An English Saint Gets The Story He Deserves

Amazing Grace

The New York Sun, February 22, 2007

"The Lives of Others," the compelling new movie about East Germany currently in contention for an Oscar, is the story of two flawed individuals' quest for moral redemption, but Michael Apted's "Amazing Grace" raises the bar far higher. It tells the tale of William Wilberforce, an unquestionably good man who set out to redeem the honor of an empire and, in so doing, saved millions of lives.

Born in England in the middle of the 18th century to a wealthy merchant family, Wilberforce (ably played here by Ioan Gruffudd) rose to prominence in a nation that had discovered the virtue of reason and the rewards of science but had lost some of its conscience along the way.

A little more than 200 years before, an appalled Queen Elizabeth I had reacted to the news of an early slaving expedition with the observation that it would bring the "vengeance of Heaven" in its wake. As usual, Heaven remained indifferent. The slave trade flourished and Elizabeth's successors were quick to take their share.

If God appeared unconcerned and most Englishmen were prepared to either avert their eyes from the evils of the Middle Passage or to profit from it, Wilberforce was undaunted, working tirelessly for two decades to secure the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Satisfyingly, he lived long enough to see Parliament strike down slavery itself in 1833.

With an exception or two, the filmmakers are honest enough about Wilberforce's rejection of slavery to make clear that the roots of his disdain for the trade lay not only in inherent goodness, but also in his deep-rooted Christianity. Unfortunately, this honesty does not extend to trusting moviegoers with a sufficiently rounded portrayal of that faith. The real Wilberforce was a man of immense charm, but many of his fellow Clapham "Saints" were a joyless bunch, and so opposed, for example, to the idea of a good night out at the theater that they might even have objected to a film as uplifting as this one.

Taking Lives in Stasiland

The Lives of Others

The New York Sun, February 9, 2007

If there is nothing else to East Germany's credit (and, frankly, there isn't), that grim, gray dictatorship did succeed in provoking two of the finest films to come out of a reunited fatherland in recent years.

The first, Wolfgang Becker's sweet, enchanting "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003) used one family's crisis to examine both the year that Erich Honecker's then largely unlamented republic simply faded away and the way that layers of self-deception, "internal emigration," and illusion had helped its citizens to weather those penned-in decades of repression, futility, and waste. Nevertheless, as moving and wonderfully perceptive as that film was, it's impossible to watch it without detecting occasional traces of Ostalgie, the nauseating, sugarcoated nostalgia that some Germans (of East and West) claim to feel for a kinder, gentler Volksrepublik, which never, in fact, existed.

The second of these films, the novice director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others," shows no signs of falling into that trap. From its concreted landscapes to its muted colors to its clammy betrayals to the black Volvos of the party bosses prowling the streets of their wretched blind alley of a capital, this wrenching, stirring, magnificent movie portrays East Berlin as it was. In this, it undoubtedly helped that Mr. von Donnersmarck was brought up in the western half of the city and was a frequent visitor to the mysterious, unsettling land on the other side of the wall.

Adding further to the film's credibility, a number of the cast began their careers in an East German state that, nearly 20 years after its demise, retains the power to haunt their lives. During an interview last week, Mr. von Donnersmarck told me that Ulrich Mühe, the film's star, had spent more than he was paid for "The Lives of Others" in legal costs incurred after the actor's ex-wife sued to stop publication of a book linked to the film in which it was to be revealed that she had "allegedly" (as, I suppose, lawyers would insist we must say) informed on him to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Meanwhile, the father of another cast member was unmasked as a former Stasi officer following publication of the photographs of him that appeared in the press after he attended the film's premiere.

But then that's really not so surprising. East Germany was the most spied-upon society in history. Neither prisons, nor torture, nor executions, nor even that wall were enough to keep it all together. To supervise a population of 17 million, the Stasi, with some 100,000 officers, grew to be more than twice the size of the Third Reich's Gestapo, and, just to be sure, it recruited at least another 200,000 informers, probably many more. In her 2003 book on East Germany, the Australian author Anna Funder dubbed this police state that was more police than state as "Stasiland." She was right to do so.

It's as a model citizen of Stasiland, a skilled interrogator doing his brutal business, that we first encounter Mr. Mühe's Captain Wiesler. He is Stasi, a member of the elect, a true believer, and, yet, even in the movie's early stages, there are hints that all is not well. He is hunched, buttoned-up, withdrawn, his demeanor as much captive as guard. Contrasted with the deprivation that was the lot of most East Germans, Wiesler's bleak, spotless apartment might be a token of his privileged position, but it is little more than a cell. The only sign that anything remains of the captain's emotional life is a brief request to an appallingly unattractive prostitute (assigned to him, we must assume, by his employers) to stay with him a little longer. He knows enough to know that he is lonely.

"The Lives of Others" tells the story of what happens when, at the request of a government minister, Captain Wiesler puts famous playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) under close surveillance as someone who may be disloyal to the republic. Intellectuals, you know. Eventually, Wiesler discovers that the politician's real motive is sexual rather than ideological. He has his eyes on Dreyman's girlfriend (nicely played by Martina Gedeck) and wants Dreyman out of the way. And that's not the most important thing that our Stasi officer discovers. As (courtesy of bugs installed in the playwright's apartment) he sits listening day after day to the minutiae of Dreyman's life, the captain begins to find out some truths both about the evil of the regime he has served so loyally and, ultimately, about his own capacity for good.

Mr. Mühe's subtle, deadpan, and compelling portrayal of a bad man possibly stumbling toward redemption is one of the most profoundly moving performances I have ever been privileged to witness on-screen. He's ably supported by a cast that never seems to put a foot wrong. In particular, it's worth singling out Mr. Koch's Dreyman, a plaything of the regime as well as its playwright, a man who comes to realize that his carefully preserved detachment is no longer enough. Look too for the clever way that Dreyman's milieu is depicted as a licensed, micromanaged Bohemia that, like so many aspects of the German Democratic Republic, is at best a feeble facsimile of what was available in the West and, at worse, a dangerously comforting delusion.

"The Lives of Others" comes to America garlanded with the prizes it has won in Europe. It has now been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Win or lose (and it deserves to win), it's already achieved something far more significant than that little statuette.

