Depleted — c’est le mot juste! Thank you, Daniel Kahneman. I’m not sick, I’m not really even tired. I did drink a tad too much wine last night, more than I’m now used to drinking. I spent almost the entire day yesterday catching up with feeds on Google Reader; it’s difficult to imagine anything more depleting. In any case, I’m going to spend today repleting.

At some point, I must say a word about the two movies that I’ve seen recently but not written up — not written up because, by Friday afternoon, I am no longer quietly at home, but running errands for the weekend. I have my stay-at-home days and my out-and-about days, and the latter cluster toward the weekend, with the result that I am depleted at the beginning of the week. (If I’m depleted today, I was even more depleted yesterday.) For example, this past Friday I was determined to mail out the new round of postcards of Will on the beach this summer. The project was so overdue that it had to be done at once. This meant that I had to go out again, late in the afternoon, to buy Dymo labels that I didn’t know I’d run out of. What drove me crazy about this errand was that I could have done it in the morning when, finding that I’d shown up at the movie theatre forty minutes early (this is what happens when you’re depleted: you forget to check Movie Showtimes before leaving the house [and I see now that I was depleted at the end of last week]), I quickly ran a round of errands that could have easily included a stop at Staples. Had I thought to do so, of course, I wouldn’t have bought a new paper shredder, which I did do in the afternoon, thus necessitating a walk straight home and a separate outing to Fairway — all very depleting. It’s depleting just to read about this!

It’s just one of the many things that they didn’t teach us when we were young, viz, that you can’t get anything done properly without being adequately rested. This was as true when I was twenty as it is now, but I was like most twenty year-olds a shambolism of inattentiveness when it came to personal management.

So, enough depletion.

***

The movies were Margin Call and The Rum Diary.  I enjoyed them both very much, but my thoughts about writing them up were scrambled by all the Pauline Kael that has been in the air lately. When the Library of America collection of Kael’s reviews was announced, I thought about buying it. I remembered how sharply I had disagreed with Kael during her New Yorker days, not so much with individual judgments as with her general world-view, which, all too apparently, did not take in the place I call home. Just hearing her name revives wearying waves of pointless dismissals of bourgeois this and bourgeois that, made in case after case by utterly bourgeois writers who would have traded in a limb to cleanse themselves of their bourgeois provenance. Paul Kael was certainly one such. Like so many critics coming from the Left, she failed to see that almost everyone in America, aside from smarty-pants like herself, who did not already belong to the bourgeoisie was keen to do so, and that the mission to educate the uneducated into a state of utopian transcendentalism was trans-Quixotic. It’s people like Kael who did everything but lick Reagan’s welcome-mat clean.

I don’t think that Kael would have liked either of the movies in today’s hopper. She wouldn’t have liked Margin Call at all, and she would have wanted more Deppness in The Rum Diary. There is nothing in The Rum Diary that wasn’t presented in sharper focus in Public Enemy, and there was a lot more Deppness in The Tourist, that underrated romp in which two of Hollywood’s biggest Big Stars completely, and with hambones dangling from their mouths, upstage Venice. The Rum Diary is clearly a valentine from its star to his idol, soul brother, and sometime housemate, the late Hunter S Thompson, and this makes it more of a literary work than a movie. Qua movie, it’s composed of worthwhile scraps of other movies, covering a range from the Bournes to Body Heat. If you had to say something nasty, you could say that it is The Quiet American without the everything. What it really needs is not so much Deppness as Ribisiness: everything that has ever made you raise your eyebrows in amazement that Giovanni Ribisi ever got into the movies (with that squeaky voice especially) is given the mighty Wurlitzer treatment here, and you want more of it. You also want more of Amber Heard’s dress-up doll act; rarely — not since Now, Voyager, anyway — has an actress been rendered, within the context of one movie, so protean by makeup. Aaron Eckhart is his usual, cool-cucumber-gorged-python self; you have to wonder where he goes to get bank loans. But, hey, it’s a fun movie, as guilty a pleasure as raiding the minibar. The LSD trip taken by the hero and his sidekick, Sala (Michael Rispoli), is a masterpiece of articulate understatement that manages to convey the dynolysergic experience with only one loony special effect at the start; the natural look and feel of a fishing pier on a breezy, somewhat foggy night is just about as accurate a postcard as director Bruce Robinson could have sent from the late great’s gonzo files.

