RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Upstairs, Downstairs became an international hit, British television producers assumed that they could quickly come up with another dramatized exposé of country-house life. Wrong again. It took the BBC—in a joint-production venture with Netflix—four decades to create Downton Abbey, a series in which the butler and the cook were every bit as engaging as Lord and Lady Downton.

Now the Brits have another smash—but this one marks a significant departure from its predecessors. In The Crown, what happens below stairs stays below stairs. This drama is all about the current Queen Elizabeth, from the time of her childhood, through initiation into the roiled world of royal worldlings, to her difficult marriage, to her troubled middle age and ultimately, after she learns to connect with the British public, her serene senior years.

In Parts I and II, Elizabeth (deftly played by Claire Foy) watches her odious, Nazi-sympathizing uncle, King Edward VIII (Alex Jennings, in a tour de force performance), abdicate the throne to wed a commoner. Then she witnesses her stuttering, publicity-shy father (Jared Harris) take over (The King’s Speech built an epic drama on these shortcomings). Alas, before his elder daughter is ready to wear the crown, King George VI dies of lung cancer.

The new queen is so innocent that the staff, out of earshot, refer to her as Shirley Temple. The naivete is not to last. Elizabeth’s new husband Prince Philip (Matt Smith) assumes the responsibility of her sexual education. But the political and social schooling is led by Winston Churchill (John Lithgow), the lion at sunset. The prime minister is determined that this young lady absorb the basics of regal propriety, diplomatic lingo, and British back-bench maneuvering. She starts out abysmally ignorant of all three.

Sir Winston is a shrewd tutor, but he is also infirm. As Elizabeth grows, she learns to lean on her courtiers. Soon she finds a way to show nothing in her face, to express little in her speeches, and to exert control while seeming to be above the considerations of politics and the Great Game of a shrinking empire. But this mastery of form demands a mask of remoteness lacking human sympathy. Elizabeth alienates Prince Philip, turning him into a distant consort who would rather make merry than make tours. She refuses to allow her sister, Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) to wed the man she loves because RAF hero Peter Townsend (Ben Miles) is divorced and therefore anathema to the Church of England, which Elizabeth nominally heads. Of greater significance, she takes an unseen hand in national policy, chews out the occasional prime minister, and makes sure to kick the ailing Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam) when he’s down.

The new film Darkest Hour offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie Dunkirk.

The story unfolds with the drama of British prime minister Winston Churchill’s assuming power during the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill’s predecessor, the sickly Neville Chamberlain, had lost the confidence of the English people and the British government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war.

Churchill was asked to become prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The armies of all three democracies — together larger than Germany’s invading forces — collapsed within days or a few weeks.

About a third of a million British soldiers stranded in a doomed France were miraculously saved by Churchill’s bold decision to risk evacuating them by sea from Dunkirk, France, where most of what was left of the British Expeditionary Force had retreated.

Churchill’s greatest problem was not just saving the British army but confronting the reality that, with the German conquest of Europe, the British Empire now had no allies.

The Soviet Union had all but joined Hitler’s Germany under their infamous non-aggression pact of August 1939.

The United States was determined at all costs to remain neutral. Just how neutral is emphasized in Darkest Hour by Churchill’s sad phone call with U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR cleverly assures Churchill that in theory he wants to help while in fact he can do nothing.

Within days of Churchill’s taking office, all of what is now the European Union either would be in Hitler’s hands or could be considered pro-Nazi “neutral.”

Darkest Hour gets its title from the understandable depression that had spread throughout the British government. Members of Churchill’s new war cabinet wanted to sue for peace. Chamberlain and senior conservative politician Edward Wood both considered Churchill unhinged for believing Britain could survive.

Both appeasers dreamed that thuggish Italian dictator Benito Mussolini might be persuaded to beg Hitler to call off his planned invasion of Great Britain. They dreamed Mussolini could save a shred of English dignity through an arranged British surrender.

