The Tourist

I feel flooded with media recently. In the last thirty days I’ve watched:

- Black Swan (twice). Amazing. Natalie Portman was transcendent.
- Tangled (don’t ask.)
- Rabbit Hole. Another excellent movie. Nicole Kidman was great.
- Winter’s Bone. Freaky.
- Hereafter. I wanted to love this movie. Even with Matt Damon, I just couldn’t.
-Sex and the City 2
-Old School. Love Will Farrell. This movie sucked.

Yet the movie that remains most vivid, playing behind my eyes, is the horrendous “The Tourist”, featuring a rather bland Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.

Angelina is, of course, a very beautiful woman. I met her once in Washington DC and she is positively luminous in person — the kind of person that you simply can’t take your eyes off. But as I watched The Tourist, my eyes remained fixedly on Johnny Depp.

I’ve always enjoyed Depp’s movies. In Alice In Wonderland, he rendered himself unrecognizable as the Mad Hatter. Oh yes, he has a flair for props; one recalls the Pirates of the Caribbean with mixture of exasperation and pure joy. But The Tourist didn’t require gobs of makeup or costumy clothes.

Depp plays Frank Tupelo, an American tourist in Venice. He’s had some sadness in his life – his wife expired in a car accident three years ago – and he is without the refinement that Jolie amps up to a thousand degrees. Jolie looks like a gorgeous, exotic insect with her enormous eyes and big pillowy lips.

Depp’s it is one of the most compelling performances I’ve ever seen. It is a bad movie – let us never mistake this for high art – but Johnny Depp is absolutely supreme. Just like he was devoured by the madness and the costumes of Alice In Wonderland, he is subsumed here in this alternate persona. His eyes look sad. Forehead lines look more apparent. His beard is a bit scruffy, not quite adequately groomed. His hair is unbrushed, a little too long – like he’d given up on his appearance since his wife died.

In one scene, he says to Jolie, “It’s a nice hotel room isn’t it?” But “Isn’t it” comes out as “Iddnt it”? It is so subtle and spontaneous you’d think he’d lived every day of his life in Indiana. I had to reply it to make sure I’d heard correctly. It was genius.

As he monkeys through the movie, being inexplicably chased by bad guys, he does it with a naturalness that shocks me; his reactions have the immediacy of a documentary.

Johnny surprises me with each performance and he proves that even when he takes a silly popcorn movie like The Tourist, he elevates it to more than it deserves to be.

Mega Mind: 9/11 Porn

I saw Mega Mind (3D) with a young member of the family today and kept thinking there was something I wasn’t getting. It’s a great looking movie with a clever premise: an evil mastermind kills his opponent, realizes he has no purpose, and then becomes good in order to fight a much worse mastermind. But something kept playing in the subtext, something I am sure it’s target audience didn’t get: it was full of images of Obama and September 11.

Posters of Mega Mind, looking queerly like Obama, is splashed on every building with the catch phrase “No I Won’t.”

But far more curious, the town looks like New York with the Freedom Tower reaching high above the rooftops. And there is a weird scene when the skyscrapers come crashing down in a way that actually looked a lot like the Twin Towers.

It felt strange. Not quite insulting. But it was an unrelenting subtext — in scene after scene after scene, in 3D, it was as if someone had stuck a silly Will Farrell cartoon on CNN footage of the attacks.

The movie was fine. Whatever.

But if you see it, I’d be curious to know if you saw the same thing I did or if I’m just feeling particularly sensitive tonight.

My New TV Boyfriend Is Now My New Movie Boyfriend

Old Spice Guy has been cast in a movie with Jennifer Aniston. The report there on CNN is just adorable; he seems so modest and sweet.

So now my TV Boyfriend is now my Movie Boyfriend. And if I were Angelina Jolie, I would be seriously jealous. Just saying.

Nicholas Sparks: Out of Ideas

Consumerist noticed something very odd about all of Nicholas Sparks’ movie posters. They’re all the same:

The Last Song

Nicholas Sparks. What a viper’s nest I’m delving into.