Sometimes a movie or, even, for that matter, a TV show, can transcend its entertainment value and become a device that compels a nation to reconsider its history. When NBC's "Holocaust" was first shown in West Germany (roughly half the adult population caught at least one episode), it shattered that country's long-standing taboo on open discussion of Nazi genocide. Now "The Lives of Others" has forced large numbers of Germans to start facing the truth about what former dissident Wolf Biermann has referred to as their "second dictatorship."

Here’s Lucy

Dirt

National Review Online, January 9, 2007

Thanks to the combination of curiosity, camera-phone, the Internet, and, now, YouTube, the culture of celebrity, never that sane in the first place, has seemed to have taken another lurch deeper into the madhouse. In recent weeks those of us who could spare time from the Lohan implosion, the Kramer collapse, or the vital Simpson debate (Jessica or Ashlee?), and who were so inclined, could have seen much more of seedy Britney than nasty Kevin has managed of late, or, if we preferred, we could have contemplated the rise, fall, and possible rise again of this nation’s most recent “troubled” Tara, That’s Miss USA, not, for once, Ms. Reid.

Not enough for you? Well, there was plenty more where that came from. We could, as usual, have feasted on Nicole Richie’s missing meals, or, perhaps, taken a little time out to wonder about Kate Bosworth’s disappearing body and Cameron Diaz’s disappearing Justin. Then there were all those images, so, so, many of them, annoyingly blurry, frighteningly clear, snatched, deer-trapped-in-the-headlights, embarrassing, banal, sexy, grotesque, compelling, sort-of-interesting, sort-of-not: shopping trips, nipple slips, fashion disasters, velvet-rope battles, parking dramas, minor traffic accidents, and, repeatedly, and why not, Jessica Alba and her bikini. Oh yes, there’s Paris too. We’ll always have Paris, epicenter of global trivia, and, for that matter, the most successful grande horizontale since Pamela Harriman swam her last lap, even if, in a confusing development, Miss Hilton has now declared a moratorium on dating in favor of nights with Brigitte Bardot, her pet monkey.

But try as hard as they might, those who now drive these stories are not from television, newspapers, or even those mags that take the edge off the supermarket checkout line. The people to watch these days are something new, amateurs or freelancers dreaming of the big time, and, while they are at it, ripping, and riffing, off the more established media they both need and threaten. Even the once-mighty paparazzi are looking a touch passé, their Leicas, Nikons, and elaborate stakeouts now menaced by an observant passer-by with his or her Nokia, Samsung, or Motorola. The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, may have exaggerated a little when he wrote about the appearance of an Army of Davids, but there isn’t much doubt that an army of Peeping Toms is among us and that, as a result, the gossip bazaar will never be the same again. Will we need People quite so much when the malicious are working their keyboards, online, on time, and, all too often, with that addictive extra slime?

The answer, in fact, almost certainly, is “yes,” but the magazine may have to take a different tack from the (generally) respectful approach that it now takes. There will always be a market for adoring, star-struck coverage (indeed in the U.K., the publishers of Hello have made a very good living doing just that, and then over here there’s Larry King), but gush about the “gowns” of Oscar night now has to compete with commentary like this (about an unfortunate skirt worn by the only truly convincing reason to have ever watched The OC):

When there's nothing left to believe in, believe in Mischa Barton. Because she will always wear something that cheers you up instantly. Take this joke of a skirt, for instance. It's like a clown repurposed a blazer and wrapped it around her waist. Amusing, but not in a complimentary, deliciously whimsical kind of way; it's more of a hideous Fisher Price "Baby's First Buttons" kind of funny. Mostly, I just want to tug it down so that I don't accidentally get a view of her birth canal. Still, at least we're laughing. Maybe for that, we owe her a debt of gratitude. Maybe we should all stand in front of her and join in a thinly harmonized chorus of "For She's A Jolly Good Fellow," led by Tim Curry, because the world needs more of him. And maybe, if we lavish her with enough giggles and praise, she'll back away slower than a gun-toting Mrs. Peacock, wary of our ulterior motives and never to be heard from in this capacity again.

I’d be expecting a little more bitchiness from People before too long.

None of this is to claim that that celebrity coverage was, in the past, as consistently fawning as some of today’s generation probably imagine. Just ask Fatty Arbuckle. Sure, there was Rock Hudson, but then there was Billy Haines too. Yes, there was a highly effective star machine, and those old studio chiefs certainly knew how to put a stop to unhelpful talk in the press about dangerous liaisons, dying marriages, and fatal car crashes. But by the mid-1950s, excitingly named scandal sheets like Confidential, Exposed, Whisper, and Private Lives boasted a combined circulation of more than ten million, and drove Hollywood to distraction, and, inevitably, the courts (to stave off an indictment, Confidential’s publisher, Robert Harrison, the “King of Leer” agreed to switch his magazine’s approach to flattery and puff pieces: naturally, circulation collapsed), not that, in the end, it was to do much good.

How, and why, so many people are so fascinated by celebrities is hard to explain. It’s something to do with mankind’s urge both to create, and to destroy, idols, it’s obviously also deeply rooted in our primate DNA, and it clearly owes a great deal to the fact that most of us live lives that are dull, dull, dull; vicarious thrills are better than none at all. Nevertheless, even if America’s obsession with celebrity has lasted a long time (and it has), its current incarnation seems more consuming, more demanding, more worshipful and more malicious than in the past. Almost certainly, that most reliable of scapegoats, the Internet, bears much of the blame. In creating its illusions of intimacy, access and authenticity, it persuades us that we ‘know’ these stars far better than ever before. At the same time, its limitless appetite for content makes celebrities out of D list riff-raff with “narratives” that would disgrace a trailer park, yet only add to the frenzy.

