the damned united (d. tom hooper; w. peter morgan)

There's a moment when what one takes to be Nigel Clough, a fine midfielder in his day, is sitting in the back of his father's car and reading something like Shoot magazine. It's 1974 and he must be about the same age as me, an 8 year old absorbed in the farcical detail of football. Eight year old's tend to know quite a lot, more than they're given credit for, and one wonders what young Nigel made of his dad's leading Leeds to their worst start in many a season, including a home defeat to QPR, sadly not featuring footage of Stan Bowles, the one man Brian has told his bunch of Leeds terriers to stop. Bowles, so my memory tells me, had a dissolute flair, something he had in common with Clough, the subject of the movie. It's the kind of flair which seems less and less common in the British game (which was always distrustful of flair) - names like Currie, Hudson, Marsh, Osgood etc used to light up our culture, a direct link to perhaps the last true flair player of them all, Gascoigne, as though brilliance, the capacity to make the jaw drop in wonder, is no longer the preserve of the British psyche.

Sadly, Hooper's movie echoes this trend. The idea is interesting enough, but this feels in the end like a workmanlike, mid-table kind of movie, run by a cautious board more worried about the perils of dropping down the leagues (doing a Leeds or a Derby or Forest) than tilting for glory. There's one scene in the film, when Clough rails at the Derby chairman, which explicitly refers to this kind of insipid cultural approach, with Clough pointing out that without his genius Derby would still be scraping around in the then second division. That the script should put its finger on the creative conundrum which links both cinema and football; the need to balance ambition with caution on the financial playing field; only for the film to then retreat from Clough's challenge, seems perhaps indicative of the culture we inhabit. Smart enough to know the rules, but never brave enough to break them.

Elsewhere, Morgan's script is functional but rarely flies. Odd notes of exposition sneak in (as Clough explains his rivalry with Revie to Taylor for the benefit not of Taylor, who surely knows this, but the audience), and a noticeable trope continues to dominate the narrative, of two powerful men headed for inevitable confrontation (The Deal; Frost/ Nixon; Last King of Scotland). However, in this instance, the Clough/ Revie rivalry feels contrived (which is not to say that it is); a somewhat clunky narrative tool to explain Clough's maverick ambition. As even the most casual follower of English football knows, Clough was in another league to Revie. Even if he needed the impetus of the rivalry, it is only a mechanism of his ambition, not the root (much as Ferguson loves to stimulate rivalries with any other manager who threatens him, from Wenger to Keegan). The scene which really seemed to reveal the serrated tension which made Clough tick was the one where he cannot bear to watch the match and hides away in the bowels of the stadium instead, agonising as the minutes pass. Here was a glimpse of the nervous tension which Clough channelled into his management; however the film's psychological portrait of Clough remained too skin deep, too thinly veined, to live up to the intensity this moment revealed.

Which takes us to Sheen's performance. Sheen's a clever actor, and a talented one. But the more of these turns that he does, the more one starts to wonder if he's really a soulful one. Perhaps he is, but at the moment it feels as though the mimicry, the details and the finickity ambition to embody the subject he's playing are in danger of getting in the way of his engagement with that subject. His Clough feels like looking at a near flawless reproduction of the real thing: it's very impressive, but it's never quite the real thing, and if anything the flawlessness draws attention to that gap that exists between the impression and the reality. Rather than involving the audience in the story it acts as a kind of Brechtian alienation technique, and I'm not convinced that's the object of the exercise, or if it is I'm not convinced the director realised this.