I always yearned to find an appropriate occasion to use the phrase “luxe et volupte” and after seeing The Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, I have found it. From the scene of a chiseled, sleek Daniel Day Lewis performing his morning ablutions and carefully dressing himself, to the extraordinary mise en scene of his homes, his staff, his elegant sister, his breakfast menu and finally, his exquisite couture, we are in a world of voluptuous beauty As Reynolds Woodcock, the celebrated go-to dress designer for royalty and the super-rich, Lewis’ movements are disciplined and exact His female staff are all attired in white coats and their workspace is as sanitized as a hospital, their stitching as precise as a surgeon’s. Plot develops when Woodcock goes to his country house, stopping to eat and finding himself engaged by the young waitress serving him. Alma is fresh-faced and reticent, a far cry from the world of high fashion, but strangely, he is entranced by her and in short order, invites her to live in his house and work as his model and muse.

Alma is a cipher about whom we know very little but we see her rise to his expectations and do her best to adjust to his bi-polar moods and demands. He is an artist – a man accustomed to having everyone around him yield to his every whim – a narcissist who can be mean-spirited and abusive. He is also handsome, dashing, creative, reckless in his driving but exacting in his beautiful designs and their execution. Alma watches quietly in a mostly compliant manner until we see a sudden change in her when she introduces herself to the Belgian princess who has come for a wedding dress. She says simply “My name is Alma – I live here” and we understand that she has begun to assert herself and feel the legitimacy of her own needs and desires. The more she demands recognition, the more resistance she gets from Woodcock who has always been the sole ruler of his roost.

At one point, after an argument, Woodcock falls ill and Alma takes care of him gently but with great authority. She counters the will of his sister and eventually succeeds in nursing him back to health, reversing their roles of dependency in a very significant way To say more about the plot would be a spoiler but this is a movie that should be seen for the dynamic performances by its three stars, its psychological insights, its understanding of the parameters of art and emotion, its beautiful cinematography and enveloping score blending classical and popular music of the 50’s to match the romanticism of the subject. The phantom thread refers to a secrret message sewn into the lining of each dress, much as the innermost secrets of people’s needs and illusions are not easily seen or deciphered yet remain intrinsic to their core. How eccentrically these get balanced between two very unusual people is the fulcrum for this stunning and momentous film. Best one of 2017

If the download statistics don’t lie, many Quadrant readers will be among those occupying at least part of the Christmas/New Year break with binge streamings of the hit Netflix series professing to recount Queen Elizabeth’s life, times and reign. And it does, too, sort of.

Over Christmastide, the phenomenon that is Netflix’s The Crown will divert many a family – monarchist and republican alike – ten episodes of our Sovereign’s life from 1956 to 1963. In Series One (1947 – 1955), the quality of the script, the brilliance of the actors, the perfection of the period, the exquisiteness of the sets, the acuity of the cameramen, combined to produce a tour de force. The effect was to make us think we were really there as the Princesses were told that their beloved Papa had become George VI; as the dashing Duke of Edinburgh saved his Princess Bride from a rogue elephant in Kenya (untrue); as Queen Mary received her errant, eldest son with such froideur (surely true); as Philip was told his children would be Windsors (undeniable). It all seemed so authentic that we now feel we KNOW what happened behind those Palace walls.

The apparent authenticity of The Crown is so delicious. It is also so insidious. We shall never really know. We have to remember this is in fact a magnificent imperial soap. In his review of the series, The Crown: Truth & Fiction (Zuleika, 50pp), the historian Hugo Vickers, while welcoming its great job in reminding a younger generation that the Queen and Prince Philip were once young themselves, he warns that ‘Fiction should help us understand the truth, not pervert it.’ As Peter Morgan, creator of the series, told The Australian, ‘I’ve done my best to stick to the facts as I have them. I think there’s room to creatively imagine, based on information we have about Her (The Queen).’ Tellingly, he went on to say, when asked if The Queen had seen Series One, ‘I have no idea and I don’t want to know…. I live in hope that she hasn’t seen it, never watches it and doesn’t give it the slightest thought.’