Throw in the fact that this new celebrity culture is both manipulated by the entertainment business and beyond its control, and there is obviously an ideal opportunity for a new Nathanael West or Ernest Lehman to tell us what’s going on. Instead, we got Courteney Cox. Her new TV series, Dirt (Cox is both star and executive producer), was billed as a show that would offer a revealing, clever, and sexy glimpse of gossip and its markets. Unfortunately, what we get is occasionally sanctimonious, slightly stale, and, rather too often, simply dull. Even the sex (Dirt is shown on FX, so viewers do get to see some) seems self-consciously “edgy,” contrived, and, at times literally, mechanical. Dirt may have been designed to appeal to the audience that FX has found with the wonderful Nip/Tuck, but it lacks the relentless perversity, carnivore morality, and wild melodrama that make a visit to McNamara/Troy a highpoint of the viewing week.

Of course Courteney Cox is as icily beautiful as ever, a John Singer Sargent portrait come to life and toned at the gym, as she plays the ruthless (yet curiously vulnerable) tabloid editor Lucy Spiller. She’s powerful, abrasive, and feared, but, as usual when we see women in such roles, there’s that pesky vulnerability and a Devil Wears Prada, what-has-she-given-up-to-get-where-she-has subtext to her role — clichés that subvert the very power that her character would ideally project. Was there a limit as to how unsympathetic a Lucy that the former Monica Geller was prepared to play? If so, that’s a mistake.

But if Cox has failed to see what fun, and what good box office, a truly vicious role could be, her show, so far, also seems to be missing an even more interesting opportunity, the chance to comment on what the Internet has meant to Lucy’s grubby universe. There’s a sense in which (judging by its first three episodes) Dirt’s underlying premise is, well, a little dated. That tabloids like Lucy’s are not quite as central to the gossip trade as they once were is not touched on, an odd omission given Courteney Cox’s own extensive experience, good and bad, of the sharp end of the celebrity obsession. True, Lucy’s two publications, Drrt (kind of like an upgraded National Enquirer, and, yes, that’s how it’s spelled) and Now (a Life/Newsweek hybrid) appear to be under great financial and competitive pressure, but we are never told why. Similarly, a conversation in which she tells one movie mogul that as much as he and his “Hollywood pals” hate to admit it, they need her, points to another worthwhile direction in which the show might evolve. An examination of the conflicted, and ever more complex, relationship between Tinseltown and those who make a living out of its dirty linen would be well worth watching. Sadly, with the exception of one rather lame sub-plot that I cannot be bothered to discuss, the episodes that I have watched show no sign that Dirt will go down that route.

That’s not to say that the show is entirely without merit. Very occasionally, some encouraging hints of what could be are allowed to surface. So, for example, in the first episode we catch Lucy at a Hollywood party eyeing an incident here, hearing a remark there, and, as she does so, we see (with the help of some clever graphics) how she visualizes the scandals behind them appearing on her next cover. It’s a nice touch. So too, a couple of cast members show promise. Hogwarts disgrace Ian Hart (that rotten Quirinus Quirrell) is impressive as “functioning schizophrenic” Don Konkey, Lucy’s favorite paparazzo and, it appears, only true friend. In a strangely understated show, his lurid hallucinations, virtuoso twitches, and fumbled prescriptions stand out. Sure, there may be a touch of Coney Island about the whole spectacle, but Konkey’s psychosis would make for compelling viewing even without the welcome bonus of his intriguing relationship with a rather pretty dead girl (Shannyn Sossamon). Nevertheless, it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that, as with Tony Shalhoub’s only marginally less twitchy performances in Monk, an initially watchable mental ailment will become increasingly less so as the series progresses, particularly if its peculiarities are used as a lazy substitute for a plot. Other than Hart, it’s also worth keeping an eye out for the progress of Alexandra Breckenridge as Willa, the ingénue reporter clearly on her way to the way to the dark side. Her early moments in the show have included deceit, drug use, and a slight suggestion of the Sapphic. Well done!

Finally, and rather surprisingly given the impressive tawdriness of the celebrity circuit, the stories that Dirt digs up add up to less than Page Six on a slow day: sports star cheating on his wife, starlet suicide, action star hires interior decorator (uh oh), and, wait for it, turns out to be gay, you know how it goes. It says a lot about Dirt, and, some would say, even more about our society, that the best story it has generated emerged not from the series itself, but from one of its reviewers. In short, Lucy Spiller’s battery-powered orgasms led a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle to publish an unfortunate and possibly (it’s debatable) unchivalrous comment about the fair Courteney. Jimmy Kimmel is also involved. As this is National Review Online, not Drrt, or, for that matter, the San Francisco Chronicle, I am not prepared to go into the distressing details, but, if, on the other hand, you are one of our more broad-minded readers, or just plain nosey, the offending review can be found here, Jimmy Kimmel’s dramatic encounter with the poor, possibly slighted Ms. Cox can be seen on YouTube (of course), and, in a desperate attempt to draw a conclusion to the whole shocking affair, the Chronicle’s caddish critic has now published an “erotic retraction” on his blog. Make of it all what you will.

As for me, I’m just pleased there’s going to be a fifth season of Nip/Tuck.

Battered Kingdom

Margaret Gaskin: Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

The New York Sun: January 3, 2007

If, in 1932, nearly 15 years after the catastrophe of the "war to end all wars" had finally drawn to a close, any Britons were still foolish, complacent, or naïve enough to cling to their island nation's traditional sense of inviolability, Stanley Baldwin, the country's once-and-future prime minister, wanted to smash that illusion beyond repair. Speaking to the House of Commons in November of that year, he warned that the "man in the street [had] to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through."

And so, less than a decade later, the bomber did. Impatient with Germany's defeat (or, more accurately, failure to prevail) in the Battle of Britain, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to turn its attention from the few to the many. The duels in the sky during that lonely, legendary, dangerous summer of 1940, almost archaic in their occasional chivalry, were to be replaced by the more typically 20th-century spectacle of fire, ruin, and indiscriminate slaughter. The systematic assault on Britain's cities, then described and now remembered as "the Blitz," began in early September 1940. By the time the worst of it was over, roughly nine months later, nearly 45,000 were dead, with, perhaps, an additional 70,000 seriously injured. The horrors of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on an exhausted England (close to 10,000 killed) toward the end of the war were, of course, yet to come.

