PaL Blog

The Counterfeiters

PaL — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:43:48 GMT

I have another movie to recommend--this one in current theatrical release: The Counterfeiters. Set in the German concentration camps during World War II, the based-on-fact story concerns the Nazis' attempt to scuttle the Allies' economic standing by flooding the global economy with counterfeit pounds sterling and American dollars. To that end, they assembled a team of the most skillful Jewish artisans and put them to work in a privileged quarter of the Sachsenhausen camp, under the leadership of one Salomon Sorowitsch (Sally), portrayed here with intense conviction by Karl Markovics.

Under the constant threat of death and at the dubious mercy of their Nazi overseers, they managed to produce several denominations of English banknotes that were declared genuine even by experts at the Bank of England. Put back to work on the production of the American dollar, the team's efforts were delayed by a single recalcitrant fellow-prisoner whose conscience balked at the idea that their work risked helping the Germans win the war. As the war's end approached, the threat became more imminent: produce, or die. One of the many great, irresolvable moral questions at the heart of the movie was whether to betray one of their own--whose choice was inarguably the right one, from the idealistic point of view--and save themselves; or whether to tacitly go along with his sabotage at the certain cost of their own lives.

What gives the movie its edge, I think, is the constant imminence of death. The barbarous brutality of the German guards and their bland, unquestioning assumption that their charges are subhuman, scheming Jews unworthy of anything but contempt reinforces this sense of imminence: as we see at several dreadful moments in the course of the film, it means nothing to their keepers to exterminate those they consider to be vermin. Knowing this, the Jews are forced into cowering servility, simply to stay alive. As viewers, we cringe for them and are sickened by the treatment they receive.

Michael Clayton Grabs you Round the Heart

PaL — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:16:24 GMT

It's dawn. Three horses on a hillside, powerful, serene, majestic. They are connected with their natural environment, at peace with their own nature... Behind the man who stands there, gazing at them, down at the bottom of the hill, his expensive black Mercedes explodes in a burst of searing flame. Explodes again.

He was supposed to be inside it.

This is Michael Clayton's moment of truth, in the film whose title is appropriately his name. It's the moment that he glimpses an end to his own suffering. And suffer he does. His life has gone awry, his moral compass long since lost. Separated from wife and family, awash in gambling debts, he has surrendered his career as a lawyer to acting as the "janitor" to his corporate law firm, doing whatever it takes to clean up those inconvenient messes that threaten the firm's image--or that of its clients. He has learned to skillfully manipulate the truth to serve the corporate interest.

From that start on the hillside, we are led back through the last four days that have brought him to this epiphany. He has been assigned the task of bringing back a partner, Arthur (wonderfully portrayed by that fine actor, Tom Wilkinson) who is also an old friend and colleague, into the fold of corporate contingency. Arthur has lost his senses--or, as we discover, found them. Building the defense of a corporate client desperate to save itself from the public exposure of its egregious poisoning of hundreds of its consumers--and potentially millions more--Arthur has done the unthinkable, switching his alliegeance from the client to its victims. A traitor to the firm and to its bottom-line "values," this miscreant must be brought back in line, and Michael Clayton is the man relied upon to do it.

Along the road, however, Clayton is brought face to face with the venality of the system that he serves. Increasingly, he comes to realize that real justice is on the side of the plaintiff in the case in question, and that his friend is far from the lunatic he has been made out to be. When Clayton's counterparts, the "janitors" who represent his firm's corporate client, spring into action and resort, finally, to murder, he turns coat himself, sacrificing his own interest and that of his firm to the revelation of the truth.

Before I get lost in the complexities of this finely-conceived, finely-written, and magnificently enacted story, let me get back to redemption--for that, as I see it, is the story's theme. If Arthur forsakes the "meds" that have kept his life in balance and descends into a fit of madness that reveals itself as moral clarity, Michael's redemption is the greater struggle, because it involves the surrender of everything that has seemed important to him: money, status, the respect and trust of those he works for, his employment--and finally his very identity--in order to emerge from the hell he has created for himself. In a remarkable feat of acting, as the film comes to its close, George Clooney's face alone conveys the transformation from misery and desperation to a kind of happiness.