I am sure that Nicholas Sparks is a very nice person. But good lord, I don’t like his books. The mawkishly sentimental claptrap makes me grit my teeth and roll my eyes.

Yet, lots of people love his books; his fan base is enormous and they support as many weepy romances as he can write. He’s got a style all his own, and he can live off it the rest of his life a very rich man. So obviously he’s doing something right.

So when I say that the Last Song is a movie that is typical of Nicholas Sparks’ movies and books, I’m saying that it’s all pastel-colored and light… until somebody gets hurt.

I should have known better. The facts speak for themselves: 1.) It’s called “THE LAST SONG”. 2.) It’s by Nicholas Sparks.

Be that as it may, I walked into the movie thinking it would be some goopy love story. And it was…sort of.

Ronnie, played by the charming Miley Cyrus, is a teenager sent to live with her father, played wonderfully by Greg Kineer. The Georgian coast is breathtakingly beautiful, and it’s a perfect backdrop for a nice summer romance. She’s angry at her father for leaving her mom, and she makes no pretense about it. She snarls and rolls her eyes in every scene for the first quarter of the movie. Then she meets the handsome volleyball player (I guess football wasn’t using that beautiful beach enough.)

A summer romance ensues. With love having opened her heart, Ronnie and her father get to know each other better. She is a child prodigy on the piano, and her father has been working on a song for her.

You know: THE LAST SONG.

Then we learn that Ronnie’s father has lung cancer.

The last half of the film was spent with him dying. It was a beautiful death – full of beautiful beach scenes and lots of tears.

I wanted to get up and leave. I was so sick of the drawing out of it. Cmon, die already! But no, he stubbornly hung on there, touching on a few small-town cliches which you’ll have to see to believe.

One evening he’s working on the song and he can’t finish, so Miley finishes it for him. And as she hits that last note…ba dum dum! He dies.

I cried like a baby, against my will. I detested Nicholas Sparks for the overt manipulation. The flimsy storyline, and the “love heals” message.

Which just about smacks you upside the head with a telephone book. It’s serious that you understand, in every way: LOVE HEALS. See how Ronnie is healed up, overcoming the deal of her father, because she has this volleyball boy? See how he changes his whole life for her? LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Maybe I’m just bitter, jaded, and heartless, but I was positively gagging.

As soon as the credits rolled, I wiped my eyes and I was out there.

For a hilarious take on how other films would have ended if they’d been Sparkified, click here. Very funny. And it helps get the sugar-sweet LOVE HEALS message out of your head. Like mouthwash for your brain.

The 1990s: Pulp Fiction

I was living in London when Pulp Fiction came out. I was amused to go to the movies and have an usher, dressed in a suit and tie, direct me to a seat – so unlike America. The theatre looked like a grand opera house, with a balcony, and red velvet seats and red draperies over the screen. A voice came over the PA system: “Ladies and gentlemen, your programme is about to begin. Please remain silent during the production.” Then the curtains dramatically opened over the screen.

I sat in my seat, a young woman not yet the age of majority, about to experience my first jolt of genuine pop culture.

Pulp Fiction hurt me. It reached a place in me that made so infuriatingly jealous, and at the same time so giddily happy, that I could not even understand how to process it all. I had written little novels, things nobody would ever see, and screenwriting was never even a consideration. Yet I felt like Tarentino had reached into my heart and stolen something from me – a story I didn’t know, but had wanted to create.

It was dark. It was glitzy. It was ridiculous. A wild car-in-the-rain sort of feeling jazzed through it, not quite random, but dangerous, like a sudden kiss from a handsome stranger.

I still remember John Travolta’s black hair. The Gimp. Tarentino laughing at the two main characters, Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. “You guys look like dorks,” he laughs.

“These are your clothes,” John Travolta replies.

I cracked up.

Writing it down, it doesn’t look very funny. But that’s why the movie is important – it shows you something in a new way.