In writing "Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940" (Harcourt, 448 pages, $27), Margaret Gaskin has essentially attempted to tell the story of the Blitz through the events of a single night that saw the largest air raid on London up to that point. It was a 100-bomber onslaught that set off a firestorm designed to reduce the British capital's historic core, the City, to nothing more than rubble. Sadly, despite a careful, and often striking, selection of reminiscences and contemporary accounts (so far as it goes, the book is very well researched) that are often as moving as they are vivid, Ms. Gaskin's overall narrative fails to convince. To use a possibly unfortunate word, her "Blitz" is something of a dud.

In part that's due to a prose style that is sometimes orotund ("A lifetime in the hurly-burly of the public presses had honed the robust tongue in which [Winston Churchill rallied] his London tribe, his British tribe, his tribe of ‘English-speaking peoples'") or shopworn (Hitler's Berchtesgaden is, wait for it, a "spectacular mountain fastness"). But more troubling still is that the author simultaneously manages to cram in and leave out too much information. Readers will have to wade through (a surely unnecessary) World War II 101 ("As Hitler's master manipulator of truth, Goebbels took considerable personal pride in what his Führer saw when he looked at his beloved maps at the end of 1940"), but are deprived of many more directly relevant details surrounding the Blitz that could have put the events Ms. Gaskin is trying to relate into better context.

We are, for example, told remarkably little about the planning, events, and principal personalities on the German side and not much more about those organizing the defense of Churchill's battered kingdom. Nor is there a great deal of discussion about what the decision by Hitler to shift to a mass bombing offensive really meant. Destructive as the Blitz was undoubtedly to prove (oddly, Ms. Gaskin neglects to provide a full accounting of the toll) it was a sign that Berlin's hopes of a quick victory in the west had evaporated. Instead they were replaced by a strategy of attrition (according to Goebbels, some of the pilots involved saw it as an "aerial Verdun," a damning and telling phrase).

The chances that this would succeed, as the German leadership fully understood, were highly dependent on America's assistance to England being kept to a minimum (to be fair, Ms. Gaskin handles the increasing desperation of Britain's pleas to America very well). By leaving the aftermath of December 29 largely out of her book, however, Ms Gaskin makes it impossible to work out where that particular raid fitted into the broader history of the Blitz. Instead, she cuts to Winston Churchill's funeral a quarter of a century later, an epilogue to a drama seemingly without third, fourth, or fifth acts.

Indeed, with a death toll of roughly 200, the bombings of December 29 were far from being the most lethal of the Blitz. Far worse was to come the following year, culminating in the last great attack on May 10 that killed nearly 1,500. That said, the significance of the night Ms. Gaskin describes is that its blazing warehouses, doomed alleys, and tumbling buildings represented the death throes of the old City, the ancient, cluttered, rabbit-warren mercantile and commercial heart of the empire, the stamping ground of Dickens, Pepys, and Johnson. When, some 40 years later, I worked in that same area, the street names — Basinghall, Aldermanbury, Cheapside, Paternoster — may have been freighted with history, but all too often they were lined with nothing more than the drab concrete of utilitarian postwar construction.

And it's difficult not to think that alongside that old City there perished much of the moral restraint holding the British back from the idea — and the, possibly necessary, barbarism — of total war. Grasping this change, is, one would think, an essential element in understanding the meaning, and the consequences, of those months of destruction. Yet the only reference to this issue in Ms. Gaskin's text is a brief remark by Arthur Harris, the deputy chief of air staff. The Germans, he said, had "sown the wind." Indeed they had. Harris subsequently rose to head Britain's Bomber Command and, less than three years later, the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah had already devastated Hamburg. By the time the war ended, some 600,000 Germans had perished in Allied raids over the Reich.

Hitler had sown the wind and his people had reaped the whirlwind.

Cultural Suicide

Ian Buruma: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the limits of Tolerance

National Review, December 4, 2006

It’s far too soon to know if the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic will turn out to be a warning heeded in time, or if it will prove to be just another episode in the decline of a country wrecked by the mixing of multiculturalism with mass immigration. Judging by the nature of the debate ahead of Holland’s upcoming elections, judging by the departure of parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the safer, more welcoming haven of America, and judging by this perceptive, misguided, depressing, and (sometimes unconsciously) revealing book, it will be the latter. If Murder in Amsterdam is a grim read, it’s not only because of the events its author recounts, but also because of the way he recounts them. Born in 1951, a child of the Dutch upper-middle class (“blazers and pearls and Hermès scarves”), and now a professor at Bard College, Ian Buruma is a distinguished man of letters, a gifted cultural historian, a skilled writer of impeccably refined sensibility: It’s no surprise to see his byline occasionally popping up in The New Yorker. This background makes him both one of the best possible guides to van Gogh’s murder and one of the worst.

Buruma’s Dutch upbringing and well-traveled later years have left him nicely placed to help us understand a small, clubby country that can be tricky to penetrate and even more difficult to decode. With his help, we mingle with intellectuals, with politicians, and with Muslims, young and not so young, pious and not so pious. We meet Hirsi Ali herself, and we visit van Gogh’s parents, still mourning the brilliant provocateur that was their wild, loutish, infuriating, and endearing son.

When it comes to describing the two protagonists in this terrible drama, Buruma rarely misses a trick. His vividly drawn portrait of Theo is made painful, not only by our knowledge of the slaughter to come, but also by the hideous irony that a man astute enough to realize that the old easygoing Holland was under lethal assault was too careless, too stubborn, and too confident to realize that he too was in danger. Nobody would harm him, said blithe, foolish Theo: He was just “the village idiot.” But that familiar comfortable village had been torn down, replaced by a multicultural shantytown, yet another miserable utopia in which there would be no room for rowdy jesters, rude pranksters, or free spirits of any kind.

As for van Gogh’s murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, Buruma tracks his descent from minor misfit to holy warrior step by deluded step until that murderous November morning comes to seem inevitable, ordained, as logical as the carnage that concludes a Shakespearean tragedy. But if the how is made grippingly clear, Buruma leaves the why something of a mystery. Worse still, when it comes to suggesting how such horrors can be avoided in future, the best he can come up with is a bit more appeasement (he wouldn’t use the word, of course), yet more “tolerance” and acceptance of the fact that “Islam is a European religion,” a grand-sounding observation that is as obvious as it is unhelpful.

