OTC50 #134

POSTED

DEFINING MOMENTS ON HOW TO PLAY ILLUSTRATED IN 5 ACTS

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The moral being, the virtuous being, of the pre-industrialized civilization was punctuated by a fatal flaw that had to be overcome to survive.

Civilization formed to and around the cities, and through the Great Plains, at times climbing over majestic mountain ranges into the frontier’s horizon until the frontier vanished.

Denzel Washington has been edited into that history through cinema, and despite the technical restraints of editing machines and actors being represented as amalgamations of bits and pieces of takes, Washington represents a society moving forward into the future.

Washington creates characters that embark on that journey through America, and thereby also confronts all the obstacles life throws in the way, along that path.

Alas, poor Yorick, what stories have you been able to tell, what significance to the larger world have you become, despite all those troubles.

The character defined for a particular film project is just the starting point, because of the great influence that society has on individual personalities. Parts of people get formed by the community, and parts of people get deterred by the community, although sometimes a different community or by communities of people within the superstructure constructed by society.

Seldom does an individual affect the greater whole. Instead, people struggle to finish the day in one piece.

Washington shows through his performances that humanity can be tempted by the less productive spirits running inside us that can be at best, on those better days, a lot of distractions.

In Flight (2012), Whip Whitaker’s story is about getting through the day any which way that is necessary, which is a plan of action that is not always so easy, when surviving may be more difficult for some people than others.

In building the character, Washington shows how an utter collapse in the moral being may still leave room for redemption.

Whitaker has lost the battle for self control to the inescapable need to feel good, with the use of stimulants, like alcohol, drugs and sexual gratification. In the hotel room, Whitaker has clearly succeeded in all three sensory uplifts.

The characters are not typecast though. Whitaker is a commercial airline pilot, while Frank is a train conductor, and Lincoln is a homicide detective.

Jobs are where the real competition in civilization is at in America. Companies may compete for market share, but individuals compete within companies, and for the attention of companies, for the opportunity to earn a living wage.

That car is shinier than the neighbour’s car for a reason.

Industrialization required wage labour to make the factories in the north turn, but the agrarian society in the south, prior to the American Civil War, used free slave labour stolen from Africa and Jamaica to tend to the cotton fields.

That community from the Old South still required intervention – especially after Reconstruction and the Segregationist Jim Crow Laws.

The Harlem of the civil rights era was the end of the line for many Americans in pursuit of happiness, only to find or to create in their shadow a worn down halfway home for poor immigrants and freed black slaves having had migrated north and found junkie town and red-light districts – and urban poverty.

Urban poverty in the North was quite different than being chained to the earth in the South.

New York had more violent parts, like Hell’s Kitchen and the East River Docks. But Harlem is where Denzel Washington decidedly made his mark in Hollywood.

In Malcolm X (1992) Washington plays the civil rights leader rising into a state of grace after falling rock bottom in prison. Malcolm X found his truth in the Muslim Brotherhood, and then, as more of an individual than a community, Malcolm X had to quickly learn to survive within a much more intimate, but just as violent, superstructure.

In New York City there is a floor that hurts when you fall – the sidewalk and the broken alleys are uncomfortable to sleep on.

Washington also shows the other side of Harlem by playing drug trafficker Frank Lucas, the King of Harlem, in American Gangster (2007). Washington shows how Lucas put everything together and kept certain traditional values that helped him maintain a community.

That community included a lot of gangsters, drug traffickers, dealers and doped up kids dying in the streets from a drug that momentarily made them feel like magic.

The human paradox can be identified clearest when comparing the two performances – not in the quality of the acting art, but in what the characters say and do, who they connect with, the position taken on moral grounds, and how they ended up as a result.

To be an individual or to be a member of the community, is a recuring theme in the performances.

In Training Day (2001) a Los Angeles police detective has fallen far from the tree – running a crew of corrupt undercover police officers. Alonzo betrays just about every community that exists in LA for his individual endeavours that just get him into more and more trouble.

Life spirals out of control without morality and virtuousness. The Russian mafia get Alonzo anyway, in the end.

If the protagonist survives the narrative, continued existence is credited to the character having been virtuous, or being quickly able to find a moral backbone, and those virtues and that moral code have more power than all the corruption pressed inside a shoe box.

If the protagonist dies, then well, there is nothing much to be done for him anyway, having led a life not worth noting.

Denzel Washington more often than not keeps everything real, when most of America is pursuing some sort of dream as a way to escape, when the dream to live by is more often than not a bit of fantasy in which people perpetually struggle to survive instead of finding the promise of immediate success.

The characters are more interested in acting honourably, putting best efforts forward and winning out over wrong doers, rather than achieving personal success by accumulating wealth.

Washington was tough on the casting directors, choosing his movie roles wisely.

At the core of many performances, the individual contribution to the community is an honest day’s work, in exchange for a living wage – and lot of guts and glory to make it happen long enough along the morally correct way to return to the same station the next day.

Even Alonso likes to get started early in the morning to eat the first good meal of the day and to listen to a person’s life story.

The community corrupts the idealistic young man – just as much in Malcolm X, as in American Gangster, as in Training Day. The community leaves Whitaker in a predicament that tests his individual code.

Of course, to make the movie interesting for Hollywood, a lot more may be going on at any given moment, in a particular situation, that would become surreal for the honest, factory worker trying to get through an ordinary day. Denzel Washington would have to be Charlie Chaplin to sell tickets to that movie before time ran out on his character.

