RUTHFULLY YOURS

Before the Black Lives Matter craze exacerbated contemporary attitudes about race and black social continuity, playwright August Wilson’s Fences articulated a black tribal viewpoint of the ambition, grievance, and assorted religious, sexual, and political beliefs borne by African American experience. The play focused on Troy Maxon, a sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh, who regaled his wife, their two sons, his brother, and a best friend of his personal feelings and beliefs, constantly recalling the things he’s gone through as a black American male. (He’s affectionately described as “Uncle Remus. Got more stories than the devil got sinners.”) Maxon’s tough, defensive attitude stemmed largely from his failed athletic career — an abiding frustration explained by the stifling segregation of the Jim Crow era. Maxon is Wilson’s archetypal character, a beyond-eloquent mouthpiece for the bitterness Wilson felt about the existential inequities suffered because of American racism.

Although Fences derives from the black oral tradition, its ideas were by no means obscure or marginalized, but in fact are so familiar to American theatrical practice that the play received two celebrated Broadway productions, the first in 1987 starring James Earl Jones, the second in 2010 starring Denzel Washington. Now Washington directs the film version of Fences (he repeats the role of Maxon) as an established classic of American theatrical literature rather than another Obama Effect film reflecting the opportunistic recent events (denoted by Ferguson and Black Lives Matter) that set a new paradigm for thinking about race.

By these terms, Fences is a conservative movie — which is unfortunate artistically and interesting politically. It feels dialogue-heavy because Washington doesn’t command the cinematic rhythm of movement and imagery that makes the best film adaptations of plays (David Lean’s Blithe Spirit, Sidney Lumet’s Long Day’s Journey into Night) seem perfect, absolutely natural, visual records of behavior. But it is that dialogue — Wilson’s deliberate, elaborately staged poetry, Maxon’s machine-gun rattling of self-shaped philosophies — that gives the play its conservatism.

Although Wilson’s writing was contemporary (he died in 2005), his ten-play output — a cycle set during every decade of the 20th century — chronicled black American history. Each drama used the background of gradual social progress, yet every story was rooted in earthly frustration, high and low spiritual aspiration (best evinced by Seven Guitars, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone), and political reality. In portraying the latter, Wilson commemorated how black folks recognized the evidence of ineradicable racism and still got on with their lives. His richest characters, like Maxon, believe in the principles of hard work, self-reliance, personal obligation, and ethical achievement.

These specific, sometimes lyrical African American truths contradict the inexact, sentimental grievance thrown up by Black Lives Matter. Wilson’s conservative narratives, with their heartfelt emphasis on personal relations, demonstrate the difference between entitlement as earned historically by human effort and the empty radical postures assumed by facile cultural inheritance. That’s the source of the conflict between Maxon and his older son, Lyons, an itinerant musician, and his younger son, Cory, a pouting, willful schoolboy.

Fences’ rebuttal to a pseudo-political social movement occurs inadvertently, as a benefit of Wilson’s concern with experience-based black values rather than political fashion. The difference is both temperamental and generational, but it is ironic that Wilson came to prominence during the rise of hip-hop culture; as if he felt the same inspiration as the post–Civil Rights, crack-era generation of America’s damaged black youth who were beginning to articulate and romanticize their own experiences. Fact is, the ingrained traditions of comprehending and surviving racism can be expressed in different idioms. Wilson has said that his writing was inspired by black poet Ishmael Reed, whose own vernacular (part of the 1960s Black Arts Movement) is as different from Wilson’s as it is from Public Enemy and Geto Boys, yet they all work the same territory. They recognize the black ethical history that Black Lives Matter (if not all contemporary liberalism) has abandoned.

Peter Berg’s Patriots Day, about the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing, combines action-movie flash with commemorative-movie solemnity. Surprisingly, the competing genres even each other out: Neither insultingly exploitative nor piously dignified, it is a nearly ideal example of pop-art historical filmmaking.

Berg’s directorial career has been the opposite of illustrious (junk like The Kingdom, Hancock, and Battlefield), but in Patriots Day, the former Hollywood actor shows a serviceable grasp of American vernacular. He depicts the devastating events as the story of tough-talking ethnic community — a vulgar and crude but also a unifying story — without ever succumbing to the sanctimony implied by the title.

Given the title’s plural noun, Berg covers a lot of ground and brings together a variety of Americans, starting with brash Boston street cop, Sgt. Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg), who was reluctantly on duty at the Marathon. Berg extends the perspective to Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese of Watertown (J. K. Simmons), M.I.T.–assigned police officer Sean Collier (Jake Picking), and FBI agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon). Fanning out, the story accumulates a range of civilians, two with contrasting immigrant backgrounds: Chinese immigrant engineer Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang), whose Mercedes-Benz gets car-jacked by the Chechen-immigrant Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) and Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff), while they’re on the run after having committed the bombing.