I walked out of the theatre a new person. Art and showbiz suddenly seemed a place that had no rules. Do what you want – really swing for the fences. It wasn’t polite. It had no formula.

I returned to the USA, got myself into college. Every class I took undermined the feeling I had about Pulp Fiction. It taught me the benefits of polite little stories about love. Green with promise, but shaded from controversy.

Now, Pulp Fiction holds a certain feeling in my head, it belongs to the zeitgeist of the mid 1990s. It was part of the chaos that came from the economy doing well, people having money. There was less fear in the world, so it was safe to make a movie like Pulp Fiction.

I don’t think it could be made today. I don’t think Tarentino could even get financing for it. It was an amusing movie then. Today it is a dangerous movie.

Hot Tub Time Machine

Warning: Spoilers. I’m serious, dude, I will ruin that movie for you if you haven’t seen it. I’m disclaimed. Also, it isn’t really a movie review. I just kind of ramble about the parts I like. So you’ve been warned. Mkay?

Hot Tub Time Machine is exactly the movie I wanted to see, and exactly the movie I thought it would be when I saw the trailer. In a word: fabulous.

A total douche – Rod Corddrey – is found in his garage with carbon monoxide poisoning. He is perfect as the unshaven, bald, alcoholic who is too loud, too … everything. You can see a past in him. To cheer this moron up, his two best friends, and nephew of one of the best friends, take off for Kodiak Valley, a place they used to go as highs school pals. They discover the beautiful Rocky Mountain retreat is not quite what they remembered: the hamlet looks run down; the storefronts are boarded up with “Out of Business” spray painted across the plywood-covered doors. At the resort, they encounter a one-armed bellhop – the actor who played McFly in Back To The Future — a fact that could not be mere coincidence.

Clark Duke – the young nephew of John Cusack’s character – stole the show for me. I loved every scene with him; he was one of the most charming actors I’ve ever encountered. When I returned home after the movie, I googled him and discovered that he and Michael Cera are best friends. I love that. It so fits. So perfect. He’s a pudgy, nerdy guy who is so locked into digital culture he can’t quite understand, in any real way, how anyone could have lived without texting, emails, and all the other electronic stuff we use on any given day.

As the foursome get settled into their run-down room, they find a closed up hot tub. Inside is a dead, rotting possum. But after a few minutes, the tub starts boiling, and it looks and smells fresh and clean, and they jump in. The douche – Corddrey – has some illegal Russian Red Bull-type concoction, and a whole bar on him. His alcoholism is actually extreme – I began to notice, after a while, the constant sound of bottles clinking together in his backpack. Anyway, the Russian Red Bull is the key. It gets spilled on the hot tub controls and they suddenly find themselves back in a room that looks slightly different.

And the bellhop has both arms.

Just don’t look right.

They hit the slopes and you immediately see the very intensely bright colors of the skiers and this brought about a smirk from me.

I was still in the low single digits in 1986, so my memory of that time is basically a patchwork of things I learned later. I feel a very strong affinity for that decade (Regan! low taxes! awesome clothes!). But I recognized the joke immediately. If you look around today, everyone’s in nice neutrals and earth tones. Apparently back in the 1980s, people wore color. Who knew!?

The guys go skiing, save for the nephew who awesomely snowboards. And when they crash, they jump up, feeling awesome. I laughed at that. That is something we can all relate to.

Anyway, basically they decide that since they’re in 1986, they must not touch anything. Ashton Kutcher’s “Butterfly Effect” is referenced through-out. You can’t do anything you didn’t do that night in 1986. Turns out a lot of bad stuff happened. Cusack gets stabbed in the eye with a fork. Corddrey gets his ass kicked. So they do allow small exceptions to the Butterfly Effect rule. Cusack talks to an interesting girl instead of the girl he’s supposed to break up with. Later, she breaks up with him, he calls her a bitch, and she stabs him in the eye. Fate got him in the end – no matter what he did.