It’s interesting to reflect that Aaron Eckhart is not in Margin Call. You might at first wonder how a movie about Wall Street sleaziness was made without him, but the very point J C Chador’s astonishing directorial debut seems to be that Wall Street sleaziness is committed by people who aren’t very sleazy. Breezy, yes. Paul Bettany is, as it were, the reason why Aaron Eckhart isn’t in Margin Call. His character, Will Emerson, is a Brit who sends a piece of his winnings home to his folks and spends the rest on laddie equipment. He’s pumped by his income, not by master-of-the-universe powers that he doesn’t seem to believe in anyway. He likes being very well paid. He likes it well enough to risk never being paid again. He is a salesman, not a con man. If there’s a difference.

What Pauline Kael wouldn’t have liked about Margin Call, I believe, is that it is ultimately a filmed play. This isn’t to suggest that it suffers from the airlessness of that unfortunate genre. It’s only afterward, when you ask yourself what made the experience so powerful, so shattering, so overwhelming but in the end so satisfying, that you realize that the film’s production values — sets, lighting, and so forth — have been just good enough not to call attention to themselves while at the same time providing the perfect stage for outstanding theatrical performances. I’m not sure that Margin Call, even with its excellent cast (many of whom, and certainly the two principals, Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey, are stage actors of the very first rank), would be as effective in a Broadway theatre, but for all I know it might be twice as effective. I vote for the movie treatment because the story is already so claustrophobic — more than three-quarters of the action takes place during a very long night in largely empty offices perched too high atop Manhattan to feel attached to anything — that it needs the atmospheric rush, paradoxically more persuasive in the movies than in the theatre, of the morning ride across the East River that Will and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley) take to round up Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) at his Brooklyn Heights doorstep. The exhilaration of speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a convertible sportscar after an pulling an all-nighter at work is something that you appreciate in the audience every bit as much as the two bankers, one of whom knows, by the way, that he is about to be let go.

For some reason, the marketing angle on this film focused on Peter Sullivan and Mr Badgley, as if, I suppose, to bring in younger audiences. But they are the least important figures in the film precisely because they’re so young. At mid-range, you have characters, played by Demi Moore, Simon Baker, and Mr Tucci, as well as Mr Bettany (don’t let me forget Aasif Mandvi),  complicated people who are very ambivalent about the risks that they take at work. And, at the top, you have the head trader, played by Kevin Spacey, and the head banker, played by Jeremy Irons, uncoiling at full length the helices of their personal mystery (they are mysteries to themselves) while the actors themselves, well-known to you as they are, show you things that you’ve never seen.Their appearing on the screen, and not onstage, signals their immense powers of destruction; what’s wrong with modern banking is that it hasn’t taken place entirely in the movies.

***

In the interests of repletion, I have set one of my Nanos to play the Bach in Order II playlist, and it is repleting me nicely. Ralph Kirkpatrick plays the English Suites, Andras Schiff plays the Partitas, and Maria Tipo plays the Goldberg Variations. The Cello Suites are played by Pierre Fournier. The Corelli Concerti Grossi are performed very deliberately by an outfit called Ensemble 415. As I write, the late Scott Ross is dashing through the Italian Concerto. (With all the things that people have done to and with Bach’s music, I’ve never heard a “fleshed out” concerto version, with orchestra, of this piece.)

The postcards reached local destinations very quickly. We had dinner with a friend last night who, earlier in the day, encountered another friend of ours as he was walking down 72nd Street. She told him that she had just received a postcard of Will; he kept his miffed-ness at not being able to say the same to himself. When he got home and collected his mail, though, there it was. Small town.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2011 at 9:16 am.