As much British cinema seems to do now, The Damned United indulges in a nostalgic vision of Britain before the dawn of Sky Sports or the Premier League, when stadiums were run down and men were men. The local colour has its moments, and there is a sense of a lost England, one where Derby County could win the league. However, within this context, the way it affected the characterisation seemed unconvincing, nowhere more so than in the depiction of the fag-smoking Leeds team, who seemed like a bunch of Dickensian raggamuffins, with their surly attitudes and curly locks. The notion seemed to be that back in those more innocent days, you could become the best team in the country through sheer thuggishness, and footballing ability was a secondary requisite. Leeds under Revie were just the biggest thugs on the block. Even if there is a germ of truth in this, the whole thing is drawn out and caricatured to absurd levels. And it also conveniently ignores the fact, as noted above, that back in the day, there were players of remarkable flair, individuals, who flowered in the then first division. The pathos of what has been lost might have been all the stronger had the script found a way to connect with the fate of Clough's teams in the 21st Century. And talking of pathos, if that's the right word, there seemed to be some going with the end note stating that Clough (and Taylor) were the first and only British managers to retain the European cup, on a day when Ferguson was poised but failed to emulate them. It does seem in some way indicative of the film's weaknesses that the moments that were really powerful and evocative were the documentary shots at the end of the strange duo on the bench, or being interviewed, moments when the full extent of Clough's almost disconcerting, messianic genius finally shone through.

synecdoche, new york (w&d charlie kaufman)

Curzon Soho. Friday afternoon. London. The leaps between place and place seem so straightforward. No one bats an eyelash at the notion of being on one side of the world one week and another the next. Technology, it is revealed, has shrunk the globe, as though borders and oceans are on the point of extinction.

OK, so that's all a bit rhetorical and actually its not as though I can pop across to where I've been for a quick chivito and Patricia any time soon, nor as though I could have leapfrogged back to a London cinema to catch any of the films I might have missed these past three Montevidean months. However, all the same, one hopes the reader will indulge the conceit. Which sets the writer up for a point of encounter with this most peculiar of films, out on a spatial limb all of its own, a limb which appears at first to be the twin towns of the title, but reveals itself to be in fact a locus in the author's brain, a place so far removed from the everyday that only Kaufman can hope to know it, him and perhaps Malkovich.

However, I still haven't reached my point, as I battle against time and its literary economies, which is that no matter how comfortable a modern audience might be with the notion of geographical fluidity, we haven't really begun to get to grips with temporal fluidity. Which is what Kaufman uses to really mess with his public's heads. Something he tricked around with in Eternal Sunshine... but which he goes to town with in Synechdoche. If you can't get lost in space anymore, you can get still get lost in time. So as PS Hoffman succeeds in ageing ten years in five minutes, and then another how many more in how many more minutes, as his daughter goes from beguiling child to a tattooed German pole dancer in less than half an hour, Kaufman succeeds in doing our heads in in a way that Dali or Lynch would be proud of.

As for the rest of it... Watching this of a Friday afternoon it really felt as though perhaps cinema (and consciousness) had moved on in the months of my Latin American exile, and now films are made differently and people think differently and we've entered some kind of post post modern age of enlightened complexity which won't reach Uruguay for another six months or so (they're generally a bit behind) and I'll be forever lost in the limbo. Admittedly its all been done by Pirandello, or Ionescu, or some other old-school modern maverick, but no-one ever gave them millions of dollars and a host of stars to play with, and a budget sufficient to make the worlds in their heads spring to realisable life. So, I thought, Synechdoche is the arrival of the future, the collapse of the fifth dimension, the breakthrough that will take us beyond death.

Then I walked out into the world with Mr Kemp and we were herded into playpens outside pubs and loud people in suits made jokes that weren't funny and I learnt that the film had been a commercial disaster and I realised I was wrong, that nothing had actually changed all that much, I hadn't died and gone to Synedoche heaven, all is as it was... This is merely another taster, of how we will think when we learn to stammer better, burn houses more theatrically, take more pride in our depression and generally revel more in messing with brains, both our own, our public's and in particular, Mr Kaufman's. To return the favour. As would only be polite.

Now then. Where's the beef? (Asado, churrasco, milanesa, chivito, molleca, chorizo, morcilla, rinones, or whatever else that's good on the menu) Como? No estoy en Kansas mas? Bueno, in that case I'll just have a full english. Good to be back.

espía a una mujer que se mata (d daniel veronese)

The Argentinians have arrived in town. The Sala Muniz is sold out. The whole of my cast has come to see the show, and it seems as though collectively they know every single person in the audience.