As always seems to be the case, some of the killer’s squalid why can be explained by personal inadequacies and, almost certainly, severe psychological problems, but to dismiss Bouyeri as Lee Harvey Oswald on a prayer mat is to miss the point. Buruma knows this perfectly well. He chooses to stress the unhappiness of the “immigrant” (Bouyeri is Dutch-born) marooned in a country where he will always be considered an alien. Fair enough, but it’s only part of the story.

Buruma has far less to say about the extent to which the Dutch themselves (or, more precisely, the Dutch elite) dug van Gogh’s grave. After all, these were the people who as a result of political correctness, indifference, and complacency did nothing to combat Islamic extremism. Not only that, but they went out of their way to vilify those who were prepared to do so (check out how Pim Fortuyn and van Gogh were described both before and after their murders). These people have spent decades denigrating their own history, their own culture, and their own traditions; to them, nationalism was among the gravest of sins. No wonder Bouyeri was unimpressed.

Buruma is too smart, and too honest, an observer to ignore these issues altogether, but his reluctance to spend much time on them shows that he has not moved as far from the attitudes of bien-pensant Holland as he would like us to think. Readers will look in vain for much sympathy for the ethnic Dutch, citizens of a state turned upside down with little discussion and less consent (raising these issues was “racist,” “Islamophobic,” choose your bogeyword) — omissions that go some way toward explaining why integration has been such a failure.

It’s also pretty clear that the author of Murder in Amsterdam, like so many other secular Europeans, has little idea of quite how dangerous truly fundamentalist religion can be. It’s telling that Buruma can find time to grumble that “conservatives” have appropriated the idea of the Enlightenment as a last redoubt from which they can defend their (presumably reprehensible) values. That’s a shot that’s not only cheap but also aimed at the wrong target. Standing up for reason is too important a task to be regarded as something reserved only for Europe’s Left or, for that matter, its Right. It’s going to be hard work and, yes, it may be a little uncomfortable at times: Café debates, ecumenical babble, and generous welfare payments won’t be enough to do the trick. Voltaire would have understood this. So, I’m sure, does Buruma; he just can’t face admitting it.

Holland’s establishment consensus is so stifling that it ought to be no surprise that the most prominent dissidents have emerged from outside the mainstream: the immigrant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now in exile); the homosexual, Pim Fortuyn (murdered); and the clown, Theo van Gogh (murdered). It ought to be no surprise, but maybe to Buruma it is. To read his descriptions of all three is to detect a certain distancing, a touch of disapproval, and perhaps even a little distaste. They rocked the boat, you see, in a way that was not very Dutch, no, not at all.

Logue’s Odyssey

The New Criterion, December 1, 2006

I was waiting to hear what the English poet Christopher Logue had done to the Iliad, and I was worried. The omens, threatening an evening of eat-your-greens earnestness, would have troubled the most phlegmatic of soothsayers. As for the theater in which I found myself, it was more depressing than Ford’s after Booth. A long way off Broadway in all but the most geographical sense, it was a hard-seat hall a few minutes’ walk from those now-vanished towers. The only thing emptier than the bleak, Beckett-bare stage was an auditorium begging for tumbleweed. We had been told that the entire cast (the performance was a dramatization of some of Logue’s verse) would number exactly three: three actresses, to be precise.

The plains of Troy. The end of a long siege. Great armies clash. Achilles. Ajax. Hector. New York City. Three girls. T-shirts. No armor. Not a chariot in sight. An evening, I thought, of modernist austerity, dreary iconoclasm, and banal feminist resentment loomed grimly ahead.

I was wrong. What followed was simply remarkable, an hour or so of extraordinary, compelling drama, beautifully played by the three actresses I had been too ready to malign in a work (produced by Verse Theatre Manhattan) that had the class—and the modesty—to allow Homer’s tale and Logue’s lyricism to weave their own enchantment. And so they did.

Here’s Achilles setting off to avenge Patroclus:

The chariot’s basket dips. The whip

Fires in between the horses’ ears.

And as in dreams, or at Cape Kennedy, they rise,

Slowly it seems, their chests like royals, yet

Behind them in a double plume the sand curls up,

Is barely dented by their flying hooves,

And wheels that barely touch the world,

And the wind slams shut behind him.

The reference to Cape Kennedy is characteristic of Logue’s “account” of the Iliad (he doesn’t pretend to understand classical Greek, and has never described what he is doing as translation), a rendering peppered with allusions to the millennia that have passed since Homer first told his story of bickering gods, warring men, and a doomed city. These references don’t jar; there’s nothing crass, no stretching to be hip about them. They remind us that some of the force of this epic derives from its own no less epic antiquity, and they do so sometimes obliquely, sometimes specifically: Achilles’s “helmet screams against the light;/ Scratches the eye; so violent it can be seen/ Across three thousand years.”

This playfulness with chronology extends to the way in which Logue shuffles Homer’s narrative, chopping here, adding there, and then (sometimes, it seems) simply throwing up the pieces into the air for the sheer fun of seeing where, and how, they land. In part, this reflects the way that Logue’s odyssey through the Iliad began back in 1959, with an invitation to contribute a passage to a new BBC version of Homer’s poem (a classier Maecenas then than now). This set in motion a process that led Logue to his Patrocleia (based on the Iliad’s sixteenth book) and Pax (inspired by the nineteenth). With those completed, Logue “realized that conflating Books 17 and 18 as GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm, an English legal term for serious forms of criminal assault) would allow me to try my hand at something new—600-odd lines devoted almost entirely to violent, mass action—which would unite Patrocleia and Pax.” Packaged together as War Music (1981), they did so triumphantly.

Naturally enough, this most cinematic (he has worked in the movies) and leisurely (it took ten years) of poets next offered up a prequel, Kings (1991), his account of the Iliad’s first two books. This was followed by The Husbands (1994) (Books 3 and 4), and, in 2003, All Day Permanent Red (the title is, typically for this magpie-writer, stolen from an advertisement for Revlon lipstick), a blood-drenched rewriting of Homer’s first battle scenes:

Slip into the fighting.