Corddrey, like in 1986 the first time, got his ass kicked again though he tried to avoid it. This got me thinking about the nature of fate. I wonder if we really do have one path that leads us to where we are today. I hope not. I’d like to think that when I am consumed with guilt for having done one thing, another option would have led to a better outcome.

Anyway, Cusack’s sister ends up doing Corddrey and they figure out that Corddrey is the nephew’s dad. The scene where he’s doing Cusack’s sister is just so funny.

Craig Robinson, from the Office, was also great as the dude who didn’t want to get his dick sucked by Corddrey. And he had a great scene where he sang “Jesse’s Girl.” Awesome. Pure love.

The wardrobe people dressed Cusack in this trench for the last eight minutes of the film:

Brills, I tell you.

Anyway, the plot is silly and frothy and this really is a boy’s movie. But I loved every second of it. I particularly like all the recursive references (like the Back To The Future bellhop and the “In Your Eyes” trench coat).

A happy movie that made me happy. At the very end when the Clark character sees that Corddrey changed his future for the better (he stayed in 1986 and invented “Loogle” and became a billionaire), he says, “These are my parents” in a way that just cut me to the quick. I actually teared up.

I want to live inside this movie. Loved it.

Bounty Hunter

The reviews for Bounty Hunter are universally bad. Professionals don’t like the cliches or the fact that it’s so predictable. But when I saw it today, a cold, rainy afternoon, it was perfect.

Full disclosure: I’ve been a huge fan of Gerard Butler since 300. He is the ideal Alpha Male and therefore, he can do no wrong. That said, he elevated Bounty Hunter from the ordinary rom-com to something a little more thrilling.

Milo Boyd is an unshaven, untamed, snarling (and incredibly sexy) former cop, now bounty hunter. His assignment is to pick up his ex-wife, whom he detests, and bring her to jail on a weird traffic incident (she grazed a police horse.) Jennifer Aniston is lovely as Nicole Hurley, a reporter who doesn’t buy the official police line about a young man’s suicide. That’s not to say you believe for an instant that she’s actually a reporter. Just that she’s lovely. Fit and thin, her toned body is constantly shown to advantage in black-microskirts and tank tops. She literally never wears anything other than that; she has obviously worked hard on those arms, and she deserves to show them off. Her “work” scenes are smooth but I didn’t forget that I was watching Jennifer Aniston. I found myself wondering how Brad Pitt could have left her. That kind of thing is distracting, but it evaporated once she was actually involved in the scenes with Butler.

Gerard Butler is no slouch in the bod department either. His form is absolutely delish. I never had a crush on a Hollywood actor, but yowsa. Sign me up. When he runs, he actually runs and the director is wise enough to give us full body shots instead of close ups of his face.

Milo Boyd breaks into Nicole’s place and skids mud on her carpets. He deletes all her Tivo’d shows. He lies on her bed, a bag of Doritos spread out beside him, and wipes his mouth on her pretty pillowcases. I found him incredibly sexy doing that. Not because it’s literally sexy that a guy would do that, but because it is the metaphor of an uncivilized mind. I love that the director actually let him be a bit of a rogue; we need more of them in our films. For me, they are the only ones worth watching. However, one thing I found interesting: despite Nicole’s enviable figure, Milo did not leer. Her sexiness was not the thing that would lure him back, or get him to see inside her soul. I think this was a deliberate act of political correctness. A man who doesn’t give a shit about his ex-wife’s fancy comforter or Audubon carpets doesn’t care about her opinion if he’s checking out her tits. But he didn’t. And it wasn’t because he was trying not to be caught. He just didn’t do it. Why not?

Also uncivilized: he didn’t fawn all over Aniston. He was mean to her. He didn’t buy her crap. As they argued and sniped, I believed they had enough of each other; the arguing seemed genuinely acrimonious, not that usual “couple arguing” slop that rom-com directors usually serve up. Aniston resorted to several female tricks – trying to seduce him for his gun, fake crying. This seemed unfair to Aniston; she’s actually a talented comedienne; I would have rather seen her be as tough in her relationship as she was in her search for the truth about the suicide.