"Michael Clayton" kept me on the proverbial edge of my seat from beginning to end. It's the kind of film where you're never allowed to pause and glance nervously at your watch. It's a true thriller, but one where violence is reduced to the necessary minimum and where the characters and the complexity of their moral issues drive the action. It's tough, uncompromising, but not lacking in tender moments, and it grabs you where good art is supposed to grab you--round he heart. Clooney's Michael is at once strong and vulnerable, scared and angry, transparent and inscrutable. We can forgive him for having lost his way, because we share his human failings, his desires, his attachments. It's when he learns to let go of them--in good Buddhist fashion--that he finds the beginnings of his freedom.

The other part of the Buddhist lesson of this film, by the way, is the karmic teaching: that cruel, unskillful actions lead inevitably to unhealthy and undesirable outcomes, while skillful action brings about the results that satisfy the soul.

Cross-posted at The Buddha Diaries

Cruelty and the Futility of Torture

PaL — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:34:59 GMT

"The Lives of Others" is a great film, and an uncomfortably timely reminder of the cruelty and the futility of torture in a week when the Burma junta of generals again comes to world attention with their human rights abuses; and on a day (yesterday) when the New York Times headlined the shameful story of Bush's continuing, secret authorization of techniques "to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics" in the course of interrogation. "The Lives of Others" is the story of a state-sponsored eavesdropper and torturer--not the kind who pulls out toenails and applies electrical shocks to the genitals, but one who gets results by sleep and sustenance deprivation and prolonged, relentless and implacable questioning followed up by threats to the subject's loved ones. The first scene shows that he's very good at what he does. He's on his way up in the Stasi (the former East German secret police) organization. He seems bloodless, pitiless, intent--and deadly fearsome in his impassivity. (A brilliant performance, by the way, by the actor Ulrich Muehe.)

Once it begins, the story involves a famous playwright of conscience and his actress lover--the unfortunate object of lust of a senior state official who orders the exposure of the playwright as a national enemy. Our hero is given the assignment to bug and monitor the apartment that the couple share, and the story is of his gradual awakening to the realization that neither he nor the state have the right to spy on the private "lives of others." Falsifying the reports from his nightly surveillance from a loft above the apartment, he increasingly puts his own career on the line, risking exposure, disgrace, and imprisonment himself.

The plot thickens with the suicide of a despairing friend of the writer in this oppressive regime, and his decision to smuggle an illegal article on the subject to a West German magazine. The events lead to a climax that is at once heart-breaking and, finally, uplifting, as our spy comes to listen to the voice of his own conscience with unintentionally tragic results. Forced by the Stasi to practice his dark art on the actress this lonely man has come, in some strange way, to love, he is confronted decisively with the inner conflict between the path his life has taken and a good, human, even compassionate heart.

The tragedy here is the senselessness of it all, the way in which truth evaporates in the grip of the police state, where torture and compulsion stifle it, wrecking lives along the way. It is shameful, indeed, to think that our own country practices such methods, employing terror in the name of fighting terror. It is shameful to have a President and a Department of Justice who sanction such behavior, in the face of common consensus that it is not only inhuman but that its results are as likely to be false and unreliable. We are not a police state in this country, but we have unforgivably allowed our government to adopt some of the police state's tactics; and to see this gripping movie about a period we have supposedly left behind us, along with the Cold War, is to be reminded, tragically, of what is still being perpetrated in our name.

(Oh, and then I open up my New York Times this morning and find this picture on the front page. Remind you of anyone?)

