musical, The King & I. Margaret also has a penchant for Bellini's opera Norma.

The film takes us on a newsreel view of British history from 1959, when Mrs. Thatcher was elected a Member of Parliament – not the first female M.P., as the film implies – through her turbulent reign as Britain's first woman Prime Minister, beginning with her election in 1979 and ending with her resignation in 1990 after she lost her Conservative Party's support. (The film implies that she disappeared from politics, when actually Thatcher served as a Member of Parliament for two years before retiring at 66.) These were tumultuous years for Great Britain; Thatcher is shown responding to labor unrest (with harsh anti-union measures), IRA hunger strikes and bombings, including one that struck the Brighton hotel where she was staying, and the war with Argentina over the Falkland islands, which boosted Thatcher's flagging popularity at home. Her legendary intransigence toward the Soviet Union, alongside her ally Ronald Reagan, earned her the nickname “The Iron Lady” from a Soviet newspaper.

While the film capably depicts Thatcher's famous absolutism – denouncing labor unions, the social welfare state (and its “culture of dependency”) – what is missing is a ground-level view of how Thatcherism affected people in the UK, many of whom were left unemployed and dispossessed by her economic policies. Her legacy is still being debated, but her impact on popular culture is clear. Without Thatcher to protest against, there would likely have been no British punk music. Unfortunately, the soundtrack contains none of the era's iconic Sex Pistols, Jam or Clash songs, but it does include “I'm in Love With Margaret Thatcher,” a relatively minor-league 1979 song by Michael “Haggis” Hargreaves (“I'm in love with Maggie T.!”).

Streep is fine, even if occasionally calling to mind her portrayal of Julia Child, and Broadbent is a pleasure, though jarringly different in appearance and accent from Lloyd as the younger Denis. The prosthetic aging makeup is tastefully done, in contrast to the bizarre work in last year's silly J. Edgar. The film is skillfully constructed, but it suffers from the problem of all biopics that attempt to portray a significant life against the backdrop of history. In the attempt to cover the life and the history, either or both will suffer. In this case, it's the history; we learn more about the lady than about the interesting times in which she served. -- Pamela Zoslov

Susy's Soup

Feature about Susy's Soup, a downtown Cleveland place that has since become a favorite of ours.

By Pamela Zoslov

“It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it,” said the prominent food writer M.F.K. Fischer. That philosophy is fully embraced by Susy’s Soup & Deli, a casual downtown eatery that has been serving comforting, piping-hot homemade soups for nine years, the last two and a half at its present location Tower City. The house-made soups, along with specialty sandwiches on fresh-baked bread, fresh salads, chili and breakfast wraps, have customers lining up out the door –- and why not? It’s hard to imagine anything more satisfying than a bowl of chicken and wild rice, chicken paprikash, chicken dumpling, creamy tomato tortellini, black bean, Italian wedding, minestrone, lobster bisque or clam chowder. To a true soup lover, the very names are ambrosial.

Diners are drawn to Susy’s by the soup and sandwiches, but the attentive service, unusual for a casual lunch spot, keeps them coming back. After a customer picks up his soup, a member of the Susy’s team brings their sandwich or salad to the table. “We do everything with love,” says general manager Dave Long. “We want to be the best at what we do. We work hard, over a hot kettle all day. We use good-quality ingredients, and the bread is baked fresh every day.” The soup is made one kettle at a time, the flavor then locked in with a “quick chill” process. Healthy food is a priority; everything on the menu is made without MSG or preservatives, and vegetarian, fat-free and gluten-free options are available.

Susy’s was founded 12 years ago by Michael Sharpe, an owner of Cleveland’s popular Sharpy’s Subs in the 1980s. He wanted to shift his culinary focus to soups, and after searching for a name for the new venture, decided to christen it after his young daughter, whose name provided a nice alliteration and represented the restaurant’s “family” feeling. The first Susy’s Soups was in North Olmsted; the restaurant then took up residence in the Park Building on Public Square before accepting an offer to open on the fountain level of Tower City. (Susy’s also has an Express location in the Halle Building.) The long lunchtime lines attest to Susy’s success. “In a bad economy, we’ve had consistent growth,” Long says.

While soup is paramount, the salads, chili and sandwiches – corned beef, smoked turkey, Reubens, chicken salad — have a devoted following. “The most popular is our grilled cheese,” Long says. “People get addicted to it.” It’s made with provolone, cheddar and American cheese, melted on tasty fresh bread from the Western Reserve Bread Co. Susy’s also has a busy catering business, providing crock pot soups, deli trays, wrap trays and box lunches for events large and small. With all the changes happening in and around Public Square, Susy’s, currently open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., may also add dinner hours.

Susy’s is guided by a love of Cleveland and a strong belief in giving back to the community with extensive charitable work. “We don’t really publicize our charitable work,” Long says, but notes that the restaurant’s outreach efforts include a monthly feeding for Laura’s Home, the City Mission shelter for women and children in crisis, supporting St. Malachi’s, donating 40 gallons of soup to feed a youth group of 400 and participating in the annual Market Under Glass benefit for Harvest for Hunger. “That stuff is really fulfilling,” he says. “We see ourselves as part of the community, part of Cleveland’s rebirth,” Long says. “We’re trying to do something good.”