Whilst the theatre seems to be bursting at the seams, a party due to break out at any moment, the stage itself, awaiting its actors, is a restricted, slightly ugly space, made out of plywood, a cheap set nestled within the theatre’s generous proportions. It’s diamond shaped, with a few old chairs and a table, on which sits an old revolver, with doors to either side and a small hatch in the back wall. An old man and a younger girl amble on. They start to talk, quietly, as though they weren’t in a theatre. Two faces spy on them through the hatch. The girl makes as if to threaten the old man with the gun, but he quietens her and takes it away, telling her they need to save it for the final scene.

Other characters appear. They are all drinking. One is called Vanya. I know this is an adaptation of Chekhov, but I can’t remember Uncle Vanya and anyway it doesn’t matter as the actors are talking about Ostrovsky and Genet and theatre, and there’s a hint of Pirandello, and the actors keep on drinking and all of a sudden they’re all roaring drunk, incapacitated, falling over each other, all of this taking place on their tiny handkerchief of a stage. And Sonya’s in love with the doctor who fancies Elena, who Vanya’s in love with only she’s not in love with either of them and she’s not even in love with her husband, Sonya’s father, Alexander, who was the old man at the start of the scene, but gradually all the connections start to make sense, like a whisky, natch, vodka dream, a night swimming, the characters gravitating round the space like fish in a bowl, a ceaseless fluid movement which seems more real than reality.

An Argentinian Chekhov, with all the unfulfilled dreams of the ever dreaming characters played out in some backwater where people speak as though they’re singing. The play reminded me a little of La Cienega, Lucretia Martel’s film, an old family holed up in its old house lost somewhere in the middle of a vast country. The Argentine dolefulness acting as a perfect foil to the Russian melancholy. A company so in tune with itself that it almost seems to deny the need for space, as though it could indeed perform the play in a nutshell, if the need arose.

camera lucida [w. roland barthes]

It doesn’t feel entirely correct to be writing ‘a review’ of Camera Lucida or anything written by Barthes. This brief book, the last that he wrote, is one I’ve read various times over the years. I don’t know what made me return to it, but it’s slim and taxing and encapsulates the way in which Barthes writes in what appears to be a complex, intellectual fashion, but in fact his words are imbued with passion about issues of emotion, humanity, love and how we live our lives in our brief span.

Ostensibly this is a book about photography, about what makes a photograph a photograph (as opposed to a film or a chair or an ice cream.) Barthes analyses a range of photos, pursuing his personal reactions, trying to see what they have in common. This leads to a succession of observations about the way in which photographs function, and what makes, from his point of view, one photograph more interesting than another.

However, this leads him to the most important photograph he knows, which is one of his late mother as a child. The value of this photo is that it, in some alchemical way, for him, captures something of the essence of his mother, in a way no other photograph did. Barthes explores his relationship with this unseen photograph, which leads him towards the relationship between photography and death, the way in which the photo would appear to renege death, it becomes one of the only human inventions which can stand in its way. Whatever has been photographed has been, and its existence cannot be denied. Thus, the book becomes an investigation into the connections between time, death, memory and truth.

Without trying to summarise his thoughts in any great detail, its perhaps safe to say that Camera Lucida is also a requiem for his mother, and, given the irony of the fact that this is the last book he wrote before he died, himself. That the essence of a person should live on, that mortality can adapt itself through the interference of light on paper, (or now, pixels) is some kind of strange modern achievement, of which photography itself is barely cognizant. However, Barthes observes, even this is a deception, for photographs themselves fade, the ink receding with time, and the truth that is written in the arrangement of ink on a page is transient too. In this sense, it could be that photographs are a kind of liminal purgatory, a whisper of breath, of the soul, which clings to the material, knowing this is a futile gesture, doomed to obsolescence.