Into a low-sky site crammed with huge men,

Half-naked men, brave, loyal, fit, slab-sided men,

Men who came face to face with gods, who

spoke with gods,

Leaping onto each other like wolves

Screaming, kicking, slicing, hacking, ripping,

Thumping their chests:

  “I am full of the god!”

Blubbering with terror as they beg for their lives:

  “Laid his trunk open from shoulder to hip—

Like a beauty-queen’s sash.”

Falling falling

Top-slung steel chain-gates slumped onto concrete,

Pipko, Bluefisher, Chuckerbutty, Lox:

  “Left all he had to follow Greece.”

  “Left all he had to follow Troy.”

Clawing the ground calling out for their sons in revenge.

It’s easy to discern that this poet of war and heroism is also something of a pacifist. Logue may be a former soldier, but his military service culminated with a spell in a British army jail located, with vaguely appropriate panache, in a crusader castle in Palestine. Later, he was involved with the UK’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a prominent, mercifully ineffective organization that misunderstood the Cold War for decades, and probably still does.

Nowadays, Logue, a man who remains, I imagine, a creature of 1950s bohemia (Soho, Paris, knew Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, was—as Count Palmiro Vicarion—a writer of pornography for Maurice Girodias, the mid-century’s most interesting publisher of naughty books), modestly and immodestly tells journalists that marching against nuclear weapons was a good way to pick up chicks.

The latest chapter in Logue’s Homeric saga is Cold Calls (2005), a work more subdued in tone than what preceded it. Thanks to its winning, to widespread surprise, Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Poetry Prize earlier this year, it has drawn more attention than anything he has written since War Music. Ironically, Cold Calls is far from the finest installment in Logue’s ongoing masterpiece. Like an Oscar given to one of Hollywood’s ancient, the award was probably a reward for longevity (Logue was born in 1926) as well as an admission that he should have received such recognition many years before.

This suspicion is only reinforced by the Whitbread judges’ comment that Logue had brought the Iliad “bang up to date.” Oh dear. They seem not to have noticed that there is nothing very much in that saga that needs renovation, a makeover, or a lick of fresh paint. As Logue himself has said, “It’s more modern than modern.” The Iliad is timeless. It always has been and, unless something very unexpected happens to human nature, it always will be. Four days after I saw that performance, those two towers were dust. The play was forced to close. When it re-opened, after a hiatus that only added to its force, American troops were in Afghanistan. Bang up to date? I think so.

If, in the end, Cold Calls disappoints, it is only slightly, and only when compared with some of the earlier volumes. Logue has set himself a high bar, and the piecemeal way in which his work appears does this latest chapter no favors. Within the context of his wider enterprise, Cold Calls is a success; it just has trouble standing alone in the spotlight. Scattered through its pages are hints that Prospero’s bag of tricks is emptying. The starburst similes are beginning to stale, talk, yet again, of the Russian Front is a little tired, old hat, old helmet.

But it’s too soon to write off the aged magician as he works away, chopping, changing, messing with, yet somehow never losing sight of his source. Cold Calls is billed as “War Music Continued,” yet by beginning with a long battle sequence rooted in the events of the Iliad’s fifth book, Logue abandons the nod to Homer’s narrative contained in War Music’s more or less sequential rendering of books 16 to 19. He then returns (briefly, sort of) to the chronological fold by using the Greek hero Diomed’s (Diomedes) impious attack on Aphrodite (Homer, book 5) as an introduction to a passage inspired by the episode (Homer, book 21) in which the river god Scamander battles Achilles. It’s neatly done, it’s characteristic of the way that Logue weaves his way through Homer, and it paves the way for yet more games with the Iliad’s original plot.

According to Homer, Scamander’s support for Troy was a matter of simple theopolitics. Fine, but a touch dull. Logue, still channeling Wardour Street, prefers something more seductive. Wounded by Diomed, the teary goddess of love (“her towel retained by nothing save herself”) makes her way to the river to ask for its water’s healing touch. Naughty Scamander (“astonished by his luck”) is only too pleased to help. When, after a sexy, bawdy, teasing, imploring exchange, that towel finally “goes curling off” into the flow (as we, and wicked Count Palmiro Vicarion, always understood it would), we know that the smitten Scamander will oblige his Aphrodite by sweeping the Greeks away. And so the river does:

Almost without a sound

Its murmuring radiance became

A dark, torrential surge

Clouded with boulders, crammed with trees,

         as clamorous as if it were a sea,

That lifted Greece, then pulled Greece down,

Cars gone, masks gone, gone under, reappearing, gone

That whole passage is, typically for Logue, of the Iliad, yet not in it.

The same, broadly speaking, is true of what follows a little later, a foul-mouthed slanging-match between Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, each dressed like celebrity trash, and behaving not like the goddesses of Olympus, but its fishwives. It leaves an impression, coarse and more than a little grotesque, that doesn’t gel too well with the way that Logue has, in his earlier volumes, succeeded in conveying the beauty, power, willfulness, and menace of the gods, but the fault lies not with the Englishman, but (dare I say it) with the Greek. One of the more puzzling aspects of the Theomachy, the battle between the gods in Books 20 and 21, is the way that it begins in elemental grandeur but ends in a brawl and an exchange of insults, something that Homer presumably inserted as a respite, a moment of comic relief amid the relentless slaughter, Keystone muddled in with the carnage. Logue’s take, for all its faults, works a great deal better.

If, after this, the concluding sections of Cold Calls are mildly disappointing, it’s not so much for what they are as for what they might have been. In a book described as a continuation of War Music, Logue might have been expected to be building towards the death and desecration of Hector, the Iliad’s tragic climax and a subject worthy of his skills. Instead this volume, which ends with the delegation of the desperate Greek leaders visiting the sulking Achilles, turns out to be set much earlier in Homer’s narrative:

They find him, with guitar,

Singing of Gilgamesh.

“Take my hands. Here they are.”

You cannot take your eyes away from him.

His own so bright they slow you down.

His voice so low, and yet so clear.

You know that he is dangerous.

Patroclus has yet to die, let alone Hector.