Powerful and Majestic

PaL — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:06:11 GMT

Small wonder that Christopher McCandless, the central character in the Sean Penn-directed movie, Into the Wild was afraid of water: from an elemental point of view, he was all fire. Unable to put down roots anywhere, he darted from place to place, infectiously re-lighting the fire in everyone he met--and unable to tame his own suffiicently to avoid being consumed by it. In the end, he was done in not only by water, as the river in spate prevented his return from "the wild"; but also, as fire inevitably is, by the absence of fuel to continue along his path. He died of starvation. Seen from this elemental point of view, "Into the Wild" was a powerful and majestic film. The earth figured prominently in the form of the great mountains of Alaska, the Southern California desert, the roads that led in all directions, predominantly north and south. There was water in plenty: the ocean where Chris learned to overcome his fear of water and passed his fire on to a woman whose passion had died; the rain and snow; the raging rivers, including the one he was unable to cross, the one that caused his eventual isolation and death. The air, the great, wide open skies that stretched above him everywhere, the air that fed the fire that consumed him. And the fire, chiefly within, where it raged, in contrast to those small campfires, match glows, embers, that stood in for the element in the outer world. A wonderful movie, I thought. Just a little bit longer than it needed to be, as though the director feared we might not get it, and risked boring us in order to be sure we got the point... Well worth the time. It's a movie one could see again, just to be overwhelmed, again, by the power of the elements.

'Lady Chatterley' Smoulders

PaL — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:36:00 GMT

Okay, let's talk about sex. Ready, everyone? I'm trusting you to get back to me on this one... We went to see "Lady Chatterley" last night--the new French film based on the second version of D. H. Lawrence's novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"--the one that's entitled "John Thomas and Lady Jane." John Thomas, for those unfamiliar with English idiom (that's English English) was in my young day--and perhaps still is--a common euphemism for the penis. Lady Jane...? Well, I never heard it used that way, but I'm sure Lawrence had a wry smile when he thought up the title. As I recall, he wrote the second and third versions because he was not wholly satisfied with the first: he wanted it to be less coy, more frank, more explicit than he had originally allowed himself. (Remember, he had been in trouble with the obscenity police already in the past.) This time, I'm guessing, he wanted to get it right, no matter what the morality brigade might say.

The film? Delightful. Erotic. Sensual. It's slightly odd, I'll confess, to see this French take on the English landscape, the English social structure, English mores. The landscape is beautiful, and captured with loving attention to detail. Those who saw Andy Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides" might have some sense of the quality of "nature as art" that we get in the long shots of green landscapes with rolling hills and thick forests of trees, or the close-ups of ferns, wildflowers, grasses... It's breathtaking and all, somehow, so quintessentially English. I could smell the moldering leaves and the rotting wood along the pathways through the woods, and feel them underfoot. The simple close-up of a prickly sweet chestnut casing, fallen from its branch, was enough to awaken long dormant memories of childhood. Delicious.

And the sex? No, I hadn't forgotten it. In fact, I think I've just been talking about it, because in this movie sex and nature are inseparable. The sex is earthy, a bit clumsy, real. The film--remarkably, considering its origin--captures something crucial about the English character, the surface reticence beneath which, often, despite stereotypes to the contrary, a real passion burns. Connie (Lady Chatterley) and Barkin share little in common but for these characteristics. Thanks to the reticence, their sexuality is slow to awaken, and when it does (a great scene, with a baby chick, passed from his hand to hers) it burns slow and awkward to begin with. Clothes, even, are not readily shed--and then not until well into the relationship; which does not mean that the scenes are not infectiously erotic. And once awakened, the sex runs deep and steamy on both sides, and it is shown as good, healthy, human and, let's say it, not a little animal. It is, notably, about both man and woman. It does not take sides.

I'm not sure that the film fully captures the full depth of the social taboos that are violated by Lawrence's novel, though it certainly tries. This is, after all, early twentieth century England, with Victorianism at least very present in the rear view mirror. She is, after all, a "Lady," and he a gamekeeper, a man of the lower orders, a servant to her husband, rude in appearance and in manner (both captured in great performances, by the way.) Her mansion, with its sweeping stairways, its elegant furniture, its ancestral portraits, is amply contrasted with his humble cottage and the shack where they meet, its walls and shelves lined with common tools and utensils--all filmed with equal love of their sheer physicality. It might seem that the affair is somehow more, well, permissible than then current social mores would have allowed: there is little sense of the risk involved for both parties, of the enormity of their action. But that, perhaps, is Lawrence, because he insists on the rightness of it--the rightness of sex as well as the rightness of flouting those old, artificial social barriers that stoof between human beings.

