Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Money's
Too Tight to Mention
(Days and Clouds and W., 11/3/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Americans
are justifiably proud of how we do things. But not everybody is so enamored
of the American model of doing business. Europeans, in particular, see
the ease in which U.S. employees can be fired from their jobs as frightful—to
them, as Willy Loman said in Death of a Salesman, a man should
not be disposed of like a piece of fruit.
Silvio Soldini's Days and Clouds
is a poignant playing out of this nightmare scenario. Michele (Antonio
Albanese) is a high-level manager who's forced out of his job in a corporate
shake-up. Stripped of his livelihood and his dignity, he's forced to
turn to his former employees and his daughter for help. The disaster
has an equally devastating effect on his wife Elsa (Margherita Buy),
a promising doctoral student in art history who's forced to abandon
her work for a series of soul-destroying jobs. As pleasant memories
of their former life fade—their nice house, trips abroad they can
no longer dream of affording—the screaming sound of a family ripping
apart becomes appalling and, ultimately, heartbreaking.
Released in Italy in 2007, Days
and Clouds has—tellingly—gotten minimal theatrical exposure
in the US. (Soldini's last effort, Bread and Tulips, was a much
sunnier affair that played on far more domestic screens.) Commendably,
Soldini never lets the film descend into bathos—Michele and Elsa
are on the wrong end of a losing struggle, but their descent has its
lighter moments and, fleetingly, its minor triumphs. Spoiler alert:
these characters don't end up living on the street, wearing apple barrels.
Alas, here in Sarah Palin's Shining
City on a Hill, we prefer this kind of story to be played for laughs,
as in the Jim Carrey vehicle Fun with Dick and Jane. But as many
Americans may soon find out, there's nothing much fun about getting
the rotten fruit treatment.
* * *
Sure,
with the end is in sight, we can all laugh about the plague that is
George W. Bush. Round about 2000, and again in 2004, things didn't seem
so ripe for comedy. Now the joke appears to be on us, with even loyal
Bushies starting to wonder at a legacy of two incomplete wars, a major
city devastated, our justice system corrupted, our international repute
in tatters, and now—as the cherry on top—the foundations of
our prosperity in doubt.
All of which is to say that the
release of Oliver Stone's biopic W. is about as well timed as
it could be. Stone further defies expectations, however, by giving us
not only a half-facetious portrait of our worst president ever, but
a half-sympathetic one. Hewing pretty close to Bob Woodward-mediated
inside story, W. manages to wring painful laughs from the disaster
without becoming an SNL-style lampoon. Perhaps the most surprising thing
about it is that Stone—a notorious political paranoic—declines
to present Bush's policies as the result of some larger conspiracy.
As framed in Stanley Weiser's script, the life of George W. is merely
one of tragedy, where the extremely ordinary son of a privileged family
gets to work out his resentment against a cold, judgmental father (James
Cromwell) on a stage that is, unfortunately, big enough to include all
of us.
W. isn't the definitive account
of the worst presidency ever. That's faint criticism, though—nobody
can reasonably expect a Hollywood movie to accomplish that. For a deeper
understanding, we'll have to do something George W. himself has been
loathe to do: open a book .
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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