It is entirely fitting that there is no photograph of Barthes himself in the book. However, as he must have been aware, his words contain more of his self, whatever that is, than any photo ever could. But that’s another story.

gran torino [d. eastwood]

Clint. They love him here as much as anywhere. The 10.45 showing at Cine Punta Carretas is sold out, as was the screening before. When we leave the cinema, Ana asks me if I like Clint. And I genuinely can’t answer. I don’t know what I think. Clint is like the Grand Canyon, I say. He’s there. You can’t like or dislike him anymore than you can like or dislike the Grand Canyon. Ana says she’s never been to the Grand Canyon, and I acknowledge that neither have I. She doesn’t seem to think my theory makes much sense, but it’s the only one I have.

What you can say about Clint is that he knows how to make a film. He knows what you need, what you don’t need. You need a sympathetic if flawed hero with a journey to go on. You need others to learn from that journey. You need bad guys who will be overcome. You need lashings of Vietnamese food, men talking like men, and a shoot-out at the end. OK the last three aren’t essential. Gran Torino is both an affectionate paean to the fading frontier values of the United States, and a jaundiced side swipe at the way those values have become corroded by its consumer culture. In a way it’s a film that’s all about neighbourliness, and society, with the Huong Vietnamese community that has moved into Clint’s barrio possessing these virtues which his own white community has neglected. I could go on a tangent about child rearing in the affluent West in comparison to other, poorer parts of the world, but it’s not strictly speaking relevant.

At the heart of the film, as ever, is Clint, a figure who has become symbolic of something of which no-one’s entirely sure what. A kind of individualistic, libertarian icon, gun-toting, unafraid to use violence if he feels the need is there. And yet even this apparently self-evident image is undercut by the film’s closing sequence, where Walt rejects the way of the gun, and the audience isn’t given what they expect. Which could be construed as something of a betrayal by those who have bought into the image Clint has been steadfastly cultivating over decades (with the help of Leone).

Maybe Clint himself doesn’t know what to make of Clint, as he ages, a journey shared by his character Walt. When Walt talks about killing lots of men in the war, it could be Clint talking about the trail of bodies in his cinematic career. The way of the gun is seductive and efficacious, as well as being crowd pleasing, but is there a hint of regret for a career chiselled from the eyes of a figure who’s unafraid to kill?

2666 (bolaño)

At one point in my university career, I read Foucault’s The Order of Things. (Les Mots et Les Choses). I don’t think it was part of the syllabus, I’d just become sufficiently possessed by the Foucault bug that I decided it had to be read. At a subsequent tutorial I sat down and said to the professor, Joanna Hodge, that I’d finished it. She looked at me, and I looked at her. There was a sort of silence, a sort of hmmm-filled silence. Which contained, it seemed to me, the knowledge that there was no real place to begin to discuss The Order of Things, a work so vast in its erudition, imagination and theoretical potential that it seemed to defy the initial stages of overview and reflection. The words to achieve this lay not within our grasp.

I’d like to think that we didn’t talk about the book at all, recognising the futility of any attempt, but I can’t remember the rest of the tutorial. I’d also like to think that when sentient beings sit down at their university tutorials to discuss 2666, a similar hmmm-shaped silence will pervade the preliminaries. Because this book is a monster. Una bestia, as they might say here. Fortunately I’ve had plenty of time to wrestle with the monster, because it demands time and effort of its readers.

Shortly before leaving England, Mr Blue called me and told me to switch the radio on. Someone was talking about the book. I switched it on too late, but was informed that the man on the radio had opined this was not a book to read on a plane. So I read it on the plane. And on the beach. And whenever I could find any down time between London and South America. I entered the strange land of Bolañismo, and lived to tell the tale, lugging the book around like a failsafe.

The first challenge of this book is that, unlike The Savage Detectives, it’s 5 books in one. None of which, save perhaps the last, have a traditional beginning or end. Which might make them all middle, but I’m not sure that’s right. The 5 books – sub-headed as The Parts About The Critics; Amalfitano; Fate; The Crimes and Archimboldi are connected by threads which are geographical and thematic. All are partially set in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa; four of them feature the auto-didact German author Archimboldi. In all of them the smell of murder and sexual violence is never very far away; in the part about The Crimes it’s pervasive.

