Circe: The Witch Tells Her Story

"Modern retellings of the lives of women from Homer's epics" is quickly becoming my favorite literary genre. Hyper specific? Yes. But insanely good? YES. After reading The Silence of the Girls upon the recommendation of Barrie Hardymon on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, I picked up her next recommendation, Circe, by Madeline Miller. And damn, who knew a book about a divine sorceress that spans epochs could be such a page-turner?

You may remember Circe as being the sorceress who turned Odysseus' men into pigs and then fell in love with him and allowed him and his men to stay on her island for a year. She provided advice on how to get back to Ithaca (which the sailors promptly disobeyed, natch), and is generally considered another minor character in the hero's journey that is the Odyssey. However, in Circe, the witch gets her own epic, a biography that begins with her birth as daughter of the Titan, Helios (aka the Sun). She is derided by the other gods and nymphs, everyone considering her to be ugly with a reedy voice, and utterly powerless. She lurks about the palace, observing everyone else, trying to avoid their scorn, but also trying to divine what it means to be a goddess.

Circe's brothers and sisters initially seem like uninteresting characters, but as the book progresses, you realize this motley extended family has been involved in many of the most famous Greek myths. Her sister Pasiphae marries King Minos and Circe is present at the birth of the monstrous Minotaur. Her brother, Aeetes, is the father of Medea, and keeper of the Golden Fleece, which means Circe gets involved as Jason and Medea make their escape on the Argo. Every time a ship would stop by Circe's island, I would perk up thinking it must be Odysseus, but then I got an even better Greek myth instead. When Odysseus shows up in the last third of the book, you've already gotten a robust view of the incredible Circe, and come to understand Odysseus is just a very minor character in her own epic tale.

Circe is a gorgeous novel, replete with all of your favorite gods and goddesses of Greek myth, but also many seemingly minor characters that you then realize had a huge part to play in the stories that have been passed down through the ages. Madeline Miller deftly weaves together all of these stories to reveal how one goddess wields such power and influence, but ultimately the glory only goes to the famous men in the stories. In fact, her encounters with Jason and Odysseus recalled to my mind a discussion I had in college about the Greek definition of "hero." While the modern definition implies a goodness of character and doing things for the benefit of others, to the Greeks, a hero was someone who sought glory, displaying their courage, strength, or wiles. Classical heroes were not "good;" they were famous and powerful. Circe instantly notices this about Jason and Odysseus - they are men who have done many great deeds, but they are also terrible men, with quick tempers, disdain for those around them, and no real interest in being good or kind. In that sense, Circe is much closer to our modern definition of a hero.

To me, the greatest revelation in Circe is the story of why she turns the sailors who come to her island into pigs. I never thought to ask why when I read the Odyssey. It was just a given, "witches be crazy, right?!" But here, we get a remarkable story that serves to illustrate how delving into the backstory of seemingly minor mythological characters can provide rich and moving narratives that keep their stories alive for generations more. I had thought my love for classical mythology peaked in college after reading scads of Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles. But if authors like Madeline Miller and Pat Barker keep churning out books about the women in the background of these epics, I will be devouring these stories for many years to come. 

The Wife: The Woman Behind the Man

Last week, Glenn Close won a Golden Globe for Best Actress - Drama for her work in The Wife. No one seemed to begrudge her this award and all critics were raving about the performance, so I dragged myself to the theater to watch it. Boy am I glad I did.

Glenn Close plays Joan Castleman, the wife of a celebrated American novelist, Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce, who is equally remarkable in this role, the perfect foil to Close). Set in 1992, the movie opens with Joe receiving a phone call from the Nobel Committee to inform him that he has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He and Joan celebrate and head off to Sweden for the prize ceremony. As the movie proceeds, Joe is bombastic and thrilled with this honor, but Joan is increasingly reserved and troubled, going so far as to beg him not to thank her in his acceptance speech. She presents a diplomatic and calm face to the public, but when she is alone, we can see that all is not well.

