A Very Lucky Young Lady: The Worst Person in the World

 (Reader alert: despite my best efforts I may not have succeeded in disguising certain spoiler alerts)

“I feel like I’m playing a supporting role in my own life,” says Julie the heroine of the Norwegian-language sensation, The Worst Person in the World, and it struck me later this may be more literally true than is at first apparent, truer than she means. A movie about a contemporary 20-something turned 30-year-old woman—beautiful and bright and privileged—as she roves about between romances, parties and careers might strike you as feather light (and would have struck me as leadenly boring if you’d described it to me that way). But in telling the story of an extraordinarily fortunate contemporary young woman, this movie manages to be visually compelling (there is always a lot to look at) and emotionally provocative. Given some time I think The Worst Person in the World may be about the weightiest movie I have seen in a long time. It is never boring.  

Julie’s story is told in 12 chapters, a prologue and an epilogue. Prologue is medical school where she has a promising start but decides mid-stream that she wants to pursue psychology. That doesn’t last long at all, and the next thing is photography. She’s working in a bookstore when her career aspirations seem to take a backseat to her love life. She meets 40-year old Aksel, a graphic novel artist of some renown, at a party and goes home with him, where he sagely tells her that they should stop before it gets started because, owing to their difference in age, it isn’t going to last. Leaving his flat, she decides then and there that she is in love with him, turns back and tumbles into his bed. During this incarnation of herself she writes an essay, "Oral Sex in the Era of Me-Too" that goes viral. Aksel will turn out to be right, it won’t last (he is nevertheless stunned and heartbroken when she breaks it to him). In a chapter entitled “Cheating,” Julie wanders out of a book party for Aksel and into another party, uninvited, where she meets Eivind, also living with someone else. They get drunk and have an eccentric erotic encounter that actually involves no cheating. But it spells the end of Aksel and Julie. She moves in with Eivind, whose ex has schooled him in all the ways to feel guilty about first world privilege. (“People die of thirst in Chile because avocados require so much water.”) Julie and Eivind as a couple will, we learn, also have an expiration date.

But while Julie and Aksel are over as an item, the film isn’t done with Aksel whose wrenching post-Julie saga becomes the pivot-point of a story that turns terminally serious at approximately the point when Julie ceases to be a 20-something. The weight of Aksel’s story and his suffering is such that Aksel unavoidably becomes the main character, and Julie the supporting role.

Not at all incidentally, alongside Aksel’s story is a motif that reveals itself over and over throughout the film. Children. Aksel wanted them, Julie didn’t. They attend a summer overnight party where a guest’s young child throws a tantrum and at night they overhear the parents having a vicious argument about the stresses of child rearing. At that party she crashes where she meets Eivind, she mischievously spoofs a cluster of mothers by pretending to be a pediatrician and claiming that "the latest research" shows hugging and cuddling your children will traumatize them. Eivind and Julie both forswear children, but later, after their demise as a couple, Julie is pleased to spot him from the window of her apartment on the street, married and blissfully pushing a stroller.

This meditation on progeny, on regeneration, is reinforced by what I regard as the film's most inspired moment: During a birthday celebration for Julie at her mother's home (where the essay on oral sex is awkwardly received) the camera veers to  photographs of family ancestors arranged in frames on a piano. The tepid ambiance of a 21st century birthday party is suspended and the narrative suddenly shifts to tell the stories of five or six women, long since passed on, who were not nearly so lucky. This one died prematurely, that one went blind. None of them had the choices that all of us--women and men--take for granted today, but lived the lives that were granted them, a solemn and bracing reminder of the preeminence of fortune and circumstance, and of the simple, inarguable truth that we owe our lives (whatever they are like) to those who bore us. 

Julie is far from the worst person in the world, but the title is meant to tease out the judgement, the disapproval of the way Julie lives her life and the choices she does and doesn't make that some of us who see this sly, inventive, intelligent, frequently funny and finally searing film may be unable to avoid. “I never follow through on anything,” she tearfully confesses to Aksel, long after they are history as a couple.

Well, she’s right, she doesn’t and those of us who like to think we follow through on things might wish she would grow up. More than that, she is luckier than she deserves to be. A pivotal point in the story arrives when Julie is confronted with a life-altering choice; many a viewer will feel certain they know the choice she would probably make if she had her own way. But then, just like that, out of the blue, the choice is made for her, and she is relieved of the dilemma or even the difficulty of making a decision. Lucky, lucky young lady.

But here is the thing....Julie is neither immature nor lacking in self-awareness. She has seen up close in Aksel what the stakes are in life, how contingent her own good fortune is--and she continues to be more or less pleased with herself and the world. This quality may madden some, but it is also part of what makes this story endearing: Julie is not ashamed to be happy. 