The part about The Crimes is the book’s anchor in so far as it secures Santa Teresa as the mooring point for the book’s diverse stories, but also in so far as its relentless description of brutal murder after brutal murder weighs the book down. It is true: this part is not airport fare. Rarely has reading felt like such an oppressive process. Bolaño traces, over the course of almost a decade, a procession of murders of women in the city. His account is based on the real-life sequence of murders which took place there. (About which there are now two films, one featuring J-Lo). Whether what the reader reads is an account of the real murders or not is another point of disconcertion. Did the writer really research every crime? Knowing where the bodies were found and how each woman was allegedly killed? And if not, how could he make it up? The elision between truth and fiction is disturbing. Furthermore, it feels as though the writer is in some way punishing his readers. Because the natural (humane) inclination of the reader is to expect some kind of resolution to the brutality, some assertion of hope, but none is forthcoming; the murders seem more a condition of life, like weather, than an aberration. This is how the world is, and the reader needs to accept it, or cast the book aside.

There are a great deal of literary references in the book, as always with Bolaño. Some of which I got, many of which I missed. The name De Sade does crop up, and at one point a Mexican general asserts that the fullest flowering of pornography occurred slightly before the time of The French Revolution. There is something Sadistic about the Part About the Crimes (with more than a hint of 120 Days Of Sodom). Furthermore it’s interesting where it’s located within the book. The opening three sections have already engendered a sense of fear for any female who goes out in Santa Teresa – a fear which the text plays on with the re-introduction of Amalfitano’s daughter in the part about Fate. So the extended description of the murders is not written to scare the reader, or invoke pity for the victims, which has already been done – rather it might be said to be there as an instrument the author uses in order to bludgeon the reader to death.

+++

On which note, and because I both have the time and the book (it seems to me) demands that the time is taken, I shall pause, and head off to rehearse in the low-rise, Latino backstreets of Jacinto Vera, a kind of amiable mirror image to the hellish vision of Santa Teresa. And later attempt to talk a little about the other side of the book, the untethered strands which float away from the Mexican shipwreck, occupying warmer, Baltic, climes.

+++

As ever, Bolaño writes about writers. Besides Santa Teresa, the book is also constructed around a mysterious, reclusive German writer, Benno von Archimboldi. The opening part, about The Critics, describes the quest of three academics who specialise in Archimboldi’s work to locate the writer, a quest which also takes them to Santa Teresa. Quite what the links are between Archimboldi and Santa Teresa is a question which will no doubt preoccupy academics studying Bolaño, who will find themselves heading to Mexico looking for the answers, and sometimes it feels as though the whole book has been written to manufacture this conceit. Bolaño writes brilliantly about writing, a subject closer to his heart, perhaps, than any other. His literary range is gigantic, his tread traversing peaks that many readers will never have heard of. There’s a kind of parlour game to be played, trying to spot the references, many of them contemporary. Is there a hint of McCarthy in Fate’s crossing of the border? There certainly appears to be suggestions of Pynchon in the book’s vast internationalism, but perhaps the connection merely goes with the territory. The similarities between Alan Pauls’ perverse, deranged British artist and the one who stalks the pages of the opening part about The Critics seems too co-incidental not to be some kind of homage, and on page 60 there is an indubitable reference to Rodrigo Fresan and his novel Kensington Gardens. This is not to mention the contributions of Goethe; Bely; Doblin; Shakespeare and the host of other writers who participate in one way or another. It’s no surprise that perhaps the most idyllic, least threatening, scene in the whole book takes place in a contented publishing house, where the employees happily swap notes about writers through the ages. As though the world of literature in some ways acts an antidote to the savagery of humanity.