Okay, you may have gathered by now that I enjoyed this film. But what about the moral questions about obscenity that so riled critics--both literary and social--when the book appeared? In view of the pornography that is available at the tough of a few buttons on your home computer these days, the eroticism of "Lady Chatterley," while less explicit, seems to me in some ways more potent than the debased images of human flesh so liberally exposed to the voyeuristic eye. I think it's clear by now that the healthy, human sexuality for which Lawrence made his pitch is regarded by most thinking people as just that: human, and healthy. Would today's morals brigades work up a lather over "Lady Chatterley"? Not, perhaps, when they have so much juicier and more broadly available targets.

Which brings us to the interesting question as to whether obscenity is harmful. Are there still boundaries that should not be crossed, or that are crossed at the cost of damage to the social fabric? Is it anybody's business what I choose to watch, or read? What I have learned about Buddhist teachings in this regard is that the practice of sex is reprehensible only by the standard of potential harm--harm to myself, or harm to other people. So then I have to wonder what is harmful. Rape, clearly, at one extreme, no question there. But how about, um, dare I raise the subject... masturbation? Harmful? I guess if you still believe that it causes acne--or blindness. Seriously, though, to whom? To anyone who indulges in the practice? To those who become addicted? Food for thought. I guess we must all make these intimate judgments for ourselves.

And what about pornography? Is it harmful to those who produce the stuff? To those who watch it? On what basis do we condemn it, if we choose to do so?

Anyway, interesting questions, no? I'd be happy to hear your thoughts...

The Buddha Diaries

'Blind Spot' a Searing Reminder of the Holocaust

PaL — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:56:00 GMT

(cross-posted in The Buddha Diaries)

Friday night, we watched the movie "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary." I can't remember how we were alerted to it, but it must have been on our Netflix list because someone had recommended it.. So, thanks to whoever did, because it's an amazing documentary. The camera dwells exclusively on the one person, Traudi Junge, who sits in the same position throughout a series of interviews, recalling her days as secretary to one of the great monsters of history.

Frau Junge's is an absolutely compelling story, from the time she had barely heard of Hitler as a young girl to her move to Berlin with the hope of becoming a dancer; to the secretarial skills tests she was urged to take and her first interview with the man she described as as a kindly older gentleman, and particularly as "fatherly"--she herself had grown up without one; to her recollections of typing to his dictation, mostly personal things, she said, and speeches, never anything that carried a remote suggestion of the evil that she later came to understand he represented... She recalled only one instance of his hatred of the Jews, expressed by no more than a curt response to a woman visitor who dared to mention hearing of the poor treatment of Dutch Jews being herded onto trains: the great dictator told her not to speak of things she did not understand and stalked out of the room. Frau Junge could remember nothing more.

Most compelling were her memories of the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler's life and the last days in that bunker in Berlin, with Hitler's increasing alienation from reality, his marriage to Eva Braun, the six Goebbels children and their distraught mother, the constant din of bombing and artillery, the suicides... And the feelings of guilt she had lived with for the rest of her life--she was 91 at the time of the interviews, and remarkably robust and clear of memory, and died at the time of the film's release--for not having been aware, for having allowed herself to sleepwalk through the horror of the war and the holocaust, for having been an enabling cog in the machinery. Only at the very end, shortly before her death, could she tell her interviewer that she had begun to forgive herself. These days, we tend to scoff at those who claimed not to know what was happening in Nazi Germany: Traudi Junge's story, from the very center of it all, is a tragic example of the "blind spot"--or, more literally translated from the German title, the "dead corner"--that succeeded in numbing the consciousness of the great majority of her countrymen at the time.

We are, as members of the human species, responsible for our own consciousness. We need to remind ourselves to stay awake, because it is all too easy to close our minds to that which we choose not to see. It's a lack of consciousness, as I see it, that has led us to the current woeful predicament of our own country and its reputation in the world.

The Voices of Babel run Deep

PaL — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:39:00 GMT

(Cross posted in The Buddha Diaries)

About halfway through BABEL I wondered what I was doing there. By the time the film ended, I understood why I had stayed. It's a wrenching movie, with violence at its core. Knowing little about it before seeing it, I was ready for some harmless escapist fare.

What I got was something far more difficult. It's about human beings caught in the act of being human--in the most dire of all imaginable circumstances.