At least one reviewer has fallen it seems for the bait and decided that even if Julie is not the worst person in the world, the story is the worst sort of celebration of conscienceless privilege. Talk about missing the point. A smarter “conservative” critical take might have focused on something other than Julie and her over-lucky life, something else entirely: the absence of any religious, spiritual or metaphysical response to the starkness of the story. Scandavian countries are said to be among the least religious in the world and in the entire course of the movie—in which we see any number of visual shots (becoming and not-so-becoming) of Oslo—I don’t believe there is so much as a parting or passing shot of a church or a cross or religious iconography of any kind. The tangible world is what there is.

Which only sharpens the knife edge that lay (very, very barely) hidden beneath this charming story of a charmed young lady. The Worst Person in the World is finally a smart, sometimes funny, believable and ultimately solemn meditation on a question of terminal importance—What will we do with our short-lived freedom?— whose poignancy is underscored by a young woman who insists on answering it her own way.

Manchester By the Sea: On the Lip of an Abyss

There is a central scene in Manchester By the Sea, when Randi (Michelle Williams) seeks to console her ex-husband Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), assuring him he is not to blame for the personal holocaust that lay behind them, and hoping to make amends for the accusations she has hurled at him. It is an all but impossible task for both of them. Neither is quite able to look each other in the eye, but it took an astute young future filmmaker of my acquaintance to point out that one of the great feats of direction here is Lee’s inability to take his eyes off the infant in the carriage, a child of Randi’s remarriage.

Only infants and children are not guilty or accusing. No one else—none of the adults—in the story seems able to look anyone in the eye for long. Characters talk at each other, over each other, missing each other’s points. Incessantly, so that there is (at least for this aging viewer) an oppressive sense of perpetual conflict, of disjointedness verging on violence. These are redeemed—I mean that in the religious sense—by scenes of incandescent beauty: crystalline skies; a charming New England town encrusted in winter; seagulls pinwheeling in a grey mist over the water; crooked gravestones in snow; boats bobbing in the pier, heaving gently as if in slumber, or meditation; and always the sea. These are backed by a soundtrack of choral and string music—forgiving and benedictory.

Manchester By the Sea is a masterpiece of storytelling, a profound meditation on suffering, death and beauty. The horrific tragedy at the heart of this story (no spoilers here, go see the movie), singes everyone in this drama—with the exception, perhaps, of 16-year old Patrick, whose fate following his father’s death from congestive heart failure forms the plot of the film. But it has entirely consumed Lee, Patrick’s uncle. It has devoured him. He is a shattered soul, a walking ruin. Death, unadorned and unromanticized, is everywhere in this film. Lee is already walking dead, and his brother’s passage is only an occasion for dutifully tying up loose ends. “What’s he look like,” Patrick asks when Lee comes to his school to inform him of the death. “He looks dead,” Lee says. “Not bad. Just….dead.” Patrick’s father cannot be buried until spring so he rests in a frozen vault at the morgue.  “I don’t like him being in a freezer,” Patrick protests. “I don’t either,” Lee says. “But we can’t do anything about it. It’s the way it is.”

Lee’s brother has left behind a will making him Patrick’s guardian, but it’s a responsibility Lee—given the ruin he has become—cannot think about shouldering. Patrick (Lucas Hedges), handsome, impish and gentle, is the only one in the film free of the somber curse that hangs over the story. He is buoyantly alive, the source of the film’s best humor. As he boasts to his uncle who wants him to move to Boston, he has a life to live in Manchester: he’s on the hockey team, he has two girlfriends (one he has sex with and one with whom he is mainly doing “basement business,” as he explains to his uncle. “What’s that mean?” Lee asks. “It means I’m working on it”), and he plays in a rock band (an atrociously bad one). Scolding his uncle for being unable to make casual small talk with the mother of one of those girlfriends (the one he’s working on), Patrick has no problem at all speaking directly. “You can’t make boring adult conversation for a few minutes? Like `Hey, how ‘bout those fucking interest rates?’”

The resolution of this conflict (sorry, you won’t get that here, either) will not be the one we might find sentimentally satisfying; but it will be the one that works, in a human way.

In just that way does Manchester render its blessing on this story of human woe. They are trying, these characters, to work it out under a gunmetal sky, hemmed in by the sea, in the teeth of death. The guilt that consumes them, that renders them unable to look each other in the eye, may be the awareness that they haven’t deserved the beauty that surrounds them. Yet one of those redemptive scenes is a human one: gathering in the church for Patrick’s father’s funeral, family and friends and folks from the town do not hesitate to greet each other honestly—smiling, consoling, comforting, embracing. The art and craft of life is learning how to live on the lip of an abyss; mostly it’s a mess or a comedy show, and some of us fall off. But sometimes, in the right light, its beautiful.

Light Through Windows: The Conspirator

Fans of painterly cinematography, of the conscious manipulation of images to create an effect, will want to see “The Conspirator,” Robert Redford’s new dramatization of the trial of Mary Surratt. A very painterly film, this one—think, maybe, of Johannes Vermeer and his pictures of light pouring through windows.