I was interested to learn in The Times obit of Lady Charteris, (the widow of Martin Charteris, Private Secretary to Elizabeth as Princess and Queen), who died, aged 97, in March this year, ‘She was fascinated by Series One of The Crown on Netflix, in which she was portrayed by Jo Herbert, with the actor Harry Hadden-Paton playing her husband. She liked to watch it with the Duchess of Grafton — the mistress of the robes and an old friend.’ To have been there, a fly on the wall as they watched, to see them laugh and scoff; nod and sigh.

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features filmmaker Michael Hansen, whose new film is Killing Europe.

Michael discusses his new film and its focus on Europe’s Suicide in the Face of Islam. He also shares the Left’s totalitarian effort to drown his film.

Don’t miss it! http://jamieglazov.com/2017/12/18/glazov-gang-killing-europe/

And make sure to watch Dr. Charles Jacobs discuss Saudi Curriculum in American High Schools, where he unveils the meaning of “Jihad” in Newton:

The seventh season of Showtime’s Homeland series had to reinvent itself after Donald Trump was elected president, which makes the escapist CIA world they created even more bizarre.

The series has always had a problem reconciling the decidedly liberal political beliefs of its main characters with the very unliberal machinations of the CIA. This tension has always been one of the selling points of the show – especially in the early years when the series’s hero, Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis), held by al-Qaeda as a prisoner for years, turned out to be a sleeper agents sent by the terrorists, until he wasn’t. The complex relationship between bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Brody – and Brody’s subsequent heroism in Iran – was fascinating to watch.

Since then, the series has had a lot less success in remaining coherent. Nevertheless, as escapist entertainment, it is extremely well done, with fine acting, good writing, and interesting plots.

Last season, the show featured a very liberal female president who was reluctant to believe the CIA assessment of the Iranian nuclear program. As it turns out, her suspicions were well founded. A rogue faction of the CIA working with a rogue faction of Mossad tried to cook the books on Iranian intelligence in order to get the Hillary stand-in to attack Iran. The plan failed because Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who supported the idea of bombing Iran, kept digging to unmask the conspiracy.

But the election of Trump presented a dilemma for the show. To solve the problem of turning a liberal president into a tyrant, the writers ended the season last year with an assassination attempt that drove her semi-mad.

Entertainment:

The upcoming season of the espionage thriller has a rogue Mathison trying to take down criminals in the government under the tyrannical administration of President Keene (Elizabeth Marvel), who has arrested 200 members of the intelligence community after barely surviving an assassination plot in the season 6 finale.

Also targeting Keene: The show’s Alex Jones-like conspiracy character Brett O’Keefe (Jake Weber) who was first introduced last season. “The founding fathers foresaw the dark day when we would face a president like her,” warns O’Keefe as he aims a pistol at a poster of the president’s face. “Anyone who takes a stand for what they believe, people are gonna say they’re crazy. They’ve been calling me that for years.”

Call it a case of unfortunate timing, but there are three scenes of Churchill, as played by Gary Oldman, behaving in a way that we are now calling sexual harassment of an employee. The first shows his young, pretty secretary (Lily James) ushered into his bedroom where he dictates to her from his bed; upon finishing, he throws back the covers and tosses his bare legs up in the air as he propels himself out – the camera moves to her shocked reaction. The second has him dictating to her in what looks like a dressing room – we see his bare legs exiting the bathroom as he announces that he is coming out of his shower in a state of nature – she hurries away. The third has him taking a seat next to her at her desk and staring at her intensely; after a few moments she squirms uncomfortably and asks if anything is wrong – he states that he is just looking at her.

There have been three Churchills released within a few months of each other – John Lithgow in The Crown, Brian Cox in Churchill and now Oldman who has received the most praise. He is the least recognizable, having been outfitted in major prosthetic get-ups and ample padding and he plays the man as louche, drunk and unforgivably cantankerous. Although there may be biographical justification for some of this, it is played so broadly and noisily that we see too little of the calm, controlled statesman and heroic leader whom many consider the outstanding figure of the twentieth century. I can only assume that this is what director Joe Wright had in mind since Oldman has proven to be a talented actor in the past and the one-dimensional portrayal he gives us here may be due to editorial decisions in the cutting room. Both Darkest Hour and Churchill show Winston as an outlier challenging the conventional political and military advice for the evacuation at Dunkirk and the landing in Normandy. Both show his stubborness, his persuasiveness and his ability to summon his talent for oratory to instill enormous courage in his constituents Of the three, only Lithgow achieves the dignity that is missing from the other two characterizations.