It's about bad things happening to good people, and about bad people's cold indifference to them. It's about the consequences of mindless action, about random acts of violence and calculated cruelty. It's about love and hatred, the results of fear and anger and mistrust, about guilt and innocence, official heartlessness and individual compassion.

It's about the agony of loss and grief, and the mad, occasional ecstasy of letting go all inhibitions. It's about the joys and fears around human sexuality, about defensiveness and vulnerability. It's about the difference between races, cultures, and religions--and about their interdependence. It's about the shared identity of the human species.

It's about being out on the edge and the fear of falling off it, about the brutal imminence and randomness of death in the midst of life. It's a film brimming with the everyday tragedy and folly of human existence--what Balzac called the "Comedie Humanine." It's about the way we butt up against each other in the strangest and most difficult of ways, how we stroke each other--and rub each other the wrong way.

It's also about language (the "babble" of human voices) and the ways in which we communicate with each other, about the limitations and the failures of communication that produce sometimes dreadful results.

"Babel"'s director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrita, has done a powerful job in confronting us with the complexity, the contradictions, and the suffering of ordinary people in the world. He also celebrates the nobility and selflessness of which we are capable at times of stress. An outstanding movie.

In "Sicko," Moore asks America: "Who are We?"

PaL — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:24:00 GMT

(From my blog, The Buddha Diaries)

Who are we? It’s the question Michael Moore comes to, after ninety minutes or so spent examining the American health care system—and finding it lacking. We saw his film, “Sicko” at the end of last week. I don’t like the title: it’s too flip for the serious work he has undertaken here—a soul-searching that turns out to be about much more than the health system. It probes deep into the national culture and the national character. Is this what we have become, he asks? A nation of people who surrender without a second thought to those who exploit the mental lethargy they have induced in us?

Is it any accident, I wonder, that we have accepted the odd notion of “The American Dream” as our ideal? Are we not all rather suffering through what Henry Miller called "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare"? Are we all so permanently lulled by the sleep of ovine contentment that we don’t notice how the values that once inspired this nation have been perverted? When do we all wake up? That’s the fundamental question. The “dream” has been mythologized into a complacent belief in a benign, love-thy-neighbor, faith-based, friendly giant America where the values of individual freedom and personal responsibility flourish, and where each of our citizens enjoys an equal opportunity to enjoy his or her own vision of happiness.

What nonsense. If we’re both clear-sighted and honest, we’ll recognize this myth for what it is: a commonly shared delusion of grandeur. So when do we all wake up to the truth that we are living in a country that has slipped—unconsciously, perhaps—into the belief that money is the ultimate value and that its pursuit excuses virtually any behavior, any excess, no matter how ruthless or inhuman? That we have chosen for ourselves a president and a congress of representatives who capitulate to those whose power is gained by wealth, and who allow their policies to be dictated by those who have bought their services? That what we are pleased to call a “democracy” is nothing more than an oligarchy in which we sleepers surrender our minds and our lives to corporate control?

When do we wake up, as Michael Moore would have us do, to the fact that the health care system in this, the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet, exists not primarily to provide for the health and welfare of our citizens but for the profit of our health insurers and providers? That millions of our fellow citizens either go without health protection because it’s unaffordable, or are commonly forced to leap through labyrinthine hoops to benefit from the insurance that they pay for? That HMO’s and insurance companies strive mightly to find reasons for the denial of benefits, which turns out to be a not-uncommon cause of death? That despite the high cost of health insurance, we rank miserably in the delivery of services when compared with other nations? That our relative infant mortality rate, for example, is a national disgrace?

We have been persuaded to swallow whole the negative myth of “socialized medicine” and to buy instead into a system designed to minimize service in favor of maximizing profits. If we were not asleep, or willfully ignorant, or deaf to reason, how could we have allowed this to happen? How can we allow it to continue? Tragically, how can we now do otherwise, with lawmakers bought and paid for by the profiteers?

And while the health care system is clearly now in crisis, it’s far from the only mess created by our collective surrender to corporate greed. What else is driving this war in which we are disastrously engaged? What else drives our international and national policies? Our significant contribution to the impending ecological disaster that threatens the planet derives from our reluctance to put bottom-line corporate profits at risk. We have elected, and continue despite all reason and intelligence to elect people who kow-tow to the gods of business and are willing to sacrifice our vulnerable and inestimably precious natural environment on the altar of progress and economic growth.