Fulfillment also comes from the simple everyday act of providing good food for people. “It’s the small things – knowing that we can make a small difference in people’s lives every day,” Long says. “We don’t like to call them customers. We call them ‘friends of Susy.’ We treat them as our friends.”

Phil the Fire

A profile of Phil Davis, owner of Phil the Fire restaurant in Cleveland.

By Pamela Zoslov

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” He clearly never imagined the determination of Phil Davis, founder and proprietor of Phil the Fire, the restaurant that introduced Cleveland to the Southern homestyle delicacy chicken and waffles –- a unique combination of golden-brown fried chicken atop thick, cinnamon-spiced Belgian waffle, topped with butter and syrup. Phil the Fire –- a nickname based on the Peabo Bryson song “Feel the Fire” –- took Davis from a dazzling rise to a devastating fall, followed by a seven-year sojourn in the desert of legal troubles and a low-paying job loading boxes in the middle of the night.

The journey began in 2001, when Davis began serving Sunday brunch in the basement of The Civic in Cleveland Heights. His chicken and waffles became a sensation, and Davis opened Phil the Fire restaurants at Shaker Square and downtown. Then, fatefully, he relied on the promises of an unscrupulous hedge fund manager, leading to the loss of millions of investor dollars and the closing of Phil the Fire in 2004, followed by a rash of lawsuits. “In January 2004, I was a local quasi-celebrity, and within a week went from being the toast of the town to the talk of the town,” he reflects. “That was very humbling, because when your fall from grace is very public, you have nowhere to hide.”

During those dark days, Davis underwent a period of personal growth. He worked out a plan to repay his debts and spent time caring for his daughter, Machiah, now 10, all the while keeping in mind a line from his mother’s favorite poem, "Invictus": “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” He spent endless hours in the kitchen perfecting his recipes, and drew upon his business-school training to launch new inventions -- including “the world’s smallest microwave” — and plan how he would do things better if he could reopen Phil the Fire.

Davis’ second act began in August, when he opened the new Phil the Fire restaurant at the Fairfield Inn in Beachwood, a warm, inviting space that serves up Davis’ signature “comfort food for the soul” – rich, flavorful dishes based on the Sunday brunches his parents, Alberta and Sherman, cooked when he was growing up in Cleveland. The location is one Davis had long been interested in. “I’d always been a big fan of this area, and when I walked in, it just felt like, this is it – this is the space I’ve been dreaming of.” The new restaurant enabled Davis to bring back two of the original Phil the Fire chefs, hire a savvy general manager and create 125 jobs. “That’s a great feeling,” he says.

When Phil the Fire reopened with an all-day Sunday brunch, it was as though it had never closed. People had been yearning for another taste of Phil’s chicken and waffles. “The support, love and warmth we’ve received have been overwhelming. We’ve had people drive in from Columbus, Ashtabula, Canton. We’ve served about 10,000 people in the first month. We’ve had people create special memories here – wedding anniversaries, birthdays — one man proposed to his fiancée in that room over there. It’s humbling and overwhelming. If I had to wait seven years for anything in life,” he says, “This would have been it.”

Davis made a conscious decision to limit the menu to “what we do best.” That means that aside from chicken and waffles, there are such mouthwatering favorites as the creamy Three Cheese Mac N Cheese, fresh collard greens, buttermilk pancakes, rotisserie chicken, fried salmon strips, broiled salmon and catfish (blackened, fried or broiled), as well as Phil’s signature desserts: Mom’s Famous Double Butter Peach or Apple Cobbler, Pecan and Sweet Potato Pie and Sweet Potato Pecan Pie. As the weather grows colder, the restaurant will offer hot gumbos and a fireplace for people to gather around.

Every dish has what Davis calls a “signature flavor,” and he is meticulous and demanding of his staff about achieving it. he says. “We cook everything from scratch. Everything is fresh, not frozen. We honor the food.”

But food is only one part of the Phil the Fire picture. “I asked the staff, what do we sell here? Memories. This food evokes memories, like the scene in the movie Ratatouille where the critic tastes the ratatouille and it takes him back to his childhood. This food is a daily reminder of the things I grew up on, and a way to honor the memories of my mother and father.”

The restaurant business is a tough taskmaster, but Davis says it’s addictive. “It’s hard to get out of your system. I’m here 20 hours a day, but this is easy. I love to cook, I love to serve. It’s a labor of love. I’m just having a ball.” The entrepreneurial Davis has plans to capitalize on his brand with a line of Phil the Fire prepared comfort foods and Phil the Fire restaurants in other cities.

After only one month back I business, Phil the Fire is already a destination spot. “People are saying, “Let’s meet at Phil’s,” he says. “This is something you can’t buy. Things like this keep me going.”