Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

ANTHONY HOPKINS – STEPHEN KING – HARTS IN ATLANTIS – 2001 (1999)

The title of this film refers to the title of a collection of novellas and short stories by Stephen King. This collection contains two novellas and three short stories with recurring characters: “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” "Hearts in Atlantis,” "Blind Willie," "Why We're in Vietnam," "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling." The film only concerns the first and the last sections of this book.

Ted Brautigan is an old man on the run who one day arrives in the house where a young boy Bobby Garfield lives with his mother. A relation is constructed between the two and it is this very theme of the friendship between an older man and a young boy whose father is dead that the film studies after Stephen King. It is a very pregnant and important theme in Stephen King. Children are always, in a way or another, the victims of the world, of grown-ups especially.

Bobby is thus confronted to bullies and he learns how to confront them and defeat them. He is confronted with what might have become love with Carol after a first kiss if he had had the opportunity t-o stay around, but his mother moves away after having been molested, at least, by her own boss during a professional seminar away from home. When back she overreacts against Ted Brautigan accusing him of some crime he did not commit.

Yet there is mystery behind Ted Brautigan because he is supposed to be “WANTED” by some low men in yellow coats and he is finally taken away soon after Bobby’s mother return. And the betrayal of Ted by Bobby’s mother who calls the low men to tell them about where they can find Ted Brautigan could have brought some complete different future to Bobby, but he does not go with Ted and remains with his mother. The film then is very short since we miss everything after that departure and before his return for the burial of his and Carol’s friend John Sullivan. The end is even made kind of sentimental with Bobby re-visiting his old home and meeting Carol’s daughter, Carol being dead, and he presents her with an old picture of Carol as an angel in some school play.

The film misses what some see in the book: the fact that baby-boomers missed their historic challenge to produce a better world that is, instead, drowning under a heavy hurricane of consumer’s goods. We are far from “love and peace = INFORMATION,” as Carol used to state. Love has become self-centered satisfaction of hormonal impulses. Peace has become the crisscross pattern of simultaneous limited wars all over the world. And information has become the meaningless soup of being over-bombarded by a constant flow of undecipherable news, fake or not.

Even the central theme of the friendship between an older man and a young boy is rather schematically reduced to something that is always seen as fishy, fuzzy, maybe false, definitely failed when ending with no hope, like in the book, no hope of Ted Brautigan being free again. That’s a shame because such friendships are essential for the simple maturing of boys into responsible and strong adults, and the breaking of it meant for Bobby a ruined youth with two periods in juvenile detention facilities. I regret that mellowing of the book in this film.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

AMAZON.com & .co.uk

11 IS A DIFFICULT AGE THAT NEEDS A DOOR TO LIFE, November 13, 2004

This film, with an aging Anthony Perkins, is adapted from the book of Stephen King that has the same title. The book is a great book about the growing process of a young teenager when confronted to a substitute of his dead father that can open his mind to life, to culture, to literature, to danger and to love. The film is by far too short to show all the details of this essential situation for any kid: the opening of a mind and a personality to the wide wild world. By being too short it looks like a sketch if not a caricature.

The whole cultural dimension is lost, particularly the discovery of literature and the pleasure to read books. Actually no book is read in the film, and no book is discussed in the film. The danger that is chasing Ted Brautigan is not clearly shown and identified, though it is not identified in the book either, but it is described in many details. Here things go too fast, the mouse falls in the trap too quickly. We are and remain hungry after this meal.

The mother, on the other hand, is quite clearly shown has a naive and selfish bigot. She spends most of her income on dresses and accuses her dead husband to have left her miserable and with many debts, which is quickly shown as false. But she is naive to the point of not seeing that her boss is inviting her to a « convention » over a week-end, because he wants a woman to be at her service during that time. She ends up raped, and she had not even thought of her boss's duplicity, in spite of previous situations that she had had to face.

The film is maybe a little bit sketchy on that point. But this woman is a bigot at the same time and sees evil everywhere, particularly in this male stranger that arrives one day and rents the second floor apartment. And yet she is a bigot as long as she does not need the man to take care of her son during her « convention » weekend. And she does not seem to wonder too hard where the two thousand dollars come from on the night the neighbor goes away.