Through these characters (named after the real-life people), Patriots Day sketches home-grown radicalization and terror as undeniably linked with our contemporary culture of diversity. It is the simple yet vivid characterizations that distinguish Berg’s storytelling from Michael Bay’s fanboy fantasy history in Pearl Harbor (2001) and from the seditious nihilism in Day Night Day Night, Julia Loktev’s 2006 suicide-bomber indie movie. The tense rivalry between the Tsarnaev brothers gives us unexpected insight into ethnic and family tradition and the pressures of both radicalization and assimilation. Patriots Day provides the closest look so far into ethnic terrorism’s feral authority.

We first see Tamerlan as he is shaving off his tribal beard, preparing for war; he dominates both his wife (radicalized American Katherine Russell, played by Melissa Benoist) and his younger brother. Dzhokhar’s twisted sense of entitlement points to the irony of American youths’ radicalization. When Tamerlan decrees, “Martin Luther King was not a Muslim, he was a hypocrite, a fornicator,” Dzhokhar retorts, “I’m a fornicator” — a defense of the dorm-room pot-smoking, video-gaming style that eventually won him a place on a Rolling Stone magazine cover. Berg parallels Dzhokhar’s hip sensibility with Officer Collier’s courtship of an Asian-American girl and his video-game recreation with friends, white guys from Boston who recite the rap interlude of Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” (“Better watch out for the boys in blue!”), a different yet equally complex kind of rebellion.

Hollywood often seems unfamiliar with such common American types, but Berg knows them. This is his fourth film with Wahlberg, who once again authentically portrays a working-man type. In Wahlberg’s hot-tempered Saunders, vulgarity becomes an ethnic, class, and psychological trait, the mark of his character. When among the elites at the FBI’s command-center re-creation of the bomb site, Saunders’s beat-cop acumen (he demonstrates what actors call “sense-memory”) serves the investigation.

Berg may have learned his craft from Tony Scott and the British TV-ad style of incessant montage and excitation — quick shots of bloody limbs mixed in with documentary footage and dramatized mayhem is sometimes aesthetically offensive. Yet this is the same craft that takes Patriots Day beyond the usual Hollywood procedural suspense and builds a captivating narrative about national allegiance, fortitude, and resolve. When the manhunt spreads beyond Boston, Berg’s action-movie bluntness takes on riveting purpose. Issues of class and professionalism come together wonderfully. (Saunders advises the FBI, “We got to let [the people of] Boston work for us” — an unimaginable idea for a less parochial town like, say, New York.) An especially excellent scene is the examination of the radicalized Tsarnaev wife by a police investigator (Khandi Alexander); their exchange has a political and sexual bravura worthy of Oliver Stone at his incendiary best.

In one clip, President Obama consoles, “This country shall remain undipped.” His Ivy League cadence and rhetorical sophistication are that of a leader who deludes the public. Berg’s vulgar panache shows a gutsy, nearly tactile respect for the people.

A well-deserved tribute to Patriot’s Day, the docudrama about the terrorism at the Boston Marathon, is that despite its Hallmark message of love triumphing over hate, it remains a riveting, compelling movie on many levels. It’s a tense whodunit, and an even more excrutiating “how-and-when-to-do -it” as the decision of whether to release the surveillance photos of the two suspects will help or hinder attempts to find them It illustrates the power plays between various levels of local government and federal investigators and enforcers It doesn’t shy away from explicitly showing the horrific injuries sustained by survivors nor the depths of grief at the loss of life It focuses on the dedication of medical workers and the willingness of ordinary, untrained people to rush towards helping victims as opposed to running away in fear. Perhaps, even more bravely, it restores the role of heroes to the men in blue and other first responders – a role too quickly forgotten after 9/11 This is a movie that should be seen by all Americans who too hastily jumped onto the bandwagon of Black Lives Matter and various politicians to condemn our policemen en masse for the actions of a tiny fraction of their colleagues

Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg have successfully collaborated on other disaster films but this one strikes most closely to home, dealing with an activity in which people of all ages could participate – as athletes, as recreational runners, as spirited observers of a thrilling contest or just patriotic fans of their own city. This last category figures prominently in the final uplifting slogan of Boston Strong as we see the Red Sox trade their team jerseys in their post-marathon game for ones featuring the single word BOSTON. Sadly, this movie is all too timely as various other attacks by Muslim jihadists continue to recur throughout our country and the world – most recently in Berlin The ideology behind jihad is skimmed over lightly in this film with more emphasis given to the notion that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older more charismatic brother, dominated both his wife and younger brother Dzhokar into complying with his personal agenda – one which the younger brother might not have pursued independently. In a climactic scene in which the two brothers are fleeing Boston and driving to New York with two more bombs in the car, Dzhokar is seen resisting one aspect of his brother’s plan – an action that provokes Tamerlan, an amateur boxer, into a physical confrontation in which he beats and threatens to kill his brother if he doesn’t do exactly as instructed This scene (which had no witnesses) dramatizes as fact the subsequent legal strategy of Dzhokar’s defense team in trying to avoid the death penalty for their client. It stands out as one of the few instances in which there is no hard evidence for the audience to gauge whether the events we are watching ever took place In the courtroom, jurors would hear the prosecution’s rejection of that theory, which they ultimately preferred when they sentenced Dzhokar to death But, since most of the film uses surveillance film from many sources, we tend to accept the “truth” of what we are shown, forgetting that this is a feature film and not even a documentary It was an odd choice on the part of the filmmakers to not hedge the presentation of this slant as something suggested by a friend or family member (hearsay) instead of showing it as a re-enactment which appears to be true.

After the opening shot establishing Denzel Washington and his buddy as garbage men making small talk while driving through Pittsburgh on the back of a truck, the movie closes in, metaphorically fencing in the audience to a small set that could be the staged version of this play. As director, Washington clearly wasn’t interested in opening up the play to be more cinematic – we are watching people whose damaged lives have been circumscribed by their race, their economic vicissitudes, their war experiences and mostly, their character flaws. Troy, the husband and father, was kicked out of his home at the age of 14, ending up in prison for a stint of 15 years, during which he discovered his talent for baseball. Ironically, prison was the only place where he had the freedom to play as he discovered when he was released in the years before Jackie Robinson integrated the sport.

For the first half of the film Troy is seen as the victim of a punishing father and a racist society that kept black men from developing their potential. His saving grace seems to be his happy marriage to Rose, played to perfection by Viola Davis, as a woman with enough strength to accept second place to a blustering, bigger than life man. Rose seems to be a woman capable of working on Tony and getting him to do the right thing despite his protestations to the contrary. She lets him talk his head off, gesture theatrically to his small audience of friend and family, but she pulls him into line when he’s let his steam off and gets him to do her bidding.

Suddenly the plot changes course and we discover that Troy has some secrets from Rose and the audience, ones he appears to feel guilty about initially though this soon gets rationalized into his entitlement as a man. His behavior becomes shockingly dense and abusive and our allegiances turn from his charismatic nature to the quieter less dramatic Rose whose behavior has some surprises for us as well. Though the mise en scene is kitchen sink reality, the language and entrance of minor characters are stagey in a formulaic way. Critics have compared this to Death of a Salesman and that is legitimate in its format as well as theme – there is a dated quality to how the characters interact even when the problems raised are beyond the boundaries of time, place and society’s conventions.

Perhaps it was A.O. Scott’s coronation of Isabelle Huppert as “the world’s greatest actress” that sealed my assessment of her latest film, “Things To Come” (L’Avenir in French). In it, Ms. Huppert plays the part of a middle-aged philosophy professor whose biggest problem is her aging, intensely neurotic and demanding mother, a character played more for laughs than for pity. The rest of Isabelle’s life is purring along smoothly; she is adored by her students, her husband, children, publisher and hunky former student who invites her to his home for the weekend, a tease for the audience. Within short order, all the preceding perfections fall apart and Isabelle does get one chance at a good cry. But faster than you can say Mon Dieu, she perks up and resumes her purposeful career, her terrific relationship with her students and a new role as grandmother. It led me to think that Mme Huppert’s stiff upper lip was more British than Gallic and that this part might have been more believable played by Kristin Scott-Thomas who at least is half of each.

This is a movie that remains superficial. Picking up on the banal philosophy quotations sprinkled throughout the script as shorthand for gravitas, the dialogue is sterile and boring. It lacks depth and emotion and Huppert’s performance, as is true of most of her work, lacks affect. By contrast, think of the short scene in Manchester By The Sea in which Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck meet on the street and she insists on explaining her past actions – a few restrained minutes packed with more poignancy, fragility and heartbreak than the total screenplay in Things to Come. Surely being discarded by a long-term husband who shared your life-work, your parentage and your taste in music is worth more than the brief remark “I thought you would love me forever.” Audiences should not be intimidated by serious critics implying that there is more to this film than most of them will experience. It’s a dud. So is Isabelle whose facial expressions remain frozen for its duration. The small bursts of color allotted to us are in the various sundresses and sportswear worn by the actress and these are hardly designer clothes. On the positive side, there is a soundtrack that includes Woody Guthrie, German arias or lieder and the slow harmonic version of Unchained Melody sung by the Fleetwoods – a haunting and unforgettable thing of beauty revived from the fifties. Would that the screenplay had summoned as much feeling as this poetic song.