``Deja Vu'' and Moments of Clarity

I've just seen a very fascinating movie. And I really don't have any idea whether you'd like it a whole lot or not. It's called Deja Vu, currently playing at the Lumiere, and it's by the Canadian director Henry Jaglom. I don't know whether you've seen any of his other films: Eating and Last Summer at the Hamptoms are the two I remember. People complain that his films are very talky. My complaint has been that the conversation in his films works a little too hard at being clever. In Eating this was especially true; there were a number of really good lines but nothing else, which made it something like Stainless Steel Magnolias for the Public Radio crowd. (It was not as funny as Stainless Steel Magnolias, though.)

Deja Vu deals with the same sort of people, the fairly well to do arty crowd: writers, classical musicians, architects. But the conversation is much more natural. That's the part I think you might like. Very ordinary people, but well educated and upper middle class, talking at length about nothing of any great significance. Conversations which are much more real than those in almost any film I can think of.

Go Fish comes to mind. It had somewhat that same quality, although dealing with a different social world.

The actors are all very ordinary-seeming people. People are making a lot of Vanessa Redgrave's part in the film, and of course she's always great, but she's not in one of the main roles. Victoria Foyt, Jaglom's wife and the film's co-writer (along with Jaglom himself), gives the most interesting performance as the main character. Interesting in that it's definitely a performance, and yet not like a performance at all. A very ordinary middle-aged woman, who is occasionally somewhat confused and unsure of herself, but only to the extent that all of us are in muddling through our lives.

What I especially liked about Foyt were the moments of confusion she goes through when she's suddenly given a piece of information that doesn't that doesn't match up with what she's been taking for granted. She's smart and she's figures things out, but she doesn't just frown for a couple of seconds and then immediately realize what's happening, the way most characters in movies do. Like most of us, she's a little slow, and before the obvious becomes obvious, she first has to think about it a little.

I guess another thing that's difference about this script and Foyt's performance is that characters in most films (and plays, and novels) always know what they're doing, even when their role is to be confused and crazy. Because they always know that their role is to move the story forward. (``Okay, now my job is to be confused and crazy, because that's what the story requires of me now.'') But Victoria Foyt's character is more the way most of us are in our lives: we sometimes see ways in which we should move the story forward, but at the same time there's all sorts of other stuff that comes along with having a life and which simply can't be neglected. These are not ``complications'' in the way that writers build complications into their plots, it's simply interference from normal life: the kids (although there are none of them in this case), the parents, the in-laws, one's business affairs. Only in movies can people just forget about all that stuff and devote themselves completely to moving the story line forward.

An example is a scene where she goes shopping with her fiancé at London's Portobello Market. The scene functions as an occasion for her to run into her new lover and run off in his car, abandoning her fiancé for a day. But the shopping isn't treated in the film as a mere pretext for this unplanned encounter. It's treated as an event of real interest in its own right, and the occasion for a major argument between Foyt's character and her fiancé.

Beyond all this, there is a rather interesting story. Much more so than in any of the other Jaglom films I've seen. A ghost story, with some nice twists and a neat ending, although one could sort of see the ending coming. Or at least one knew that there was something like it on the way.

The story depends on a lot of coincidences, which a number of critics have complained about. But it is, after all, a ghost story, and there's an implication that some or all of these coincidence are not coincidences at all, but rather some suprahuman force of destiny at work. Now I don't believe in this sort of destiny myself, but in a ghost story, you're already committed to accepted something that is rationally impossible. (And there are actually at least three things in Deja Vu that are beyond the bounds of what is possible in a rational world.) So it seems to me a bit picky to balk at a few meaningful coincidences as well. That's simply the conceit of the plot, it's not what the film is really about.

The other thing that was powerful for me, and which you might not care so much for, was the theme of what I will call the Moment of Clarity.

So here we are, in our ordinary lives, making do with the best we have been able to find, accepting the compromises that have enabled us to survive, having not the life we originally wanted, but doing okay and finding our own small satisfactions and small comforts. I don't know if you ever looked at my review on my web page of Alice Munro's book The Moons of Jupiter, but she's very good at portraying characters (women) who have learned to settle for the best they can get, even if it's not all that great.

And in Jaglom's film, what the characters have settled for is not all that bad. Not when we look at it by the standards the world goes by. His characters are reasonably well off, they travel around, they're educated, enlightened, concerned with things that seem reasonably meaningful, and make conversations that are intermittently witty.

Then into this life comes the Moment of Clarity. One sees this in lots of fiction and movies, and it's one of the things that always makes a piece of fiction powerful for me. This ``moment'' might last a day, or a week, or even for a year. But suddenly one becomes aware of the life one really wanted, and there seems to be an opportunity where one might have a chance at it. But against that there are all the responsibilities and commitments that one has made to the life one already has. Most especially, there are all the other people in one's life, people who depend on one, people who will be badly hurt if one goes after this opportunity for a new life, and people for whom one's impulse to do this seems incomprehensible, bizarre, almost psychotic.

