This weekend: "Another Happy Day" and "J. Edgar"

I have two movies to write about from my weekend. Warning: Both of them were dark, sad movies. However, I don't regret the viewing experience in either case.

First, I watched Another Happy Day. What you might have guessed already is that the title is ironic. Yes! It is! The film is about one of the most neurotic families that ever lived, and the misery that naturally follows the people who participate in any event having to do with that family. In this case, the event is a wedding. The main character, Lynn, is played by the (maybe actually neurotic) Ellen Barkin. With all due respect to female actors everywhere, I must ask: Ellen, did you have to pout so much? Her mouth is in a seemingly permanent shape of downward protrusion, as if she had just tasted something hideous! (Of course, there's also the possibility it's her Botox.) She is not pretty, and not "hot," as one of her teenage sons suggests. Both of her sons seem to be a little in love with her, but no one knows why. She's not likeable in any way. She's a whiny, narcissistic, fragile, bitchy, anxious person. From the very first scene, we see her yelling needlessly at her (other) teenage son. It's quickly clear that Lynn can't handle stress, family events (such as the wedding they're driving to), her sons, or even driving her car -- Lynn can't handle anything, basically.

We learn that Lynn has been physically abused by her husband, forced to separate her two (other) children from that marriage, give up her eldest son and protect her daughter from complete psychic breakdown after the violence she witnessed. Lynn has four children altogether: the daughter, Alice, has been slowly mutilating her body with a straight razor, thanks to her abusive father. The younger two sons (teenagers) come from Lynn's second marriage.

We also see that Lynn has a cold mother, two stupid loudmouth sisters, a teenage son who's on the autism spectrum and another teenage son who's addicted to opiates. Lynn has a lot to deal with, but she can't handle it at all.

The family, as presented to us, is obnoxious. The mother, beautifully cold and brazen Ellen Burstyn, has sided with the ex-husband, Paul, despite his abuse. She even flirts with him over the telephone! She tells her daughter that she's just inviting trouble and wonders "why can't we just have a good time?" Paul himself, played by the rarely mis-cast Thomas Haden Church, is little more than an idiot brute. He behaves as if he doesn't remember his own sins, and we're inclined to think he doesn't. Or doesn't get it. (Is he a brute who has been hit over the head one too many times?) Lynn's father, an old man with heart problems and other ill-defined health troubles, is usually medicated or asleep, unless he's having a heart attack in the middle of the night (apparently a regular occurence). Lynn's sisters do little more than sit around gossiping, guffawing and dressing up toy dogs. Another family twist: Lynn has to fight for the right to be called "mother" to her eldest son (whom she was forced to leave with her ex). Paul comes with a second wife, Patty, played by Demi Moore. This really might be Demi Moore's best performance, as she has never been as hateworthy nor as authentic as she is here, playing a grown-up-stripper stepmom with territorial poison to spew in the face of her husband's fragile ex-wife. "I'm the one who tucked him in at night," she says. "I'm the one." (She, too, has apparently forgotten that her husband forced Lynn to leave her son.)

So of course, Lynn runs around from one disastrous, devastating interaction to another, and we're all just waiting to see if she'll survive the wedding without her son overdosing or her daughter committing suicide or her ex-husband bullying her again.

Sounds awful, right? So why do I say this movie is worth watching? Because there are some tricky nuances that will surprise you. Here is one example: you don't think Lynn is really to blame for anything that happens to her, at first, (although Lynn is frightfully annoying, she is still a victim!) until the scene where you finally get her mother's perspective. Dear Ellen Burstyn, you are a genius. The scene is the kitchen table after midnight, where Lynn stumbles upon her mother sitting in the darkness. She tells her daughter "No" when Lynn asks "Mom can I talk to you?"

Lynn flinches.

"No. You have never had the decency or the respect to know when to keep things private!" Doris (Burstyn) says. [This, after an afternoon of Lynn describing Paul's abuse in detail, to a room filled with people.]

"I'm just trying to make things better," Lynn (Barkin) says (pouting, as usual).

"Better for who? Better for me? Unable to sleep, exhausted, and unable to sleep in the middle of the night? How are you going to make things better for me?"

Doris (Burstyn) then proceeds to share with her daughter what it's really like
having her husband disappear before her eyes, falling into old age, isolated, frightened, expecting at any moment to be widowed. The intense loneliness of her life, accumulated, now Lynn must bear witness to. She is not just "Lynn's mother," but a woman with her own pain. A pain that she never, ever, shares with anyone else. Doris has been holding herself together precisely because everyone else in the family spews poison at each other all day long. It is quite truly the most heart-wrenching scene in the entire film. A film filled with heart-wrenching. Doris, the cold matriarch, turns out to have every reason to be insensitive to her daughter. Within just a few seconds the entire movie is turned on its head. The idea of a necessary insensitivity is just one example of the remarkable ways characters reveal themselves in human terms.

There are many gorgeous performances in this film. Burstyn's is best, but there's also the young addict portrayed by Ezra Miller, and Demi Moore as mentioned. All these messed-up humans are truly gorgeous to observe, once you adjust your eyes to the darkness. It's a sad story, and dark, but for anyone who knows what a neurotic family is like, this is a necessary film. It's necessary to show how truly black that bottomless pit of pain can be. It's necessary to show, also, how human are the human beings who live in it.

Second, I watched J. Edgar this weekend. By contrast to the above characters, J. Edgar is not permitting himself to be human at all. Apparently he denies himself his sexuality, even in the privacy of his own bedroom. He is unmoved by criticism or by other humans' ideas of what he should be. He is motivated, robotically, by his mother's perception of him and by his own quest for power. This is the story of a chronically repressed person, with a nastiness layered on top like a thick skin. Only it's not a thick skin. If it were self-defense, we might sympathize. No. He's only nasty because of how unhappy he is.

I didn't like the movie very much. Two things I liked. One: Naomi Watts as the devoted Ms. Gandy, Hoover's secretary for life. She is sweet, expressively silent, and offers up her own face as the window into Edgar's soul (since his own cannot express it). Two: the art direction. The juxtaposition of Edgar and Clyde at the races in the 1920s and then again in the 1960s, for instance. There are a thousand clever transitions between past and more recent past. Edgar's desk, office, and private rooms are symphonic in their carriage of the movie's mood and the main character's dark personality. You feel as though you have lived in Hoover's actual life for a little while.

Of course, Leonardo DiCaprio is always good to watch. One knows, "anything with this actor's going to be good," is not a believable statement. But I love him, anyway. He's commanding. J. Edgar Hoover only wished he were as commanding as DiCaprio actually is.