The movie includes flashbacks to how Joan and Joe met - he was her writing professor at Smith College in 1958 (shout out to my Seven Sisters alums!) and married with a child. He embarked on an affair with Joan, got divorced, and the two of them moved to the Village, where Joan helped kickstart his literary career by working at a publishing house and delivering his manuscript to the right people at the right time. Of note, young Joan is played by Annie Starke, who is Glenn Close's actual daughter, which helps explain why I was so impressed at how they managed to find a woman who looked so like Close. Harry Lloyd, who plays young Joe, is far too good-looking, and neither actor can really hold a candle to Close and Pryce (obviously a high bar to clear), so I preferred to treat the flashbacks as necessary for exposition but not for any acting revelations.

I won't give away more details, because this movie unravels slowly, quietly and then dramatically revealing the cause of Joan's angst. In our #MeToo era, this is the perfect film about how women set aside their ambitions for the men in their lives or find themselves dismissed by the male establishment. Joan's literary ambitions are thwarted by male critics and publishing houses finding it difficult to take female novelists seriously, and Joe's behavior in their marriage is appalling but constantly dismissed as acceptable male hi-jinks. Watching Glenn Close slowly seethe and reach her breaking point is a true joy, and it's no wonder she's a major awards contender this year.

The screenplay was adapted by Jane Anderson from the novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer. But the movie is directed by a man, Swedish filmmaker, Bjorn Runge, which struck me as a bit odd. I could see his influence in the attention to Scandinavian detail around the Nobel goings-on, but I couldn't help wondering what this movie would be like if directed by a woman. The Glenn Close performance is magnificent, but Pryce dominates so many of the scenes. Of course, the argument could be made  that the movie reflects their actual relationship - she is quiet and retiring, while he is loud and acts like the world owes him everything. But we could have discovered even more about Joan, probed her psyche even further, and truly felt her pain over the years she spent in service to her husband. Ultimately, The Wife falls short on character development, relying more on the twisty plot to keep the audience engaged, and Glenn Close does all the work to ensure this character truly comes alive. I suppose it's the ultimate irony that she has to carry the film, and much like Joan Castleman, transform it from a mediocre piece of art to something sublime. 

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo: Organizational Psychology

Honestly, I had no desire to watch Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. I am not a big fan of reality programming, and as someone who is generally quite organized, I didn't think there was anything I would get out of watching this show. But then, as always happens, I was bored, decided to watch Episode 1, thought it was OK and hit Play Next Episode, and suddenly the weekend was over and I had bingewatched all eight episodes. Oh Netflix, I'm such a sucker for you.

For the uninitiated, Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizational consultant who has spent years teaching her clients how to de-clutter their homes. Her books are bestsellers, so it only made sense for Netflix to cash in and give her a show where she visits different families in California and teaches them her patented KonMari method to get rid of clutter and then organize what's left. It's a soothing show that could turn into something predictable and rote, but the variety of families keeps things engaging. For someone like me, the fun of the show is watching how different people acclimate to the KonMari process, and suddenly discover items that spark joy.

"Sparking joy" is the central tenet of the KonMari philosophy. She doesn't want you to throw out everything in your house. Instead, she wants you to identify the items that spark joy for you and ensure you hang on to those. By eliminating the joyless artefacts in your home, you are now bathed in the glow of only joy-sparking items that you wish to take ahead with you in your life. The 5-stage process begins with clothes, then books, paper, Komono (aka, kitchen, bathroom, garage, toys, pet supplies, etc.: a miscellaneous catch-all depending on your living situation), and finally sentimental items. Sentiment is the final stage because at that point your joy-meter is fully tuned and you'll be able to select items that truly have meaning as opposed to junk you're hanging on to for less joyful reasons.