This was the thing that made The Age of Innocence such a powerful film for me, so that I went back to see it again a week later, while many of my friends were saying, ``Oh God, it's so slow, the story drags on forever.'' The Daniel Day Lewis character (Newland Archer) has a nice marriage coming up with Winona Ryder, a marriage which is everything he is supposed to want, everything the world thinks he ought to be happy with. And then the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up, and he realizes everything that is missing in this life he is about to commit himself to. But his fiancée (Ryder), although not the equal of Lewis and Pfeiffer in worldliness, outsmarts them and keeps Lewis for herself. Some people criticized Ryder's performance, but I thought she did a brilliant job of portraying a woman who understands much more than she will ever reveal, and who wins without ever overtly acknowledging that a battle is going on. This is the sort of thing that, for me, was missing in The Wings of the Dove.

For a less profound example, one can look at The Bridges of Madison County. I didn't want to like that film, but I had to. After a week with Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep goes back to her marriage with a very limited, but very good husband, and we see her decision as heartbreaking, but the only one possible.

Or, for another take, there's The Blue Angel which I saw again last week at the Castro and which you wanted me to look at four years ago when I was so smitten with Petra. Having seen it again now, I have to say that I have a very different take on it than the conventional one. In the beginning of that film, I see the Professor as a pathetic character, leading a pathetic life. And then along comes Marlene Dietrich with the promise of something much more passionate, more exciting. To me, it's a no-contest decision. Who on earth would forgo Marlene Dietrich in order to continue a life of hollow respectability teaching contemptuous high school students (or maybe junior college is the more accurate equivalent)?

So the Professor marries Dietrich and runs off to become part of Vaudeville. Wow, what incredible luck! What I wouldn't give for an opportunity like that!

But he's such a dumb shit that he can't cope with the demands of a life that requires interactions with people based on more than automatic obedience to authority. And when Dietrich quickly loses interest in him, as was quite predictable from the start even if he'd been a much more attractive male than he was, he winds up actually wishing he could go back to his pathetic life of teaching students who despise him. What a loser!

Anyway, in Deja Vu Jaglom (or rather Foyt, the author) rather stacks the decks by having the leading woman engaged to a male (played by Michael Brandon) who's almost as much of a geek as the geek in Dirty Dancing, except older, richer, and with a successful career, and having the male lead (played by Stephen Dillane) married to the sort of educated bimbo who characterizes suburbia in the movies (and not only in the movies).

For me, Michael Brandon's was the one weak performance in the film, because, good as it may have been in many ways, looking at him I was always aware that I was watching an actor playing a role.

What I especially liked, though, as previously mentioned, is the way Foyt deals with this situation with the sort of confused muddling that those of us in the real world resort to, rather than standing in front of the camera and uttering a grand soliloquy about the horrors of having to deal with such a Momentous Decision in the face of Conflicting Loyalties. There's not a great big Moment of Truth and Grand Epiphany as one is supposed to put in one's short stories. A little epiphany, yes, as the ghost story comes into play to show her the right way, and she quietly makes her decision and does the right thing. Or what I consider to be the right thing, anyway.

And the story ends at that point, with the two fated lovers coming together. What comes afterwards, after one makes a decision of that sort, will be another story, which we can only wonder about: much longer and more complicated.

If the professor had been successful in Vaudeville, and been even grateful for Marlene Dietrich's infidelities, because they freed him from a woman who, after all, was only exciting for a short while.... Now that would have been an interesting story.

Jennifer Aniston's performance in this film is extremely natural, just as Victoria Foyt's is in Deja Vu. While I was watching her, I was assuming that she was a relatively new actress, because I thought that only someone who still had a close connection to ordinary life (as contrasted with the life of stars who get paid millions of dollars per picture and have long since given up their ``day job'') could portray the kind of character she did so well. When looking her up later, though, I find that she is well known for playing one of the leading roles on the television show Friends. I've never seen the show, so I didn't recognize her. She's also had a few previous somewhat minor movie roles.

The thing that really struck me as I watched her, though, is that she has an amazing ressemblance to Barbra Streisand, to the extend that I even wondered whether she might be Streisand's daughter. It turns out though that she's apparently no relation. Just happens to look that way.

As I watched her in the movie, I couldn't help but keep thinking of how Barbra Streisand would have played some of the same scenes. Streisand would have played them up, and given us the famous Streisand mannerisms, and a lot of people would have said that Streisand's performance was much better.