The runaway train is always a real possibility, and when someone else falls at work there is an opportunity to succeed – not for greed and attention but out of a sense of purpose. Hollywood creates villains and heroes, but everyday life is just about a struggle and the need to survive – fixing what goes wrong so that everyone can carry on and start again tomorrow the same way today began.

Washington pulls the camera toward him with charisma and stoic control, and by applying a reasonable intervention in situational scenes. The character had an important role to play, but he was always just one part of many necessary moving parts in society.

The play is knowing everything there is to know about the character, whether that person is an investigative journalist or a struggling lawyer with just one more client left to serve.

This approach to performances results in the character being perceived as genuine – the worker had a whole day to get through and didn’t have time to overreact and make more out of what was already a difficult situation made for the movies.

As a train conductor in Unstoppable (2010) there was no time in movietime for histrionics. Tobin Frost was being paid for just such a situation in which he can use a lifetime of knowledge and experience running trains out of the yard, to stop a runaway train that comes headlong at him on the same line.

This day was extraordinary, but Washington was not so much focused on showing the American public how to save the world as how to get through a day that’s starts out ever so ordinary.

Washington ever present of his place on stage, worked on not presenting as black, and intentionally avoided the stereotypical typecasts. Why can’t the drug dealer be cast as a white confidence man?

Washington chose to play MacBeth instead of Othello.

The social tensions were always evident though, in the vanishing background, without having to underline the politics in middle class America and the faults that prevent or slow upward mobility success.

Americans have to start work on time, work hard all day long, and be prepared for just about anything. Extra hours were more often needed to feed the kids and pay the electric bill.

Washington chose roles that underscored workforce integration, playing characters as trained professionals, able to excel at their job to overcome obstacles, often in positions of authority, working within an envelope of mutual respect among colleagues.

In Philadelphia (1993) Joe Miller had to overcome his prejudices toward gay people during a time of hysteria over HIV/AIDS. The personal injury lawyer is asked to represent a corporate lawyer who has been released from his employment because of his HIV/AIDS diagnosis. 

Miller hesitates, but then he claims the moral high ground and overcomes his predisposed perceptions about the gay community, and gains a greater understanding and tolerance.

An individual in motion has more integrity and influence on the community than one who simply accepts the world around him standing frozen still, even with all the moral conundrums and barriers in the way.

God is there for everyone. Like the good son of a preacher, Washington carries the moral burden, again and again, letting the aggressor strike until he has an epiphany about better moral choices.

If Washington continued to be viewed as black, that was the viewer’s perception, because all the stereotypes and racial tropes had been removed from non-racially specific performances, while everything the character said and did was attached to an occupation and the interconnected relationships of that particular person within the community.

In the Pelican Brief (1993) Gray Grantham is a well-respected journalist in Washington DC whose life turns on the job, waiting all night for phone calls, recording interviews with subjects and seeking out informants.

This dedication to the profession results in people reaching out with story ideas and inside information that leads to the tiniest of details. Grantham has sacrificed the personal life for perfection as an investigative journalist – like he’d wanted to be one all his life.

In Crimson Tide (1995) First Officer Hunter comes into conflict with the Captain of a nuclear armed submarine when that old school hawkishness readies to launch nuclear missiles without final confirmation from the Pentagon.

Hunter knows the nuclear playbook, but he also has a moral code and sees the world differently – most notably as a world that must survive the passing of ships in the night.

The obstacles, in the way everyday, are just opportunities to prove one’s character and to rise above the rabble by choosing the morally correct path to achieving a defensible ending.

The real battleground for equality is in the job market – obtaining skills to acquire jobs that support a family. Upward mobility from the ghettos requires an education, a bit of luck and a good job – but most of all, perseverance.

Washington shows Americans how to stay on track – as a garbage truck driver or a Gulf War veteran, as an investigative journalist or a train conductor.

Even the bad guy characters, Washington creates, show remorse – and seek grace, especially once they get caught at whatever it is they were doing.

PAST PRESENT DYSTOPIA CRASHES INTO THE FUTURE

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

A Texas Oil Tycoon has that singular purpose of making money that puts the world at risk.

Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, a rather rich old eccentric from the Longhorn State, whose million-dollar oil rig causes a glacier to break off in Greenland. The glacier fragment is so big as to be expected to cause a catastrophic impact on Northern Europe.

Digger has a lot of eccentricities that allow him to ignore the significance of the 400-foot-deep iceberg, such as the love for his dying cat, an insatiable taste for tuna, and the uncomfortable ease at which he dresses and undresses in front of house guests.

Director Alejandro G. Inarritu casts everything, including the emerging climate dystopia, in a veneer of satirical humor. Everything is a bit more ornate than necessary, and the camera angles are always positioned to exaggerate reality.

The jury may still be out as to whether Inarritu is mocking the climate protestors or the world leaders ignoring the weather warnings.

Cruise is joined by a bit of an ensemble cast, most of whom only have minor roles as Cruise and his Digger character obviously want everyone’s attention. John Goodman has a more substantial role as President of the United States, who considers Digger an important advisor to the Presidential Cabinet.

That Latin fantastical story telling influences the narrative, with the film, turning into a back stage rehearsal of a play, and Cruise playing stage actor Curtis Markson who plays Digger on stage sometime in the not so distant future.

When the audience leaves the theatre, they enter the dystopian world the director has seemingly been mocking so fantastically.

Cruise does a job on the acting, wearing a mask of makeup, etc, but also moving around, at times being self referential to his previous movie roles, such as stealing a few scenes from his first mega hit, Risky Business (1983).