Each stage involves grabbing every single one of those items that are in the house and piling them up into a mountain in one place. This lets you see the wealth of stuff you've accumulated, and basically shames you. Then you start to sift through, donate the majority of things to charity, and figure out ways to tidily organize what's left. I am not currently concerned about clutter - I recently moved and was perfectly adept at donating everything that did not spark joy to Goodwill. But I did enjoy watching Kondo's approach to organization. For some reason, all of the families seemed to have a lot of drawers. I don't know about you, but my apartment is completely bereft of drawers, I have always lived out of shelves. As such, I didn't find much use in the KonMari method, unless I were to buy a ton of storage boxes to stack on my shelves. However, her folding method is strangely soothing, and you can bet that all my towels are now neatly rolled up, my fitted sheets are tamed into submission, and my unmentionables have been tucked onto my shelves in the optimal fashion, sans boxes.

What struck me is how so many of these families had never learned how to organize themselves from childhood, and as such they were taking these habits into adulthood and disrupting relationships with their partners and children. Episode 3 was my favorite, with a family of four that was wholly reliant on the mother to keep them organized. Marie Kondo is such a sweet and tiny lady, and yet over the course of that episode, she miraculously whipped that family into shape. She doesn't personally seem to do much, though behind-the-scenes it seems like she was supplying a ton of boxes and organizational advice that didn't make it to the screen. But the art of her method is that it forces the people themselves to figure out their own organizational system. She only supplies the tools - they have to do the heavy lifting. By the end of that episode, the kids knew how to keep their rooms clean, the dad was helping out around the home more, and mom felt less like a guilty witch who kept pestering her family to get the house in order.

If anything, this show is a brilliant sociological petri dish, showcasing how we live now, and the ever-pervasive gender roles that exist in the most enlightened households. Over the course of eight episodes we meet families of different races, classes, and sexual orientations, and yet they all are refreshingly alike in their desperation to de-clutter, get organized, and live joyful lives. If ever there was a show designed to reveal how all human beings are the same, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is it. Turns out, no matter who you are, you cannot stand living in a messy home. 

Bohemian Rhapsody: Strut That Stuff

I love Queen's music, so I've been jonesing to see Bohemian Rhapsody for a long while. I finally got myself to the theater and now I'll be singing Somebody To Love for weeks on end. As is only right and proper.

The absolute star of the show is Rami Malek. His portrayal of the flamboyant and brilliant Freddie Mercury is a tour-de-force performance, sweaty and magnetic, much like the man himself. You'd think having extra teeth shoved in his mouth to give him Freddie's overbite would make the whole performance feel forced, but anyone who has seen Malek's intensity on Mr. Robot knows that this is a man who gives his heart and soul to every performance and won't let the audience down. He is mostly lip-syncing to the music (no actor could be expected to do justice to Freddie's four-octave vocal range) but forget his lips, his whole body is thrumming to the music from start to finish.

The rest of the cast do good work as well, showcasing the variety of personalities that were around Freddie and how they dealt with his mercurial (pun intended!) temperament. Lucy Boynton is wonderful as Mary, the love of his life, who gives the man the support he needs but also has to deal with occasional unwarranted control and jealousy. Aidan Gillen and Tom Hollander are wonderful as the band's manager and lawyer, respectively, two businessmen who nonetheless get carried away by the band's brilliance and back up their wild schemes, even if that involves making an "operatic" rock album. Allen Leech has the awful job of portraying Paul Prenter, the man who ruins everything for Freddie and the band in a Disney villain-esque fashion. And Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, and Joe Mazzello do a nice job as Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon, Freddie's fellow misfits who make up Queen. Lee and Hardy particularly get a fair amount of screentime, which makes one wonder if that's because May and Taylor were the film's creative and music consultants.