The depiction of Archimboldi himself, so presaged by the book’s preceding six hundred pages, reflects Bolaño’s tenderness towards the literary. The foreboding giant doesn’t really live up to psychotic expectations. Here there’s an indication of the other side of the book’s tender nature; which is to create a space for the inarticulate, or the losers. Flawed character after flawed character is allocated their idiosyncrasies (none more so than the paranoid eccentric Amalfitano) and these are treated with great respect. Whilst Bolaño is a writer capable of articulating great menace, and literary caprice, he is also something of a patron saint of lost causes, the ones whose stories are seemingly lost to the world, recovered at the last.

En tonces… as they say down here. These are the last words of Bolaño, apparently, the great tome which was completed, or nearly completed, shortly before his death. Already the book would appear to be being canonised, in a manner which probably wouldn’t entirely displease him. He knew his worth, mas o menos. What does 2666 reveal in the end? Allowing that generalities are only assertions founded on stories which contain other stories which contain still more stories and so on. It tells us that great books don’t have to be neat and tidy. In fact, it probably helps if they’re not. Bolaño wrote two of them, and his second is fractured, like a broken body. Literature is not a precise science. It’s some kind of search, for some kind of something. Not for nothing is the detective novel his chosen model in both the Savage Detectives and 2666, where the reader is the detective, trying to assemble the clues both to solve the terrible crimes, but also to unlock the maverick authorial message. Literature is an offshoot of the world of literature, and though it is not essential to be aware of that, it might help. Culture, no matter how remotely, serves a purpose. The world, the one we know as humans, is a world composed of stories.

the wrestler (d. aronofsky, w. robert d siegel)

The Wrestler is a skilful piece of film making. This deduction is possible because when you look at the narrative, at what’s going on in the film, it’s all fairly silly. (Said without wanting to sound too English). The Ram basically commits hari-kiri, using his sizeable heart by-pass wound and a fat old man who goes under the stage name of The Ayatollah to carry out the deed. This because he went out and got ‘fucked-up’ when he should have been making amends with his estranged daughter, who as a result becomes even more estranged. The lap dancer who doesn’t fancy him suddenly does and quits it all to convince him not to commit hari-kari, but because he's such a complete and total fuck-up he goes ahead and does it anyway.

Maybe this is supposed to be a warped commentary on the American dream. It makes for a lot of potential schmaltz and vaguely preposterous narrative turns, but, in spite of all this, the film kind of works.

There’s doesn’t seem to be too much doubt where the credit for this lies. Firstly Aronofsky, who shows he can pull off the multi-faceted Soderburgh trick. The grainy, restless hand-held photography successfully conveys the bleakness of some of the colder, duller parts of the US. It also adds a pseudo-documentary feel to the investigation of the wrestling sub-culture the film is set in. The participants don’t feel like Hollywood actors faking it – they feel like the real, unadorned thing. In addition to this, no one does screen violence better than Aronofsky. It’s often wince-making, and again, even when it’s clearly fake, (as in the meat-slicer scene), he pulls it off. There’s a kind of meta-text at work here: the fakeness of the wrestling violence is reflected in the fakeness of movie violence, and as a result the audience really doesn’t know what hurts and what just look like it hurts. Consequently, when it doesn’t just look like it hurts, but looks like it really looks like it hurts, the violence is hyper-effective, and we feel Rourke/ Ram’s pain all the more.

Rourke is the second reason the film works. It’s a performance which succeeds as much for its under-statement as its over-statement, and this is what separates it from other renowned macho performances. The moments of reflection which suggest that all the pain he’s endured (or faked) has taught him something, that something in part being the uselessness of a macho approach. The performance is a sly commentary on North American values; emphasising both the abrasive charm of a macho posture, but also its suicidal boneheadedness. In this regard The Wrestler might well be the full stop at the end of eight years of neo-con government.

three monkeys (d nuri bilge ceylan, w. ceylan & ebru ceylan / ercan kessel)

This was the last film he watched before fleeing England. His pursuers not really external, they were internal, and besides, it might have been argued that the true object of his flight resided in the place he was headed for.

