The Billiken's Bluff

Two weeks ago I wrote:

A few movies have done it right. 9.11.01 as background. As a part of the story but just the primer coat. People are not affected by events this large in a constant gut-wrenching (widow's and family members excluded) way. It's more of static, background noise.

Sunday, I saw The Great New Wonderful which had The Big September staunchly placed as backdrop, and yet all was not right. Maybe I want melodrama, or at least a little drama



Maybe I just want to care about characters and plot if I pay $10.75 to see a movie. I'm reminded of something a teacher at NYU asked me in a writing workshop:

Why are we telling this story today?

I would ask the same of Danny Leiner, director of TGNW becaue it requires infinitely less energy and action to not talk about 9/11 or not make a movie about it.



9/11 can only be background if there is another story to advance the plot. In 25th Hour there was the specter of Ed Norton's pending prison sentence, that gave immediacy to the love interests, the conversations with friends, family, father. It even gave immediacy to discussion of 9/11. It wasn't just public it was personal. Norton starts shouting at mutli-racial phantoms in his mirror at himself. We’ve been through this movie before on these pages, but there were compelling characters you can care about in the film. It didn't have to be about 9/11 at all because the plot could stand alone.



If a movie has an ensemble cast tasked with sorting out 9/11 one year later, then by default every story should be about 9/11 in some way. This TGNW was not.

Here is the ensemble...

There is a young boy, age 8. He is disturbed, regularly sees a psychologist, wears strange outfits consisting of cowboy boots, capes and sock puppets. He hides books outlining how to skin animals and taxidermy. He burns toy army figurines. He gets into a fight with an Armenian boy and calls him a sand monkey. This seems 9/11-induced. But it turns out that this has been going on for two years prior to 9/11. There is no link other than the sand monkey comment which is topical, timely but unconvincing to this jury.

Olympia Dukakis lives in Requiem for A Dream-Brooklyn.



She eats TV Dinners, watches a TV almost too old fashioned to be believed. She sits next to her husband and clips coupons. She is old and feels it. Her husband says nothing and smokes cigarettes on the porch. She paints botanical scenes, in secret. She is passionate for something, he is not. She resents her husband for being old and having nothing to say and most of all for being ordinary. She runs into a childhood friend from Coney Island. He is not boring. He is old but full of energy, he buys Snickers bars, rides a bike, has lived in Italy, knows good wine. They spend time together. She has feelings, thinks for a moment that maybe there could be more to life than her living room. But he ends up still being married and just wanted to be friends with her after all. She retracts further. She sees her husband at home and hates him, shakes him. This is not 9/11. They have 9/11/2002 on their television, but this is not the point. Her story is sad but incidental.

And in a way this is more real right? This is how lives happened around 9/11/01/02/03, but why make a movie about the ordinary?

The ensemble continues. Two Indian limo drivers/security guards for Indian diplomats and sub-continent celebrities, Avi and Satish, provide foreign other comic relief. They are fairly funny, but this should not be the point. One is stern the other is goofy. Fred and Barney. Some Hispanic youths lean on their limo, Satish yells and pushes him off the car. The youth calls him Apu and spits on the limo. That is the extent of anything related to 9/11. Avi cheats on his wife with the checkout girl at Pathmark. He feels bad about it. He cries. Satish consoles him. They agree to see the new Lawerance Fishburne movie together.



There has to be more.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s story-line is the only one that was enjoyable or did anything close to approximating a reaction to 9/11. She is firmly ensconced in the business of upper-echelon cake design and sales. She sells cakes for upwards of 25K to sweet sixteen socialites. She travels with a team of cake salesmen and women dressed in Zoolander-style outifts; aviator lens and pinstripe suits, warm-up jackets and stilettos. They travel in a Land Rover. They sell cakes. Gyllenhaal wants some information about a potential client. She speaks with Edie Falco at lunch. Edie is the cake competition. She says that after everything that has happened, don't you think we would be doing something more, not focusing on all this competition and posturing. She talks about how she went to Antarctica 4 years prior to see penguins, she would like to make a 2nd career of studying them as a zoologist or something. Falco hangs herself later in the movie. Gyllenhaal gets the account, sells the cake. She attends the sweet sixteen and walks to a karaoke stage where a lone girl is singing, Gyllenhaal loses it, begins crying. She is a petty person and knows it. She just sold a cake for 25 thousand, a woman killed herself, and there has to be something more than this.

But I don't know if I liked this because of how ridiculous this sounds (it was) or because it really moved me (it may have a little, but not significantly).



And any movie utilizing Stephen Colbert in a cameo should either cast him in a humorous role or place him in a role where he is intentionally not funny because you expect him to be.



He was a school principal and extraneous to 9/11 and my overall enjoyment.

And even in my absence you still feel my presence, exactly.