The heavy involvement of the Queen band members behind the scenes was the cause for concern for my friend Katie, who, unlike me, actually knows about the band as opposed to just loving their music. For such a die-hard music fan, the movie is far too cavalier in re-writing the band's history to suit dramatic purpose, and is heavily sympathetic to the other members by blaming their woes on Freddie's desire to pursue a solo career. Indeed, even though I know nothing about the real-life goings-on, the movie felt incredibly Hollywood, with a screenplay by Anthony McCarten that traffics in every possible cliche. The way that characters talk or express themselves feels like something out of a Rolling Stone article about the band, not something that humans would actually say in conversation. The movie's best moments are when you focus on the music - either when it's being performed on stage or arduously put together in the studio where poor Roger must scream "Galileo" at higher and higher pitches until it's a wonder his vocal cords don't snap.

Bryan Singer is the purported director of this movie but he quit a few months into the making of the film for many undisclosed reasons. The movie looks very odd in places, with cheap special effects or poor cinematography that takes you out of the film for a bit. But I found myself willing to overlook everything as long as I got to see Queen perform at Live Aid. The final twenty minutes of the film  recreate that iconic concert and it gladdens the soul to see all these songs we've watched being put together culminate in one miraculous performance that gives you goosebumps even more than thirty years later.

All I wanted when I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody was to watch Freddie Mercury strut the stage. Rami Malek strutted like no man has strutted before and my heart was glad. It is an incredible performance in an otherwise so-so film, and there's certainly something wrong with you if you don't immediately go to YouTube and start watching that Live Aid concert. Rami Malek is somebody to love indeed. 

Vice: Much Too Much

I'm not going to mince my words: Vice is a terrible movie. Halfway through watching it, I turned to my friend Katie, and literally went, "oh god, this is terrible." So if you were looking for a rave review, go elsewhere. However, for a dissection of how this movie went off the rails, read on.

Starring Christian Bale as Dick Cheney and Amy Adams as his wife Lynne, this is the story of how a "dirtbag" from Wyoming ended up becoming the most powerful Vice President in the history of the United States. The movie opens with 9/11 and Dick invoking executive authority in the Situation Room to make a lot of important decisions while the President is nowhere in sight. And then we flash back to follow his rise to power, starting off as a congressional intern to Donald Rumsfeld (played by Steve Carell, the only actor who doesn't quite manage to disappear into his role). 

The actors are the greatest thing about this movie. Christian Bale is well-nigh unrecognizable when he's portraying the older Cheney, and Amy Adams is brilliant, a veritable Lady Macbeth who drives Dick on to pursue greater and greater heights. Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush provides an awful lot of comic relief (much like the real man himself, sadly), and Tyler Perry has a rather marvelous turn as Colin Powell. But written and directed by Adam McKay, this movie is like a two-hour SNL sketch on cocaine.

You'll recognize a lot of the cinematic gimmicks and flourishes from The Big Short, McKay's previous film that served to explain the financial crisis in an engaging and informative manner. Unfortunately, in this movie, we're talking about gruesome wars and torture, not mortgage-backed securities. I don't need to repeatedly be reminded of the horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison and have scenes of bombing innocent civilians in Cambodia or Iraq unexpectedly flash up on the screen with no warning. It's a gimmick that almost trivializes those horrors. And there's the usual cameos of random actors breaking the fourth wall or text flashing up on the screen so you know exactly how important the unitary executive theory is and that it will be the point of the whole damn movie - did you not get that? Let's put it up on the screen five more times in ALL CAPS. 

Listen, I get it, Dick Cheney is an evil man. The only nice thing he does in the entire film is stand by his gay daughter, Mary, and he eventually turns on that too like a true cartoon villain. Interestingly, we get a lot more backstory about Lynne's parents and upbringing, but nothing at all about Dick's. And that's the trouble with this whole movie. It starts off with the premise, Dick Cheney is evil, so it's not interested in saying anything more beyond that. It's just going to serve up a litany of his abuses in as gruesome and offputtingly comedic a manner as possible. It is an ADHD nightmare, scampering from horror to horror, rapidly flicking through random frames of violence and apocalyptic scenarios while dreadful music plays in the background, because the audience would not otherwise understand that we are supposed to be appalled by what's happening in the White House.