Logue has said that Cold Calls is the penultimate chapter of his epic, and, judging by an interview he gave the London Independent last year, it appears that the last chapter (“this bit isn’t in the Iliad at all”) will not take readers much closer to the destruction of Priam’s noblest son. Instead, he is planning to describe an assault by the Trojans on the Greek camp that will, in the end, decide nothing.

In a way though, perhaps it’s fitting that he will leave this ancient, ageless cycle of revenge, glory, bravery, and violence, of Troy, Gilgamesh, and Stalingrad, uncompleted, still alive, still alluring, still with us:

And now the light of evening has begun

To shawl across the plain:

Blue gray, gold gray, blue gold,

Translucent nothingnesses

Readying our space,

Within the deep, unchanging sea of space,

For Hesper’s entrance, and the silver wrap.

Covered with blood, mostly their own,

Loyal to death, reckoning to die

Odysseus, Ajax, Diomed, 

Idomeneo, Nestor, Menelaos

And the King.

Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Logue.

Defying Death To Save A Life

The Fountain

The New York Sun, November 22, 2006

Darren Aronofsky's "Pi" was, for all its indie buzz and critical approval, muddled, pretentious, and, at roughly 80 minutes in length, roughly 80 minutes too long. His no less pretentious second effort, the morbid "Requiem for a Dream," won even more awards (and, to be fair, a deserved Oscar nomination for Ellen Burstyn) but combined dazzling direction with leaden storytelling, preachiness that would embarrass the Drug Enforcement Administration, and, most unforgivably, ghastly treatment of pretty Jennifer Connelly.

Mr. Aronofsky's latest film,"The Fountain," has so far faced a more mixed reception from the critics (it was booed at the press screening of the Venice Film Festival earlier this year), but for his audience, at least, it may be third time luckier (lucky would be too strong). If an hour and a half of "Pi" called for cocktails, the only reasonable response to "Requiem for a Dream" was a stiff hemlock. By contrast, this latest Aronofsky should leave you soothed, relaxed, and mellow. Think nap. Think Windham Hill Records circa 1986. Think marijuana.

The plot may be as ludicrous as it is ambitious, and the philosophical premise that underpins it is ultimately a downer, but as gorgeous image follows gorgeous image and Clint Mansell's mesmerizing score pulls you in, it's difficult not to be beguiled. Needless to say, it doesn't hurt that the movie's stars, Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, are exceptionally easy on the eyes.

Of the two, Mr. Jackman has the meatier role (or, more precisely, roles).To start with, he's Tomas, a 16th-century conquistador sent to New Spain by the embattled Queen Isabel ( Ms. Weisz) to find the legendary Fountain of Youth. Inconveniently enough, this turns out to be a tree located somewhere in the jungles of the Mayan hinterland, leaving poor Tomas the task of finding a very small needle in a very large and dangerous haystack. All he has to help him are a peculiar map, a determined friar, and the questionable support of fellow conquistadors clearly appalled by the prospect that Mr. Aronofsky's soft-edged movie might be turning into a remake of Werner Herzog's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God." Throw in an onslaught by those few Mayan warriors not already enrolled in Mel Gibson's forthcoming "Apocalypto," and it all becomes a little awkward for our luckless Spaniard.

Fast forward more than 400 years and Mr. Jackman reappears, this time as Tommy Creo, a scientist desperately looking for a cure for the brain tumor that is killing his wife, Izzi ( Ms. Weisz, again). As I understand this movie, Tommy is not the same person as Tomas, although Mr. Aronofsky has suggested, a touch ambiguously, that they represent different aspects of the same character. It is true that for two people living hundreds of years apart they do seem to, well, overlap a lot.

Yup, it's a puzzle, but let's not let that stop us from skipping on another 500 years and renewing our acquaintance with Tommy, except now he's Tom, kitted out like Grasshopper from "Kung Fu" (shaved head and all), and hurtling through the galaxies in a transparent globe that seems more Christmas decoration than spaceship. It appears that Tommy Creo did indeed discover the secret of eternal life (Guatemalan tree bark), but not in time to save Izzi, and, no, that's not a spoiler: From the moment we first encounter her, she has photogenic death written all over her photogenic features. Now, 500 years later, for reasons I can't be bothered to go into, Tommy/Tom is set on transporting a sickly Tree of Life to the Xibalba nebula, an equally sickly nebula that may or may not be the site of the Mayan underworld. I did mention, didn't I, that this movie's plot is ludicrous.

Other than the ailing tree, Creo's only other companion in his globe is an apparition that is either Izzi's ghost, an extremely persistent hallucination, or, who knows, both. Either way it involves Ms. Weisz standing around looking beautiful, wise, and mysterious, which is very much how she also plays the living Izzi and the long since perished Queen Isabel. As roles go, these are not the most demanding, but as they are considerably more flattering than what Ms. Connelly was put through in "Requiem for a Dream" (significantly, perhaps, Ms. Weisz is the director's fiancée and has thus, presumably, managed to keep on his good side), Ms. Weisz will probably have kept any complaints to herself.

But if the dying tree, or dead Izzi, or immortal Tom don't have much to say (he's too busy meditating and munching on Guatemalan tree bark) that leaves us free to concentrate on the bewitching, sparkling, glorious black and gold of Mr. Aronofsky's vision of deep space, a black and gold that echoes the candle-lit chiaroscuro of Queen Isabel's court. It's a color scheme that recurs throughout the film, providing a welcome note of continuity for a movie in which the narrative repeatedly jumps backward and forward in and out of three eras.

As visions of space go, it is, like so much of "The Fountain," simply lovely to look at, but Mr. Aronofsky's Hubble-influenced, almost organic spirals and clouds (suitably enough, the director dispensed with CGI and arranged for the special effects for these sequences to be brewed in a petri dish) also fits nicely into what passes as this film's overall message, a message that might owe something to its director having listened a little too often to the simpering mysticism of the Beatles' "Across the Universe."

More specifically, Mr. Aronofsky wants us to feel better about dying. This film seems to reflect his belief that modern man spends too much time, effort, and spiritual energy dodging the coffin. He offers us instead the role model of the saintly Izzi, calm, accepting, and perfectly content to ignore Dylan Thomas and instead "go gentle into that good night." Frantic Tommy's insistence that science can somehow devise an alternative, less fatal, solution is portrayed as grossly insensitive, and is obviously designed to show that, when it comes to confronting the Grim Reaper, our technological society has its priorities badly skewed.

