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The Magnificent Meyersons – Wandering Wisdom

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“Sometimes, I wish God would just reach down and give the world a big old shake, you know?”

One day. One family. And it all gets shaken up a bit. Evan Oppenheimer’s The Magnificent Meyersons is a peripatetic search for understanding what it means to live in a world that may or may not have a god, in which right and wrong may or may not be relative, in which the future and the past may or may not hold the answers. And it’s a comedy (sort of).

We wander through the streets of New York along with four upper middle class adult siblings: Daphne (Jackie Burns), the older daughter, who is struggling with not being quite fulfilled as a mother, wife, or at work; Roland (Ian Kahn), the older son, who is a confident businessman, but perhaps a bit overprotective of his daughter; Daniel (Daniel Eric Gold), the younger son, a rabbinical student who may or may not have faith; and Susie (Shoshannah Stern), the younger daughter, who is deaf and seeking to make her way as a realtor. There are also interludes involving their mother (Kate Mulgrew) and memories of their absent father (Richard Kind).

Note that the term “peripatetic” means to walk around, to wander. As the day progresses, each of the siblings sit or stroll through the city talking to friends or family about any variety of things. The subjects are just as wandering as the people in the film: the existence of God, what makes man [sic] unique among the animals, what it means to be successful, what makes us happy, and if the past can be forgiven.

There is a philosophical bent to this film similar to what is found in the biblical book Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, the author (often referred to as Qoheleth) ponders the meaning of life and what makes life worth living. Qoheleth is also a bit peripatetic. He wanders through various approaches in search of the answers to his questions. The four siblings, along with the parents to a lesser extent, all have different understandings of life. The film and all the talking are not so much about finding the answers as it is about all the questions. That too is a bit like Ecclesiastes.

Because the discussions are so diverse, there are many interesting things said along the way. There is an ontological proof of God set side by side with an ontological disproof. At another point, Roland says, “You know what makes man unique? He’s the only animal who can’t take care of himself.” When Daphne admits to being “selfish, vain, and lazy”, her husband concurs, and adds, “like everybody else”. Perhaps the deepest wisdom expressed is “Everything matters”.

The theme line of Ecclesiastes is “Vanity of vanities! All is Vanity.” That refers to the ephemeral nature of life. That concept is also central to the musings of the characters in The Magnificent Meyersons. As they all try in their own way to deal with the life, there is an understanding that things are constantly changing. But how we deal with all those changes can open new ways for us to live in vain lives.

The Magnificent Meyerson is playing in limited theatrical release and on virtual cinema.

Photos courtesy of Argot Pictures.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things – And Thinking and Thinking

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How best to describe I’m Thinking of Ending Things? The easy answer is that it’s a Charlie Kaufman film. (He both writes and directs.) His scripts (cf. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Synecdoche, New York) are always mind games (not only for the audience, but for the characters as well). He leads us through a twisted perception of reality. He challenges us to think about what identity means. He challenges us to think about what reality means. He challenges us to think about what life means. I would categorize him as an existentialist, but one who might befuddle Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jessie Buckley as Young Woman, Jesse Plemons as Jake in Im Thinking Of Ending Things. Cr. Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020

The story centers on a young woman (Jessie Buckley) and her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) on a road trip to his childhood home to introduce her to his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis). The young woman (in voice over) speaks of a thought in her mind of ending things—specifically, her relationship with Jake, which she thinks is going nowhere. As they drive through the snow, they talk about many things, sometimes in great depth.

Jesse Plemons as Jake, Jessie Buckley as Young Woman, Toni Collette as Mother, David Thewlis as Father in Im Thinking Of Ending Things. Cr. Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020

Perhaps you’ve noticed I haven’t told you the young woman’s name. It keeps changing. At various times she is called Lucy, Louisa, Lucia, and possible Amy. Her clothes change from time to time as well. And she is studying painting, quantum psychics (or physics), neurology, and/or genealogy. The disjointedness of her identity is just one part of the intentional confusion of the film. The young woman also sees the characters at different times of their lives. There is a bit of a dream/nightmare quality to what the young woman is experiencing.

As all of this plays out on the road, at the house, and on the road again going home, the discussions touch on poetry, musical theater, physics, cinematic history and criticism, and David Foster Wallace. People deliver very long quotations from a wide range of sources. And finally, we arrive at an empty school in the midst of a blizzard where we see a pas-de-deux based on Oklahoma in the hallways while the janitor (is it an old age Jake?) cleans the floors.