The breaking point comes when they’re in Atlantic City and he’s pulling his usual crap. He tells her to get in the car, she tries and he pulls away. He does it twice. Then Nicole begins to cry. “Shit… it’s real,” Milo mutters. He gets out of the car, and he tells her, kindly, to get in the car, he was just messing around.

She does. You can see a thaw has taken place. It was actually genuine; I find that resolution in fights occur when one partner suddenly sees what is happening and takes charge, and that is what Milo did. They happen to drive by their honeymoon bed and breakfast, and to hide out while the bad guys are on their tail, they check in. At dinner, they actually talk instead of snipe, and they have that “oh we made a mistake” discussion. Back at their room, they’re about to make love and Nicole overhears him on the phone telling his friend that even if he does get laid, he’s taking her back to jail. She runs.

After much chasing and arguing, they solve the crime. Then he takes her into the jail. As he is coming out of the jail, he punches a cop so he can go to jail. They are in adjacent cells. They walk to the bars and he says, “Happy anniversary baby,” and she said it back then they kiss. It is the only kiss of the movie, and it’s actually quite touching.

Yes, there are many cliches in this movie. But Milo Boyd is not the usual romantic comedy lead, and he elevates the movie to something a little more intriguing. Aniston can quite ably play that same character for the rest of her life; she has trademarked it. She has it down. But she has actual talent to draw on, and she was responding to Milo in a way that did seem spontaneous.

I found it a lovely way to spend an ugly spring afternoon. It won’t change your life, but it is a nice, pleasant way to pass some time.

UPDATE

I forgot I’d snapped this with my BlackBerry during the movie. I don’t understand why it came out this way, but I think it’s kinda neat.

Movie Review: Avatar

I had been warned by some conservative friends that the plot of Avatar would leave me disgusted. It is, they said, basically a liberal wet dream of Gaia, anti-capitalism, anti-military mush that happens to be the most beautiful film ever made.

I try to meet movies (and books) where they are, meaning if the subject is abhorrent to me, I try to put that aside and watch the movie on the merits. And thus, despite the cautions of my conservative friends, I paid my $20 to see it in 3D.

Avatar is about a paralyzed Marine, Jake Sully, who will take his dead brother’s place in a scientific-military experiment to infiltrate the Na’vi. The scientists want to study the Na’vi who live on Pandora, and the military wants access to the most rare, valuable substance in the world upon which Pandora is sitting : unobtainium (yes, it is really called that).

Sam Worthington is absolutely brilliant as Jake Sully; incredibly handsome in an every-guy way, he is gung-ho to begin his journey in his new body — the avatar originally created for his brother. The evil military commander, Colonel Miles Quaritch, promises Sully a new set of legs if he can pull this off.

Sully enters Pandora and falls in love with one of the “blue monkeys” as one of the military guys call them. He loves the land, and the woman, and he decides he must fight against the military oppressors. If this sounds like something Michael Moore might jerkoff to, there’s more.

In the world of Pandora, everything is connected. All trees, all beings, all animals, are peaceful and connected, and it all sprouts from a magical happy tree where Na’vi can hear their ancestors. The matriarch leads the Na’vi in a hippie ritual of linking arms and swaying in front of the tree that will leave you rolling your eyes, and curling your lip from the faint scent of patchouli and hippie love that seems to emanate from the screen.

Another stupid scene is when Sully and his blue primitive “mate”. It isn’t actually shown, but when they return to the clan, the woman announces to her parents, “We have mated. It is done.” That struck me as incredibly stupid.

Moments like this woke me from the fictional dream. I had to remind myself to give context to the movie, don’t react to the vague nausea caused by the hippie love-fest. There were several such moments.

The hard-hearted military doesn’t care about hippies, and it smashes the land, causing great chaos. At one point, Sully’s love interest says, “they killed their mother,” meaning “the earth”. It was all very sappy. However, a word about the female character: she was lovely. There were scenes of her running along tree branches and her balletic grace was absolutely breathtaking. Another lovely lady was Michelle Rodriguez. I really enjoy her in all her movies; Girlfight was amazing. In Avatar, my eyes were drawn to her any time she was on screen.