Darkest Hour offers the most disturbing portrayal of a man subject to depression, addicted to alcohol and tobacco and temperamentally unable or unwilling to control his outbursts. The film reminds us of his parentage – Winston’s father died of tertiary syphillis and his beautiful mother was undoubtedly “too much loved.” The decibel level of this movie is high, Oldman’s performance is histrionic in the extreme and we leave the theater wondering how to forgive him his excesses when they have filled the screen for more than two hours. Though it’s worth seeing Darkest Hour for its historic content, I prefer the more controlled performance by Brian Cox and urge you to see Churchill to and judge for yourself.

A full year after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the left is still trying to comprehend – as Hillary Clinton titled her post-mortem book – what happened. How did the matriarch of the Clinton crime syndicate – er, political dynasty, riding the promise of an historic victory as the country’s first female president, lose the White House to a brash, unpolished, shoot-from-the-hip reality TV mogul with no political experience? For that matter, how did the upstart Trump, whom the media and his competitors dismissed early on as an unserious candidate and fraudulent conservative, emerge as the party nominee from a field of seventeen established Republican politicians to challenge Hillary in the first place?

The answer lies in filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s latest documentary, Trump: the Art of the Insult, the title of which is an obvious nod to Trump’s 1987 business advice book, The Art of the Deal. Gilbert’s previous work includes Dreams From My Real Father, which presents the case that Barack Obama’s real father was Communist propagandist Frank Marshall Davis, and There’s No Place Like Utopia, in which Gilbert sets off across the country in search of the Progressive dream.

In his newest work, the filmmaker has compiled an hour and a half of campaign and interview footage of Donald Trump using a verbal flamethrower to lay waste to the media landscape, to the other Republican presidential candidates, and to Democrat opponents Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, on his way to a stunning election victory.

The film includes no commentary or narration – Gilbert simply lets Trump speak for himself. And speak he does. Trump has no politician’s filter, as one interviewer says of him, which freed him to hurl insults relentlessly at targets unaccustomed to dealing with an opponent on that level of discourse. Trump went after competitors who were used to polite, orderly policy debates, and instead of engaging them on that level, pegged them with demeaning nicknames and called them schmuck, idiot, stupid, nuts, nut job, doofus, loser, clueless, incompetent, and lacking enough charisma to intimidate other world leaders. The implication was that Trump was everything they were not – especially a winner.

Three Billboards, written and directed by Martin McDonaugh, has a cover story of a mother’s insurmountable guilt and grief over the murder of her young daughter who was raped while dying Compounding the tragedy of this brutal crime is the apparent inactivity of the police dept in working this case and finding the culprit. The mother, played by a fierce Frances McDormand, hatches a plan to challenge their complacency by calling out the police chief and reprinting the police report on three prominent billboards right outside the small town of Ebbing, Missouri. Several factors complicate this plan: the expense of the billboard rental, the fact that the police chief is dying of pancreatic cancer and the reaction of the town to this public disgrace.

Amid this set-up, you will find grotesque caricatures instead of real characters – American crackers who punctuate every word with the omnipresent F modifier along with other salacious references to female anatomy and disposition. This is set in relief by the letters written by the fatally ill police chief (Woody Harrelson) who is wondrously also capable of multi-syllabic, poetic expression including a reference to Oscar Wilde, straight out of left field for a small-town Missouri cop. Admittedly, he hears the name from his much younger Australian wife, an alcoholic who is inexplicably in nowheresville America with a much older husband, but she would more likely know the name Adele than Oscar Wilde. Mildred, the grieving mother played by Frances, is another unbelievable pastiche who is a formerly battered wife, somehow capable of standing up to the town’s authority and disdain, hurling Molotov cocktails to burn down the police station and contemplating the murder of an incidental bad guy not implicated in her daughter’s case. From the way she is played by McDormand, she would have killed her sadistic husband the second time he assaulted her, not hung around for years of abuse until the children were grown and her son could come to her defense. None of the details in these character sketches make any visual, dramatic or logical sense. Did I mention that there’s also a dwarf?