Is it not time we ripped the mask from the American Dream and revealed it for what it secretly promotes—the me-first greed that denies social responsibility for those less fortunate than ourselves? That panders abjectly to those who promise to cut our taxes and fails to mention the social programs that must also be cut in order to fulfill those empty promises? That willingly steps on the misfortune of our fellow beings in order to promote our own needs and interests?

So who are we, Michael Moore rightly asks? What have we allowed ourselves to become? What happened to that benign, generous, immigrant-embracing America of which the world once stood in envy and respect? How is it that violence in our homes and on our streets have become as "American" as the warfare we export?

These are questions those of us who seek to find serenity in our lives and to promote it amongst those who share this planet with us must seriously ask ourselves. We sit, we meditate, we send out metta into the world to the best of our ability. Well and good. But I, for one, am tormented by the sense of responsibility to do more--and the recognition of my relative impotence. I find it hard to be satisfied with doing only what is in my power, when my power seems so negligible in the face of such an imponderable and pressing need to change.

The Namesake Sparkles with Quiet

PaL — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:44:00 GMT

(From my daily weblog, The Buddha Diaries)

The Namesake is a good movie, well worth seeing. It’s the story of a Bengali couple, married by family arrangement, who move to the United States and bring up their own family, a son and a daughter, maintaining their own rich cultural traditions in the context of American society.

It’s a film, as I saw it, in good part about civility. The relationship between man and wife starts out having nothing to do with romantic love, or the reasons for which we in the West choose to get married. It’s characterized by civility and restraint, by mutual tolerance—even of mistakes—and a respect of each others’ inner privacy. We watch it grow into a deep and abiding love—and one which allows for the growth of an intimacy eventually far richer than the intimacy of spilling every secret of the heart and soul or of leaping into bed at the first opportunity.

Here in the West, we tend to blunder mindlessly across each other’s boundaries under the pretext of affection; our getting to know each other can look like an aggressive takeover, a mutual invasion. We want to know everything, reveal everything. The relationship in this film allows each partner the respect of a distance that might seem cool, uncaring, lacking in passion to the Western mind. There is a politeness, a civility that fosters the core self of each, creating a strong individuality and bringing with it the rewards of slow revelation and deepening understanding—this in the context of a sense of social obligation that transcends the fulfillment of those immediate--and often trivial--personal “needs” that seem so urgently important to us.

For a quiet, unhurried and moving investigation of universal issues like marriage and family, the search for happiness, and the ineluctable processes of aging and death, this is a rewarding little gem of a movie, and one that offers us the glimpse of life viewed from a very different point of view.

Blood Diamond: Sounding the Alarm

PaL — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:27:00 GMT

(From my daily weblog, The Buddha Diaries)

Blood Diamond is not a film for the squeamish, or for those who avoid any kind of violence on the screen. The dreadful scenes of civil war depicted in the movie are shown in unsparing detail, with brother fighting pitilessly against brother, and with boy-children trained to kill innocent villagers mercilessly with the assault rifles put into their hands. Manipulated by corporate European diamond traders, these desperate people slaughter each other in pursuit of a global commodity that most of them never even see.

The redemption myth centers on the post-colonial adventurer played (extraordinarily well) by Leonardo di Caprio, whose cynicism and greed drive his quest for freedom through the wealth to which diamonds offer a desperate, violence-strewn path. He partners with an unwilling village fisherman whose family has been torn apart by war and who holds the secret to a spectacular fortune in the form of a diamond he has found and hidden in the African dirt.

The stated lesson of the film: don't buy one of these luxury baubles unless you can be sure it's not a conflict diamond--a stone that has been mined at the cost of human families destroyed by warfare, and of human blood. From a broader view, I saw the diamond as a metaphor for all of the earth's dwindling resources, and the film as sounding the alarm for worse violence and bloodshed to come as those resources become more scarce with time, and men more desperate to cull them for their own. Like the character played by di Caprio, we are at serious risk of sacrificing our humanity to our greed.