The Na’vi represent the ideal liberal people. Yet they sleep in hammocks in trees; when I saw that scene I kept thinking I would hate to sleep in a tree, and I was glad that our capitalist society provides for beds and pillows and huge white fluffy puffs to cuddle under on cold mornings. These people didn’t even have clothes.

An interesting fact: there was no government either, and I suppose the poor and weak and minorities were tended to by the community, not by a beneficent government, which is actually a conservative idea.

The technology was as amazing as you’ve heard. It really was the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen, a thoroughly beautiful, sensual experience. This movie no doubt provides the quantum leap in movie technology. I would not be surprised if most movies are now made in 3-D.

In the end, I just could not meet the movie where it was. The bad guys were cartoonishly bad. The good guys were cartoonishly good. The political message too overt – I couldn’t get away from the fact that director James Cameron was glorifying the savage while mocking the strength of a civilized society.

By all means, see the movie. But expect to roll your eyes a great deal, and expect to want to punch the first dread-headed hippie who asks you for money for smokes.

The Reader

I read The Reader in 1999; it was an Oprah book so it was everywhere that year. One could not appear in public with the book without being pelted with questions, “Isn’t it divine? Isn’t it amazing? A wonderful book…”

The book left me cold. I remember very little from it – only that Hannah was a Nazi prison guard and she had an affair with a young boy. Then she’s tried for war crimes and is found not guilty because she could not read. I think there was a piece of evidence, like an order she supposedly wrote, that proved conclusively she could not have done what they accused her of because she was illiterate.

I chose to see the movie version because Kate Winslet is in it. My instinct was correct. She is an amazing actress. Sometimes she appears to completely German, so of that era, that I blink my eyes and wonder if there is some sort of special effect, some trick of lighting or makeup to make her appear so vivid. There isn’t.

Her uncombed hair, rapidly tied back in a knot, her svelt body, the strange cant of her eyes and grim mouth are all effects, but the acting comes from inside her. She meets a young boy, Michael; she helps him home one afternoon. He returns to her home and she asks him to do some housework for her. He gets filthy so she tells him to take a bath. Such a strange juxtaposition of her strict, efficient, joyless exterior, and the obvious sensuality in her face. Before he gets into the bathtub, she stands behind him, not touching him, and kisses his shoulders. Her hand reaches around, gently taking his penis in her hand and she whispers, gravely, “This is why you came back.”

The boy is so very young. Maybe just fourteen or fifteen. The camera allows you to see his perfect contoured buttocks, his long legs, his narrow shoulders. The scene changes abruptly. Hannah is on top of him, her breasts exposed, her whole body rocking back and forth atop the boy. At no time while watching did it register that this was a moral trespass. Of course, you think, of course it happened this way.

The sex is filmed beautifully and honestly. The second time they are together, she drapes her leg over his shoulder and the winces; it is so honest that for a moment you feel like you’re watching something that should not be filmed at all. It is too private.

In another scene, she kisses his chest, lower, to the flat, perfect expanse of his belly. It is absolutely perfect. It is the kind of tenderness that makes you suffer in its absence.

After a fight, the boy comes into the bathroom where she is in the tub. Milky water does not obscure her breasts or the blurred triangle between her legs. This is what I mean by honesty. The camera shows you exactly what the boy sees. She is very angry, stiff with anger. “You do not mean enough to upset me!” she shouts. The boy says that he is sorry. He has never been with a woman before. He sits down on the edge of the tub. Her expression does not change, but you can see that she is changing. You see that she recognizes that he is very young and his youth affords him a measure of forgiveness.

“Do you love me?” he asks.

Her eyebrows betray a scrim of bewilderment when she realizes the answer. Very subtly, terrifyingly, she nods her head yes.