Guy Boyd as Janitor in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Cr. Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020

Yes, that is a lot of input for a film. There are lots of moving parts in this invention. If I were to try to look at this film in depth, it would require a dozen or so viewings, plus various trips to the library to search out some of the quotations and people who are mentioned or alluded to. It would end up a term paper (or maybe a dissertation) with several chapters. But of course, most of us won’t be going down that rabbit hole. Instead we can just enjoy the rabbit hole that is this film.

Jessie Buckley as Young Woman in Im Thinking Of Ending Things. Cr. Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020

Like I said, it’s a Charlie Kaufman film. We know going in that things will get strange—that we may not know what is really happening. And what we experiencing and how we interpret what is happening is really what Kaufman is trying to get at. Our reactions are the real point of watching a film such as this. Our perceptions, our feelings, our sense of self are really what this film is ultimately about.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is available on Netflix.

Marjorie Prime – Do You Remember?

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Think of an important event in your life. Do you remember it the same as someone else who was there? Do you remember it the same as you did a few years ago? Marjorie Prime is about the relationship between reality and memory. Based on a Pulitzer-nominated play, the film is a cerebrally challenging encounter between the past and what it means to us.

Marjorie (Lois Smith) is a woman in her 80s whose memories are quickly fading. We see her talking to a much younger man, Walter (Jon Hamm). But this is set in the near future and Walter is an artificial intelligence hologram of her late husband. He has been programmed to tell her the story of her life. Of course, his understanding is only as accurate as the memories that have been fed into his program. In the interaction between Marjorie and Walter, he is able to adjust his memory to accommodate new facts or perspectives. Perhaps he can even change the story to make it better. Marjorie’s daughter Tess (Geena Davis) finds it a bit creepy that the hologram represents her father as a young man. Her husband Jon (Tim Robbins) believes this is a chance to help Marjorie remember and to continue to have a bit of joy in her final years. In time, both Tess and Jon find new ways of using the technology in their own lives.

The stage play character of the film make this really about the conversations between the various characters. Some of those are about past memories, but some are also about the nature of memory itself. At one point it is mentioned that when we remember something, we are really remembering our last remembrance of it. Each time we may remember it slightly differently, so the cumulative effect of repeated remembrances could actually be much different from the reality. But if that is so, which is more important, the actual event or the evolved memory that we hold? This is especially relevant when our memories are sometimes unpleasant. Do we really want to remember them? Do we never want to forget them?

As I said, this is an intellectually challenging film. (To me, that is a good thing.) When my wife and I saw this with a friend, it led to quite a bit of discussion after the film. This kind of slightly esoteric questioning may not appeal to some. But for those who want to be jarred into thinking about the things you remember (or think you remember), Marjorie Prime will be well worth the time. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen this year.

Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt

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We often think of philosophers as those who sit in ivory towers unaffected by the actual world. They think their thoughts about the nature of things without really understanding what matters. But often philosophy comes out of profound experiences. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt is a documentary about a German-Jewish philosopher who created a controversy when she covered the Adolph Eichmann trial for The New Yorker magazine and spoke of “the banality of evil.” The 2012 narrative film Hannah Arendt garnered significant critical praise.

The film follows the outline of her life—growing up in the First World War, the rise of Nazism, her education (including an affair with her teacher Martin Heidegger, who provided philosophical prestige for the Nazi regime), her eventual escape first to France then to America. This is a film made up mostly of Arendt’s own words—sometimes in archival footage of interviews, but often through readings of parts of her works or her correspondence with her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers. There are no “bumper sticker” quotes in all of this. Arendt’s experiences gave her a grounding with which to approach meaningful aspects of human life—especially the nature of evil and how totalitarianism comes to be.

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For Arendt evil is not a demonic force, but the result of people—even people who are trying to be good within their framework of understanding—who fail to engage in critical thinking. It is not that people do not recognize that something is wrong, but that they find ways to justify doing that wrong as though it were right. At the Eichmann trial Arendt did not see a monster in the dock, but rather a mild-mannered bureaucrat. He was doing his job (which just happened to be overseeing the Holocaust). He claimed to not even be an anti-Semite. But he was also, in his mind, a good German.

It is difficult to judge what passion Arendt may have had for the topic based on an actress reading her works and letters. At times the film comes across as a very dispassionate discussion about something that deeply affected millions of people. I suspect, though, that in her works she does stand back a bit to strive for a detached voice. That may be part of what led to the backlash to her ideas of the banality of evil.

Evil is a difficult subject to come to terms with. Theologians and philosophers struggle to understand its very nature. This film provides some insight that can help us look at some of the questions around evil. It is not an easy film. I enjoyed classes in philosophy, but this required my attention throughout to keep up. It is one of the most cerebral films that I’ve encountered in a long time. (And I don’t think cerebral is a put down.)

Photos from Hannah Arendt Personal Archive and Zeitgeist Films