Rounding out the implausibles is the shiftless cop played by Sam Rockwell as a mama’s boy afraid to own up both to her and his own gay-dom. Though severely burned in the aforementioned fire at the police department, he is out of the hospital and his bandages in a week and mirabile dictu, he overhears a confession of a rapist sitting in the booth behind him at the local tavern. Though Frances has berated the local priest with her choicest potty-mouth expletives earlier in the film, one can only marvel at the author’s resort to a deus ex machina for some serendipitous clues.

If you compare this film with another one also dealing with a person’s guilt and grief, you will see the difference: one author going for easy laughs, casual violence and characters that are grotesques while the other finds the humanity in simple working-class people portrayed with understated honesty and true emotional depth. For that experience, revisit Manchester By The Sea, written by the incomparable Ken Lonergan who will take you inside the characters’ hearts instead of watching them from an insultingly superior perch.

On “Fox & Friends” this morning, reacting to the live footage of President Trump in Hanoi, I talked about the Vietnam war’s domestic impact on the American psyche. It took many decades for that to change, and this Veterans Day movie pick is one of the cultural artifacts of that evolution in perception – a film about soldiering that wears its allegiance in its very title. It was released about six months after 9/11, in the spring of 2002, and in that sense is a movie about an old war seen through the lens of a new one.

The best thing about We Were Soldiers is how bad it is. I don’t mean “bad” in the sense that it’s written and directed by Randall Wallace, screenwriter of Braveheart (which won Oscars for pretty much everything except its screenplay, which was not overlooked without reason) and Pearl Harbor (whose plonking dialogue has been dwelt on previously in this space). Mr Wallace is as reliably uninspired as you can get. And yet it serves him well here. Pearl Harbor was terrible, but it was professionally terrible, its lame dialogue and cookie-cutter characters and butt-numbingly obvious emotional manipulation skillfully woven together into state-of-the-art Hollywood product. By contrast, in its best moments, We Were Soldiers feels very unHollywoody, as if it’s a film not just about soldiers, but made by soldiers – or at any rate by someone who cares more about capturing the spirit of soldiery than about making a cool movie. It’s the very opposite of Steven Spielberg’s fluid ballet of carnage in Saving Private Ryan, and yet, in its stiffness and squareness, it manages to be moving and dignified in the way that real veterans of hellish battles often are.

This is all the more remarkable considering that it’s about the first big engagement of the Vietnam war, in the Ia Drang valley for three days and nights of November 1965. In those days, the word “Vietnam” had barely registered with the American public and the US participation still came under the evasive heading of “advisors”. In essence, the 1st Batallion of the 7th Cavalry walked – or helicoptered – into an ambush and, despite being outnumbered five to one by the enemy, managed to extricate themselves. Colonel Hal Moore, the commanding officer of the AirCav hotshots, and Joe Galloway, a UPI reporter who was in the thick of the battle for two days, later wrote a book – a terrific read. That’s the source material from which Wallace has made his movie, with Mel Gibson as Moore and Barry Pepper as Galloway.

We Were Soldiers opens with a brisk, unsparing prelude – a massacre of French forces in the very same valley, 11 years earlier. Then we’re off to Fort Benning, Georgia a decade later, where Colonel Moore and his grizzled old Sergeant-Major, Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott), are training youngsters for a new kind of cavalry. “We will ride into battle and this will be our horse,” announces Moore, as a chopper flies past on cue. Basil Plumley, incidentally, is not in the least bit plummy or Basil-esque. He’s the hard-case to Moore’s Harvard man, a fairly predictable social tension, at least to those BBC comedy fans who treasure the “Dad’s Army” inversion, with lower middle-class Arthur Lowe and his posh sergeant John LeMesurier.