Was Three Monkeys an appropriate film to watch under these circumstances? I would like to be able to tell the reader that yes, this film was the one that compounded or concretised or validated or whatever other mangled word sprung to mind his flight. That in its brooding Istanbul melodramacy, he perceived a key which neither his hometown nor the place of his flight had ever revealed. That as he watched the, (it emerged) revelatory titled Three Monkeys, the key turned, his lock was sprung, and he prised from the narrative’s own locked algorithm the solution to it all.

However, to suggest this would be to deceive. And although deceit and its consequences were the raw materials of Three Monkeys, and although the film did indeed brood with an intense, near-catastrophic Turkish gloom, signalled by random events whose significance would never be known, only gleaned, (the son’s assault; the man’s visit to the mosque; the son’s brutal vomiting; the wife’s red nightdress), these things in the end cloyed his impatient mind, (impatient to flee), leaving him with a sense of frustration rather than epiphany.

Sometimes a film can skewer you to your soul; at others it skids past like a long-lost lover avoiding you in the street.

revolutionary road (d. mendes, w.justin haythe)

Article 1. Wo sind die kinder?

Towards the end of the film, the last time the Wheelers will see one another, after their long night of the soul, April decides to pretend for the benefit of Frank, and makes him breakfast. She says something along the lines of - 'I sent the kids away, as I thought you'd like to have a quiet breakfast before your big day'. At which point one is tempted to scream: What kids! Admittedly their two children have been glimpsed, upon occasion. But miraculously, every time the Wheelers have one of their bust-ups (frequently) or invite the all-seeing mad man round for lunch (twice) or need to go out - the kids vanish. Who looks after them? Where do they go? Why are they so conveniently absent? The reason this seems important is that this is a film seeking to capture a raw emotional honesty - it could be argued its the whole premise and raison d'etre for the making of the movie - but right there you have this massive child shaped gap, suggesting a void at the heart of all this truth, a lack of emotional honesty. There's one very good dramatic reason for absenting the children so much: the movie strives to ensure that the audience retains sympathy for the Wheelers, in particular April, in spite of the nasty way they act towards one another. If the audience were to glimpse the suffering their actions imparted to their children, their sympathy quotient would plummet.

Article 2. Paradise Lost involves losing a paradise.

The film opens with a roadside argument. It feels as though this will be a pivotal moment. The rot has set in and the slide towards marital disintegration has begun. This is fair enough. Except that, within the context of the film, it's not a pivotal moment. Because the audience is never shown what has been lost. We're asked to buy into the notion that the Wheelers possessed some unique, Fitzgeraldian glow, without being given any evidence for it. (If there is any template for Revolutionary Road the movie, not the book which I haven't read, it's surely  Tender is The Night, which endows the Divers with a similar, although articulated mystique.) A few fragmentary flashbacks aside, the narrative dwells exclusively in the section of the arc that has crossed the yardarm. In effect, what this means is that an audience's real reason for accepting the (vital) premise that these characters have something magical about them (which they lose) is the fact they're played by very famous and beautiful people. Which is a bit of a trick, when all's said and done - the conceit being that because these very famous and beautiful people are so special, then the Wheelers must be too. 

Article 3: The Meta-narrative. 

This is a bit more discursive. Mendes has been the key overseer over recent decades in the evolution of a kind of boutique theatre, initiated at the Donmar, his highly successful London HQ, a product of its late-Thatcher, Blairite era. This has seen the creation of a meticulously cast and packaged brand of theatre, which takes calculated risks to create an expensive cultural product, consumed avariciously by its affluent consumers. A couple of years ago Mendes quit the Donmar, in part to exercise his ambitions to make movies, in part, one likes to think, because he recognised that what he was doing there was, in a way, creatively bankrupt. An exercise in capitalism as much as theatre. In this sense, Mendes was, within the meta-narrative of the film, Frank Wheeler. Around the time he quit he also hooked up with Winslet, who is April within the meta-narrative as well as the film. Winslet, a partner whose filmic cultural framework offers Mendes the opportunity for redemption. It comes as no surprise that much of the film becomes an exercise in Mendes capturing Winslet, luminescent, tragic, striving towards a broader personal frontier, striving to get to Paris. The raw emotional honesty Revolutionary Road seeks to capture is testament to their brave new creative world. However, just as it's harder for a rich man to get to heaven than not enjoy the sight of Kidman taking her clothes off on the Donmar stage, the last place to go in search of raw emotional truth-telling is Hollywood. Where the very budgets themselves conspire to wrap your truths in a tasteful package of well-framed shots with excessive amounts of extras. No matter how desperately hand-held it all gets towards the conclusion. Hollywood cannot offer the Wheelers cinematic redemption. There's only one place to go for that, but you have to be able to speak the language. And that's Paris.