Vice is a liberal scaremongering film, out to tell us about all the unprecedented authority Dick Cheney amassed while he was Vice President, so now we should all be terrified that Trump and Pence will do the same. Unlike The Big Short, where the entire audience could get behind it because we all universally agree that bankers are demon spawn, this is a movie that is guaranteed to anger half the nation and further their belief that all Democrats want to do is rabble rouse and attack Republicans. I already had a poor opinion of Dick Cheney going into this film. What I did not expect was that I would leave with a decidedly poor opinion of a liberal filmmaker. 

Green Book: Race Relations 101

Green Book won the Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award in September and initially generated a great deal of awards buzz. However, this was followed by a backlash about it being a movie about racism that caters to a white audience rather than truly reflecting the black experience. Having watched the movie after all the hullabaloo, I can agree that it's a well-done crowd pleaser that suffers from being a bit too neat and elementary.

Set in 1962 (and based on a true story), the movie stars Viggo Mortensen as Tony Vallelonga, an Italian-American bouncer from the Bronx who needs a job for two months while the night club he normally works at is closed for renovations. He interviews to be a driver for Doctor Shirley, and discovers that rather than being a doctor, Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) is a brilliant pianist who is now embarking on a multi-city tour of the Deep South. Being a black man, he needs a man of Tony's talents at navigating trouble with both finesse and his fists as needed.

What follows is your classic road movie with two diametrically opposed characters who gradually learn more about each other and develop an unlikely friendship. It's a trope as old as time, very Hollywood, but in the hands of two such fine actors, you can't really quibble. Mortensen is fantastic as the volatile and brash Tony, a man who is deeply prejudiced at the beginning, but chooses loyalty to his boss over his innate racism at key moments, thereby widening his horizons. Ali is magnificent as the dignified and mesmerizing Don, a man who can speak multiple languages, play classical and pop music with effortless grace, and has specifically chosen this tour over the easier option of staying in his swanky digs over Carnegie Hall and being revered by the Park Avenue crowd. He is out to make a point, and as he and Tony venture deeper into the Jim Crow South, things get dicier.

The title of the film is based on The Negro Motorist Guide Book, a guidebook that helped African-American travelers in the South find motels and restaurants where they could stay and dine. The movie's focus tends to be on Tony's indignation at how Don is treated; the same white people who sing his praises and are enraptured by his music are the ones who firmly remind him that he needs to use the outhouse or cannot dine in the whites-only club, only play there. There are two moments when they are stopped by cops, one time in the South and another time in the North, which makes for a very tidy contrast - however, we all know that just because you're in the North, you're not guaranteed to encounter a friendly white cop. Moments like that are where this movie is far too simplistic, and while it illustrates a lot of the blatant racism and horrors of the Jim Crow South, you see them more through Tony's eyes as a white man who is justly indignant, rather than the much more interesting perspective of Don Shirley.

The one moment in the film that truly resonated with me was when Tony kept badgering Don about how he didn't know enough about "his people." He doesn't eat fried chicken, he doesn't know who Aretha Franklin is, the list goes on. Eventually Don blows up, describing his childhood where he was sent to Leningrad as a young boy to study music and even though he can play Chopin like no one else can, record companies insist he plays popular music because there's no call for a black concert pianist. He isn't black enough for black people, but certainly not white enough for white people, so where does he belong? And that's when I knew that was the story I wanted to hear, but was sadly not going to get. Reading his Wikipedia biography subsequently, Don Shirley is a fascinating man, and this movie would have greatly benefited from taking his point of view more often. Unfortunately, when you have a screenplay written by three white men, that's going to be difficult to achieve.

Green Book is a good movie and benefits from two excellent actors giving the material all they've got. However, it makes an excellent case for the need for diversity in Hollywood behind the camera. There was an opportunity to tell a truly deep and meaningful story about a brilliant African-American man that most people have never heard of. Instead, we got a story about an Italian-American with a heart of gold who learned that black people have a hard life and his family should stop using racial slurs. This movie is good, but man, it could have been great.