She just takes the money, though she will, to compensate maybe for her lack of love, buy the dream bike her son had coveted all summer long. In other words, this film could have been a lot better.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

TRANSPARENT – AMAZON PRIME – 2014

This series is surprisingly bizarre. The summary of it is explicit and at the same time evasive. It does not really describe the atmosphere and meaning of this altogether queer – the queer of LGBTQ – sitcom.

“When the Pfefferman family patriarch makes a dramatic admission, the entire family’s secrets start to spill out, and each of them spins in a different direction as they begin to figure out who they are going to become. Starring Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, and Gaby Hoffman.”

As you find out by just reading that summary, it does not mention we are dealing with a Jewish family. That implies some cultural, social and ideological, not to mention religious, elements that structure and construct the meaning of the series. In the same way, it does not mention the fact the “family patriarch” was a university professor and researcher and has now retired. He was and still is an intellectual that provided and still provides his family with a tremendous level of financial and economic resources. That creates real and devastating dependency in the members of the family. They are from beginning to end enslaved to the father, in a Jewish family where the Jewishness is transmitted by the mother and in a community where the rabbi is a woman.

Think then of the meaning of the father (by the way the real patriarch is the grandfather who is buried in the last episode) deciding to become a trans woman in his late sixties. It is a challenge to the Jewish character of his wife since he is not divorced. It is a challenge to his secondary Jewish relation to his children who are Jewish because their mother is Jewish and this fact cannot be changed by the decision of the father to define himself as a woman though he remains on the trans-vestite side of his trans approach of his gender rather than on the trans-hormonal side. That only makes the necessary adjustments of the other family members’ approaches of their husband or father quite superficial since it is only changing the gender of the pronouns used for any reference to him, sorry her. He remains a HE under a SHE surface, and the mother does not seem to be able to change her pronominal reference to HIM, not HER.

That makes his move quite pathetic and the wife is quite justified in her just standing on the side, watchful, curious, intrigued and after all nothing else, certainly not supportive.

The three children are quite special.

The elder daughter defines herself as a lesbian and reveals she has always been and she steals her unique lesbian partner from her own marriage in what becomes a mid-life crisis, supported by the father who gives this lesbian couple the family house after he has moved out of it. She is possessive and at the same time she regrets and maybe nostalgically dreams of her ex-husband since she gets a divorce from him, but he is fluid enough to let her (them) have the children of their marriage quite often. He does not seem to really resent the strange situation his ex-wife has created.

The second child, the son, is a greedy sentimental love addict, in fact not love really but only his hormonal outlets that have to be numerous and frequent. He is an authoritarian and possessive music manager fired from the label he was working for but then he is financed by his father to start his own label. He supposedly falls in love with the female rabbi of the community but he is untrustworthy with her and she – let’s hope – is clear enough to know that one missed rendezvous is forgivable but a second is not and yet she only seems to finally walk away after a third unfaithful episode more or less amplified by his younger sister’s gossiping. He has a propensity to invite his ex-lovers, at least some of them, to his family happenings even when he is supposed to concentrate on the rabbi he has declared his first and only real love. What’s more, the series will grant him a very contradictory present: an undeclared and so far unrecognized and unclaimed son. To jump from being the permanent and flippant oats-sower for more than twenty years to being the father of an adult son is majestically iconoclastic since this son is a Christian and he says graces before eating, which is not exactly the fashion in this Jewish family.

The last child of this triad is a younger daughter who is absolutely unable to keep to one objective and one plan for more than six months in her life. She is entirely covered and financed by the father in all her attempts at occupying her free time with entertaining activities that never last long. What’s more, she is a very vicious – though only half conscious – gossip that loves revealing things that are both half true and half false to people who should be protected from those nasty revelations. She hurts everyone around her and then she humbly begs like a puppy for everyone to forgive her and take her back under their protection and their financing.

So the superficial gender trans-formation of the father in that situation is more a gadget than a real deeply explored change. As a sitcom, it is nicely entertaining but it is also quite circumstantial and thus lacks real matter.