My friend told me in the pub after watching the film that if you're on facebook you can poke Godard. Maybe Sam should give him a nudge and see if that spawns the missing children.

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao (junot diaz)

To start at the beginning of our relationship. Mine and Junot's. There's a certain novelistic circularity. Back in 1994, when I was given the nickname Y&T, and living in Montevideo, a North American friend, who I would never see again, called Chrissie Ehrick, who was studying some aspect of the politics of Battle and its relationship to feminism, I suspect, gave me a book called Drown to read, written she said, by a New Yorker. And although there was plenty going on that year, more than enough to keep me busy, I read it.

Drown was a collection of short stories that propelled Diaz onto the map as a literary prodigy. Apart from the fact it seemed more hispanic than gringo, I can't for the life of me remember a thing about it.  Not a character nor a storyline. I don't even remember if I liked it.

Fast forward fifteen years (that's quite a few years in relationship-time) and I, on the point of returning to Montevideo for my first extended stay since 1994, find myself reading Diaz again. Not that he's been exactly prolific. God knows what he's been up to all this time, but it certainly hasn't been getting books published. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was only published last year. As is the way of relationships, I've changed and so has he. Although how much I can't tell, as I don't remember what he used to be like. But I do know he's grown up into a full-blooded novelist, and whatever stopped him writing novels (or getting stuff published) for fifteen years didn't mean he wasn't working on it. (I'll wikipedia him in a moment and no doubt all will be revealed.)

This book wouldn't have had as much of an impact on me back then, just like I don't think he'd have written it. Why? Because, it is, in large part, about growing up. The pains of. Underneath the book, hidden away in the corners, is a narrator, who grows up alongside Oscar and his sister Lola, his story tucked away in the margins. Maybe that's Junot, maybe it's not, he sure as hell flirts with making us think it might be.

Or maybe Junot has more in common with the tragic nerd, Oscar, the hero of his book. Or one of them. Not every day a book manages to make one of nature's losers into its hero, but Oscar is all these things. Hero, nerd and loser. Cursed by the fate of his family, and the family cursed by the island they come from. An island cursed by Columbus, and maybe whoever else came before him.

Like all the best books, he says with gross generalisation, The Brief Life is about a lot of things: Trujillo; Dictators; The Dominican Republic; girls; boys; sex; grannies; moms; growing up, and its eternally recurring inevitability. Threaded through the book are enough literary references to keep his students happy (the flyleaf tells us Snr Diaz has been teaching). But more importantly, threaded though the book, is a warm skein of what they call, in the places they know it, humanity. Which preserves the nerds and history's losers, in spite of the power of the ones who think they're winning. 

In one of his many footnotes, Diaz mentions Rushdie with reference to the constant clash of dictators and writers. He says that the reason dictators feel threatened by writers is they recognise competition when they see it. Through telling the simple stories of good people who suffered at the hands of the bad guys, with all bad guy roads in the Dominican Republic leading to Trujillo, Diaz adds his shot to the war between writers and dictators, doing his best to ensure that history's last words won't be written by the 'winners'. So, in addition to the fact this is a beautifully written, very funny and kind of moving and all those other key novel-ticking- boxes book... The Brief Life is also deeply political, and that's just another reason why you should be reading it before you go to Montevideo, or the pub, or the succeeding phase of adulthood, or wherever it is you're headed to next.