Frida, Julia, Sylvia
In case you’ve been wondering why the sudden deluge of movie posts: I’ve been clearing out my Netflix queue by watching everything, because some of it has been there for basically forever. For instance, I’ve apparently been stocking up on biopics.
1. Frida, about Frida Kahlo, is my favorite of this batch: it’s lively, colorful, stylish and stylized, with a clear sense of what it wants to say about Kahlo, her life and work, and her grand romance with Diego Rivera.
Kahlo and Rivera had a grand romance in the same sense that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did: they were terrible for each other and made each other miserable, but they also got each other on a level that no one else did. They couldn’t stop loving each other and, if they were given the chance to go back and start over, probably would have done the same thing all over again.
2. I am, I’ve decided, looking for Code Name Verity in all the wrong places, or perhaps the wrong times: World War II movies about women don’t seem to be scratching my itch. I was underwhelmed by Charlotte Gray, about a British woman who parachutes into France to help the Resistance, and I’ve been underwhelmed again by Julia, a biopic about the playwright Lillian Hellman and an episode in her life that may or may not have actually happened.
The movie is based on a short story from her (fictionalized?) memoir. In the 1930s, Hellman’s childhood friend Julia lived in Austria and Germany and resisted the Nazis. Hellman, traveling through Germany on her way to Russia (to see her play performed in Moscow), carried something or other for Julia’s underground group, and sees Julia very briefly in Berlin...and that’s most of the time they spend together as adults in the movie.
It occurs to me that Maddie and Julie are also apart for most of CNV...but their flashbacks are more plentiful than the ones detailing Hellman and Julia’s friendship. The flashbacks in Julia are charming, but they’re so few that the whole thing feels extremely unsatisfying. It occurs to me that the filmmakers are unclear whether they're making a movie about Hellman and Julia's friendship, or Hellman's partnership with Dashiell Hammett. Either would be fine (although a movie called Julia really ought to have more Julia!), but wavering between the two makes the movie unfocused.
And the massively inconclusive ending doesn't help.
3. Watching Sylvia, the movie about Sylvia Plath, gave me the same uncomfortable feeling as delving into the life of Vincent van Gogh. I knew both stories in broad outline, and they filled me with righteous rage on behalf of poor innocent Plath and van Gogh, betrayed and abandoned by traitorous traitors.
The traitorous traitor in Plath’s case is her erstwhile husband, Ted Hughes, a poet in his own right who abandoned Plath (with their two young children) to go have a silly affair with a married woman. What a cad!
Obviously running off and cheating was still a caddish thing to do, but at the same time...she made a bonfire out of his rough drafts! In a jealous rage, long before he had done anything to justify that jealousy! Is that not a break-up call right there? Hughes clearly cracked under the burden of dealing with Plath's mental illness. He would have been a better man if he hadn’t, but I find it hard to blame him for not being up to the challenge.
1. Frida, about Frida Kahlo, is my favorite of this batch: it’s lively, colorful, stylish and stylized, with a clear sense of what it wants to say about Kahlo, her life and work, and her grand romance with Diego Rivera.
Kahlo and Rivera had a grand romance in the same sense that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did: they were terrible for each other and made each other miserable, but they also got each other on a level that no one else did. They couldn’t stop loving each other and, if they were given the chance to go back and start over, probably would have done the same thing all over again.
2. I am, I’ve decided, looking for Code Name Verity in all the wrong places, or perhaps the wrong times: World War II movies about women don’t seem to be scratching my itch. I was underwhelmed by Charlotte Gray, about a British woman who parachutes into France to help the Resistance, and I’ve been underwhelmed again by Julia, a biopic about the playwright Lillian Hellman and an episode in her life that may or may not have actually happened.
The movie is based on a short story from her (fictionalized?) memoir. In the 1930s, Hellman’s childhood friend Julia lived in Austria and Germany and resisted the Nazis. Hellman, traveling through Germany on her way to Russia (to see her play performed in Moscow), carried something or other for Julia’s underground group, and sees Julia very briefly in Berlin...and that’s most of the time they spend together as adults in the movie.
It occurs to me that Maddie and Julie are also apart for most of CNV...but their flashbacks are more plentiful than the ones detailing Hellman and Julia’s friendship. The flashbacks in Julia are charming, but they’re so few that the whole thing feels extremely unsatisfying. It occurs to me that the filmmakers are unclear whether they're making a movie about Hellman and Julia's friendship, or Hellman's partnership with Dashiell Hammett. Either would be fine (although a movie called Julia really ought to have more Julia!), but wavering between the two makes the movie unfocused.
And the massively inconclusive ending doesn't help.
3. Watching Sylvia, the movie about Sylvia Plath, gave me the same uncomfortable feeling as delving into the life of Vincent van Gogh. I knew both stories in broad outline, and they filled me with righteous rage on behalf of poor innocent Plath and van Gogh, betrayed and abandoned by traitorous traitors.
The traitorous traitor in Plath’s case is her erstwhile husband, Ted Hughes, a poet in his own right who abandoned Plath (with their two young children) to go have a silly affair with a married woman. What a cad!
Obviously running off and cheating was still a caddish thing to do, but at the same time...she made a bonfire out of his rough drafts! In a jealous rage, long before he had done anything to justify that jealousy! Is that not a break-up call right there? Hughes clearly cracked under the burden of dealing with Plath's mental illness. He would have been a better man if he hadn’t, but I find it hard to blame him for not being up to the challenge.