There is a lot of light through windows in “The Conspirator.” Scene after scene of light pouring through windows. But here the light is harsh—characters squint into it, uneasily—and the subjects are not the graceful maidens of Vermeer. They are tense soldiers and lawyers, angry and calculating politicians, frightened witnesses and family members. And there is Mary Surratt, played by Robin Wright, looking alternately serene and devout (when at prayer in her jail cell), or pained and distrustful and trapped (when she is in the trial court).

Mary Surratt was a confessed supporter of the Confederacy and the owner of the boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth met from time to time with others who conspired to strike a blow against the government by killing not only Lincoln, but Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Mary’s son John was heavily implicated in the plot (but never convicted) and in “The Conspirator” Mary is portrayed as being used by the government as bait to ensnare the son. She is eventually hung after a military tribunal, in which witnesses are traduced and the outcome appears to be pre-ordained by a government hungry for revenge and eager to douse, forever, the dying embers of southern rebellion.

The parallel to the controversy today over the legal status of detainees in the war on terror is evident enough. But anyone expecting standard-issue Hollywood liberal polemic will not find it in this movie. There is, first of all, plenty of room to doubt Mary Surratt’s innocence. And the rational for a military tribunal—which roughly parallels that for detainees in Guantanamo—is given a full hearing: the full dimensions of conspiracy against the government were not known and a civilian trial could compromise security.

And, too, the drama bristles with the seething grievances of a nation that has been severely traumatized. Just ended was an exhausting war, the bloodiest ever seen anywhere in history, one that was instigated—from the northern perspective—by rebels in pursuit of a morally besmirched cause. Explicit reference is made to the treatment of Union prisoners by the rebels, a reference surely to the infamous prison at Andersonville where more than 12,000 Union soldiers died of starvation, malnutrition, diarrhea and disease. The Confederate officer in charge of the prison was convicted of war crimes, and news of the conditions at the prison stoked Northern instincts for retribution. And after all of this, the President is shot in a conspiracy that was believed by many to be widespread. There were those in the North, and in the President’s cabinet (especially Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by Kevin Kline) who were determined to put the screws to the South.

And on the other side the argument in Mary Surratt’s favor that makes itself felt most strongly, though it is insinuated rather than stated, is one that might discomfit Redford and others of contemporary liberal disposition.  Because the entire conduct of the rigged trial would seem to be, in its way, a vindication of the Confederate cause. I was waiting for Mary to say to her lawyer, something like this: “Look at what is happening. Don’t you see it? This is what we were fighting against. You flatter yourself that you were fighting to end slavery or to preserve your precious Union. But what you have succeeded in preserving is the right of distant power to exercise its will, to have its way and to claim it is doing it for the general good. Now your side has won and we are all—you, me, everyone everywhere— going to have to pay the piper. Because now this power---it is located in Washington, but it might as well be on the moon for all it knows about me or my life and my family, or about you and yours—will always have its way, and will rationalize what it is doing, and later it will write the history that says it was doing the Lord's work because it was for the greater good.” 

The characters are trapped in their own necessarily thwarted understanding of their historical circumstances, an entrapment captured during the trial scenes with a kind of staccato imagery so that one glimpses the agonized faces of the participants as they might look in faded black and white photographs. The light from outside, from all of those windows, might be the light of the truths we would like to think are self-evident—about how individuals are innocent until proven guilty, about the  right to a trial before a jury of peers--the truths that persist outside, above and beyond our own limited understanding of our circumstances.

Except that in times such as those depicted in “The Conspirator,” or in such fraught times as our own, those truths can be too harsh to bear. The film would seem to dare us to condemn the men behind the trial of Mary Surratt. Americans today have largely acquiesced without great protest to the idea that detainees at Guantanamo, some of whom have been held for years now without legal counsel, are too dangerous to risk being set free, even if evidence against them might not stand up in a civil trial. And they have acquiesced, too, to a greatly enlarged government invasion of their own privacy.

Well, so we live in dangerous times, and conceivably the tribunals are a necessary concession to an extreme situation. However, I believe the torture of some of those detainees at Guantanamo is another matter, an unambiguous wrong, and a great stain on American honor. And the two issues--torture and the conduct of legal proceedings against the detainees--now cannot be separated since undoubtedly one of the reasons the authorities recoil from a civil trial is because much or all of the evidence they have against these men has been garnered through methods that would make the information inadmissable in a civil court.

No one thought to waterboard Mary Surratt or her confederates. And the movie makes clear that in her day, as in ours, fear is the real enemy of reason and sanity when the world seems dangerous. What is needed are clear heads, sober minds and sharp eyes to discern what truth we can in the ambiguous shadows of our own murky history. Armchair warriors, gossip merchants with megaphones, the politically shameless who would exploit legitimate fears for partisan ends—these all only make it harder to see the light.