But a performance by Streisand in this role would have made me always aware that I was watching Barbra Streisand. Whereas the pleasure of Jennifer Anison's performance was my sense that I was actually watching the sort of woman who the movie was about.

As I watched the movie and kept thinking about this, it eventually occurred to me that major Hollywood stars --- people like Barbra Streisand or Jack Nicholson or Robin Williams or Meryl Streep or, for that matter, even Woody Allen --- are always bigger than their role in the movie. I don't mean that they're not credible in the role. In many cases they are extremely credible. (In a number of cases, Barbra Streisand is not, but we don't really care.)

Meryl Streep is quite credible playing a farm wife in Bridges of Madison County. Robin Williams can play a very credible teacher or psychiatrist. And Jack Nicholson is completely credible playing the kind of characters he plays. In fact, one of the joys of watching performances by a top actor is often saying to ourselves, ``The performance is so right on! He has got that character 100% down.''

And yet no one would think that Meryl Streep was a real farm wife, even if they'd never heard of her and never seen her in another movie. No one would mistake Robin Williams for a real psychiatrist or real teacher. The stars in movies play their roles accurately (or at least in some cases do), and yet at the same time they give an exaggerated portrayal of the kind of person they're playing. Whether we laugh at them or cry with them, we respond to them more powerfully than we would to the corresponding person in real life, because they take the traits of that person and play them on a larger scale.

That's one of the reasons why these stars get paid millions of dollars for their performances. And I, for one, have no quarrel with that. I love watching Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and Robert Duval and Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Newman.

And yet at the same time, there's a different sort of delight I get watching some of the actors in independent films. And from watching Victoria Foyt (and also Anna Massey) in Deja Vu and Jennifer Aniston in The Object of My Affection. It's the delight of saying, ``This is a real person. This is the sort of person I actually meet in my own life.''

I never feel that way about Michelle Pfeiffer or Jodie Foster or Emma Thompson.

Recently, having studied Scorsese's films more carefully, I re-watched The Age of Innocence on videotape in order to watch it as a Scorsese film. And certainly I could now see some of his distinguishing touches, especially in the camera work. (After watching Scorsese films for a while, I notice that the camera work in films by almost any other director seems really boring.)

But watching it again now, six years later, it was also easy to see why this film had been so compelling for me. The answer, in brief, is one word: Michelle Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer's portrayal of the Countess Olenska perfectly captured a type of woman I have known several times in my life, starting with the artist Sheri I knew as a teen-ager and who is described other places in these pages, and most recently, I guess, in the person of Petra. This is a woman whose appeal to men is in a child-like simplicity/naivete. In she gives the impression of lacking in conventional intelligence (although in Petra's case this was partially deceptive, since she was a Berkeley student), but she's had a lot of experiences with life, and especially with men, that have taught her to be very astute in dealing with people.

Marilyn Monroe had that quality, although for me it was not as strong in Marilyn as in some of the women I've known. Audrey Hepburn had it in Breakfast at Tiffany's, especially in the beginning of that film, where I thought that she portrayed Holly Golightly as a woman exactly like my friend Sheri. However in most of her films, Audrey Hepburn had a slightly different quality, that of a very precocious young child. She conveyed this through her movements and her eyes, which of course were remarkable, but most of all, I think, through her voice: the voice of a child who has been exposed to a lot of adult conversations and who has a large vocabulary which she uses quite appropriately, but pronounces very carefully.

Aside from this, rewatching The Age of Innocence confirmed my opinion that Winona Ryder's performance was absolutely perfect and quite subtle. The character she portrays, May, is not a woman who is ever called clever. She is quite limited in comparison to the man, Newland Archer, she is in love with and marries. She perceives herself as being not really good enough for him, but she is determined to have him. Winona Ryder has the difficult task of showing us, the viewers, that May figures out what has been happening with her husband, without letting May show her knowledge to her husband. Unlike the Countess Olenska, she is not astute and subtle in dealing with people, especially in dealing with men, but she is able to persevere, not by a clever strategy, but by carefully avoiding letting the situation reach a crisis point.

There is one single moment in the film where she lets us, as well as her husband, know how much she has understood. She has just let Newland know that she has pregnant, telling him that only today was she able to be certain of this. But then she slips by letting him know she had told Ellen Olenska of the pregnancy two weeks ago.

``I thought you said it was only today you were certain?''

May hesitates for barely an eyeblink. Having lied to her cousin Ellen was a serious act, but to lie to her husband would be unthinkable. May says quietly, ``Yes, I was only certain today. But I told Ellen that I was certain two weeks ago.''

It's what one might call a Henry-James moment. The revelation is there; all Newland has to do is to ask, ``Why did you lie to her?'' But of course the whole nature of his world is that he can't ask a question like that.