If it does, this hardly makes us unique. So far as I'm aware, a keen interest in staying alive has been present in every culture since things went so wrong at Eden, and I believe that, with the exception of the lemming, the rest of the animal kingdom feels much the same way. Judging by this movie, Mr. Aronofsky, however, does not, preferring instead to believe, like Peter Pan, that death is "an awfully big adventure."

But then, he's still on the right side of 40.

A Character Sketch Gone Crazy

Stranger Than Fiction

The New York Sun, November, 10, 2006

There are some desserts, just a few, that are perfection itself. There are plenty more, glutinous, sticky, cloying, annoying, that tip over into a sickly sweetness and simply disgust. Then, trickiest of all, there are those that teeter uncertainly along the edge, promising delight on one side, threatening nausea on the other. They generally end up delivering both. In this respect they resemble nothing so much as Marc Forster's sharp, saccharine, original, clichéd "Stranger Than Fiction," a film that infuriates and enchants, and is, without doubt, the best date movie I've seen this year.

So far as saccharine is concerned, a quick glance at the advance publicity materials turned up danger signs by the sachet load. The movie was not just funny, but "sweetly funny." It was also "heartfelt," "deeply moving," and "deeply emotional. "When, to top it all off, I read that Ana the love interest (Maggie Gyllenhaal) was billed as a "free-spirited," "anarchist" baker, there was nothing to do but be apprehensive about the prospect that lay ahead. Deeply.

Sure enough, if it's syrup you're looking for, "Stranger Than Fiction" is a movie splattered with gobs of the stuff, above all in a final sequence that equals, and may even exceed, the repulsive aspartame-saturated conclusion of "Love Actually." The producer of "Stranger Than Fiction" has claimed that the last moments of his film are "a beautiful tribute to the little things in life that are, in the end, our salvation" — a grim boast that tells you all you need to know.

As for clichéd, let's just say we've all been down the boring-corporate-stiff-transformed by-love-for-free-spirited-girl route many times before, even if making the free-spirited girl an anarchist baker is something of a novelty. But if the core love story itself is not particularly original, the same cannot be said of the context within which it is set. Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is not just a boring corporate stiff (IRS actually, but you get the point), he's also the hero of the latest novel ("Death and Taxes") by reclusive author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), something he only discovers after hearing the disembodied voice of the novelist narrating exactly what the unfortunate taxman is up to. This would be disconcerting at the best of times, but these are not the best of times. As Crick comes to discover, Karen is busily working out how she can kill him off in the final chapter. Somehow Crick, fictional, yet real, has to contact his creator and persuade her to end "Death and Taxes" on a less lethal note.

The script may not be quite as clever as writer Zach Helm likes to think ("From Pirandello, to Brecht, to Wilder, to Stoppard, to Woody Allen, to Wes Anderson," he writes in the press material,"we an see the progression of a contemporary, self-aware, reality-bending and audience-involving wave in dramatic literature … ‘Stranger than Fiction' is simply my abstraction of it."), and the logic of the plot falls apart from time to time, but the premise is so interesting that it cannot fail to intrigue. This is less because of the collision of author and character — an old conceit that is not by itself enough to carry a movie ("Monkeybone," anyone?) — than for what the film has to say (or, just as often, imply) about the way we all have to struggle with the uncertainty of life and the inevitability of death.

As if that weren't substance enough, "Stranger than Fiction" also addresses the question of what exactly the big man upstairs (if He exists) thinks He is doing. The clue that this somewhat meaty topic is part of the movie's agenda comes in a brief aside from Karen, barely audible, and over in a second or two, in which she tells a TV interviewer that she doesn't believe in God. It's a moment that is easy to overlook (perhaps deliberately so), but it's surely a hint that this film's meditations on the nature and responsibilities of creation are intended to take its audience into a more provocative place than the self-indulgence of most Hollywood musings on the creative process.

Karen, unlike certain other creators I could mention, is finally forced to dispense with the dishonest alibi of free will and come to terms both with her creation — her Harold — and with the actual human cost of the destiny she has sketched out for him. She might look at what she has written and see that it is good, but will that be enough for her to live with Harold's tragic, but artistically pleasing, death?

If all this sounds, you know, a little heavy for a date movie, don't worry. Like the far better "Groundhog Day," it's perfectly possible to enjoy popcorn, hormones, and "Stranger Than Fiction" without being bothered too much by the deeper issues lurking just below the sheen of its romantic comedy surface. Besides, like "Groundhog Day," this film offers audiences the engrossing spectacle of a comedy icon (then Bill Murray, now Mr. Ferrell) delivering a performance of unexpected delicacy, subtlety, and depth. Mr. Ferrell disdains the lazy cliché of the solitary, dried-up, and obsessively compulsive tax drone in favor of a far richer, sometimes even tragic portrait. As a result, Harold's growth and transformation (bolstered by terrific set design and clever cinematography) is all the more convincing and, yes, touching.

The former Ron Burgundy is not let down by the supporting cast. Ms. Gyllenhaal's Ana (the anarchist baker) may come across, initially at least, as being as smug, self-righteous, and preachy as all the other anarchist bakers you've ever met, but her warmth, smile, and not-quite-explicable sexiness make it easy to understand just why Harold is so smitten. Ms. Thompson, meanwhile, is splendid as usual, even if, as usual, it's impossible to avoid the impression that her acting is Acting with a capital "A," acting that is trying just that little bit too hard. By contrast, as Jules Hilbert, the professor of English who helps Harold work his way through this most unusual of literary conundrums, Dustin Hoffman's seemingly effortless performance purrs along like the smoothest and most expensive of engines. Even if it's fueled by occasional pieces of ham, it's so entertaining that it would be churlish to complain.

In fact, on balance much the same could be said for "Stranger than Fiction" as a whole, so go and see it, but if you — or your date — are diabetic, cynical, or just lacking a sweet tooth, it might be just as well to leave before the sugary excess of that final scene.