Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,95
love, because they are unattached to the world of commodities, are radical propositions. The complaint that a girl is put through a sadomasochistic experience by a man in a mask misses a key element of the story that is in both book and film: the man in the mask was radicalized in the exact same way. The gender is irrelevant; the gift is everything.
And that’s not even factoring in the pleasure of the massive explosions, Buffyesque fight scenes, a sharp cast of British talent (John Hurt, Sinéad Cusack, Stephen Rea) and the pleasantly subversive fact that the adolescent son of our present prime minister, Euan Blair, was a runner for a film that takes great pleasure in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. The letdown—and I am sad to say it—is Portman herself, who continues to suffer under the weight of a beauty so great it makes Audrey Hepburn look dowdy. Even her bald-headed mug shot looks like a Vogue shoot. Compounding the problem is the kind of English accent only ever found in Swiss finishing schools and the offices of dialect coaches in Hollywood—and Long Island lingers in it still. There is a film for this beautiful girl out there somewhere. I’m just not sure what it is.
In the meantime, she throws a wrench in the works of V for Vendetta by being both too feminine and too mild for a story that in book form was an act of fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was not “Blow up the Houses of Parliament” or “Wear a white mask and knife people,” for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The message of V for Vendetta is “Change is possible.” In its film form this is a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the message of the first Matrix movie: the world is other than it seems. If this film makes kids think that way again, that’ll be, like, totally awesome.
The premise of Tsotsi is terrific. A young thug from a South African township shoots a middle-class black woman in the stomach and drives off in her car. A mile down the road he hears a baby crying in the backseat. The audience gasps in that odd mixture of surprise and recognition that great storytelling affords. Everything flows from this point with the inevitability and moral didacticism of the Moses story. But the setting is fascinating; everything is news: the township shacks, the glamorous black middle class, the tube station, the concrete rings in which orphaned children sleep out in the open air. At the center is Tsotsi himself (Presley Chweneyagae), who needs no mask to commit his acts of terror—his face is a mask. In a scene so menacing it outpaces the deadliest moments of Scarface itself, he stalks a crippled man through a train station, a beast on the hunt. Frantic local hip-hop, kwaito, choreographs his frenetic impulse to violence; gospel swells as we glimpse the possibility of redemption in a boy who seemed lost to all pity. I wept throughout the last fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, unlike the woeful 50 Cent movie, this film—from which young black men could genuinely profit—will be seen by Ekow Eshun and nobody else. It will not sell for five quid on the Kilburn High Road, and no one will pass it around a playground.
TRANSAMERICA AND ROMANCE & CIGARETTES
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Just before Humbert Humbert meets Mrs. Haze, the mother of the girl who will go on to obsess and destroy him, his gaze falls on “an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest.” This tennis ball has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand themes of Lolita—it “just is,” and in this is beautiful. Many films attempt to master the art of the little moment, the unnecessary aside, the “just is” that makes the work human, and not merely a contrivance of art.
Transamerica is almost entirely contrived, desperately panting after the Oscars it did not, in the end, win—but hidden within its improbable plot and grotesqueries dressed up as humans, there is a policeman looking at the duty roster of the previous night and finding the crime for which a seventeen-year-old drug-using hustler has been locked up overnight: “This is a new one: apparently he shoplifted a frog.” Neither the frog nor the incident is mentioned again, but I gift a whole extra star to this