He reads to her. She lies in his arms and he reads her books. The love affair is beautiful but it is quickly overshadowed by the trial. The boy is watching but Hannah does not see him. He is older. Hannah is aged. She is accused of writing a report describing how, as a guard, she allowed a group of women to burn and die. The door was locked from the outside and she did not open the door. She is accused of writing the report. The other female guards testify that she wrote the report. The judge asks for a writing sample, and Hannah, overcome with shame, quickly changes her story and admits that she wrote the report.

The boy, a law student, knows this is not true. He goes to visit her in the prison where she is being kept but changes his mind. He returns to his college and makes love with another student.

The next day, Hannah is found guilty of murdering 300 people. The boy watches in silence. Hannah is sentenced to life in prison, and then she turns and looks at him squarely. He is weeping.

I think this is a flaw in the book. I don’t recall it very well, but I don’t believe it went into the significance of this. The movie makes it clear that he understood that she was guilty of those crimes. She slaughtered old women and babies. She sent them to their deaths. She was matter of fact about it, explaining at trial that they had to make room for the new Jewesses who arrived every day. “Where could we put them? What would you do?” Evil, horrible. And he loved her anyway. Michael is unique among movie characters because he is not so overcome with love that he will forgive genocide. He knows right from wrong. He loves her, and he allows her punishment to happen with no interference from him. It is painful for him. But that is what makes his silence so moving.

Many years pass. He sends Hannah some tapes in prison. He sends a tape of himself reading “The Odyssey” by Homer – the first book he read to her when they were first lovers.

One day in prison, when Hannah is very old, she goes to the prison library and checks out “The Lady With The Little Dog” by Checkov. Michael has sent her a tape of him reading this, and again it was a book he read to her as her lover. It is almost painfully poignant watching her learn to read as an old woman by listening to her lover’s voice, looking at the words on the page, watching it finally click in her mind.

Michael receives a letter. It is from Hannah. It says, in firm childish writing, “Thank you for the latest, kid. I really liked it.”

She writes new letters: “Please send me more romance.”

He does. He receives more letters:

“I think Schiller needs a woman.”

“Are you getting my letters? RightWrite me.”

He does not. Nor does he visit. He simply sends the tapes.

After being in prison for twenty years, a parole officer calls Michael and informs him that Hannah is up for parole. “If you do not take responsibility for her, Hannah has no future at all,” she says. “Thank you for letting me know,” he replies.

He arrives at the prison. The beautiful woman of his youth is gone, replaced by an elderly grey-haired woman. He is holding back – a lot. He tells her that he has a friend who will give her a job and he has found a place for her to live. Details, details.

At one point he asks her if she thinks about the past and she says, with the slightest glimmer of hope, “With you?”

“No, not with me,” he says firmly. There is a lot of silent traffic between them. A lot. He tells her that he will pick her up in a week, when she is paroled. They do not hug goodbye. The lack of contact made me ache. But it is not the worst part.

She takes all of the books that he has sent her and all of the books checked out from the prison library and she stacks them on her desk and she hangs herself.

Michael arrives to collect her. The prison administrator tells him that she has died. Hannah has written a will. She wants her little bit of money to go to the one daughter who survived the fire, “and tell Michael I said hello.” Only then does Michael cry.

In New York, Michael finds the daughter who survived the fire. She’s an urbane New York woman living in a penthouse. Chic furniture. Lovely jewelry and clothes. Michael hands her a small tin with the money, Hannah’s tin. The woman takes the tin and gives back the money.

Michael takes his daughter to a church where he spent an afternoon with Hannah. Hannah has been buried in the cemetery there.

All this, the second half, is less powerful than the first half. I am too much reminded of its literary origin, everything is just too neat and self-referential. The only “sloppy” thing is the fact that he never forgave her while she was alive, that he could not touch her in prison. I appreciate that honesty. The cemetery, the tin, the stacks of books as a platform to hang herself are all too literal for me. But the love story is honest and disastrous, hurting everything it touches. The filmmaker found some pictures to make the Truth come true.