Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Three Beautiful Things 07/15/19: Walk Called Off, Two Loneliness Movies: *Mr. Turner*, *Sunday*

1. I started toward the trail to hike up the hill behind the hospital and soon experienced that the intestinal instability I'd awakened with was slightly more serious than I thought, so I returned home, disappointed. Fortunately, I didn't feel ill and so I did some light housekeeping and read more about Sunday's Wimbledon tennis match and focused on eating bland foods and drinking tea.

2. Without planning to, I watched two movies connected to each other by their preoccupation with loneliness.

From the time I first saw gigantic paintings of his at the Tate Museum in London in 1975, I have been enamored with the work of J.M.W. Turner. In December of 2014, I became aware of movie being released about the painter, entitled Mr. Turner. I knew Mike Leigh directed it. It was exactly the kind of movie I would have hot-footed it to the Broadway Metro or the Bijou in Eugene to see, but, when it was released, I was in Kellogg, my home was in Maryland, and, when I returned to Maryland, I don't remember if the movie was playing in theaters in the D.C. area.

So, I never saw Mr. Turner. But, it's been on my mind for nearly five years. It's a longish movie, running just over 150 minutes, and today, I decided to rent it from Amazon and watch it.

My insides ached during the entire movie. Intellectually brilliant, gruff, laconic, Turner's snorts and grunts and social awkwardness lacquered over his deep feelings of pain, of loss, of longing. Detached, he longed for attachment. His gropings for intimacy were sometimes awkward, sometimes predatory. While his art demanded that he live many hours in solitude, this solitude was not the same as his loneliness. The solitude enhanced his art, his sensitivity to light and color, the meeting of sea and sky, his insights into the emerging world of smoke, steel, and machines in the early to mid-1800s in England, and his understanding of how the turbulence of the outer world paralleled inward human turbulence. But, his loneliness, the ways he walled himself off from many who sought his love and approval, warped him. The warped and groping J.M.W. Turner unsettled, angered, shocked, and repulsed me.

The movie is a complex portrayal of a complicated man. Mike Leigh's J.M.W. Turner is, by turns, capable of hardness, cruelty, and exploitation and of tenderness, sensitivity, and fellow feeling. If this movie's J.M.W. Turner had been only despicable, I wouldn't have ached throughout the movie. I would have simply despised him -- and I did despise him, especially in his relationship with his longtime, devoted, and cripplingly lonely housekeeper, Hannah Danby and in his dismissal of his daughters and their mother. But, I did ache in empathy for the pain of Mr. Turner's isolation, for the way what was good in him remained largely, but not entirely untapped, unexpressed. But, even when he experienced the affection he longed for, it was in isolation, was largely, but not entirely, secretive.

3.  Over the past few months, I have watched the DVDs of acting sessions, under the direction of John Barton, put on by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, called Playing Shakespeare.

When I watch these episodes, I'm especially impressed with Lisa Harrow's work. I began to read more about her acting career and discovered that she starred in a movie, released in 1997, with another of my favorite actors from Playing Shakespeare, David Souchet.

The movie's title is Sunday. It's an independently made movie -- what is often called a "small movie". I found the movie at a used DVD store online and ordered it and today I watched Sunday.

As the movie unfolded, a quotation from Tennessee Williams kept surfacing in my mind: "We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life."

The story of Sunday centers on two people who are strangers to each other. Oliver/Matthew has been let go by IBM and now lives in a men's shelter run by a church in Queens. He's homeless. Madeline lives in Queens, is estranged from her husband, and can't find work. She's an actor.

The movie all takes place on a frigid, snowy Sunday. Early in the day, these two lonely strangers meet on the street -- I won't give away how they meet -- and spend much of the day together.

As their day together progresses and as they learn more about each other, each character's hunger for connection drives each of them to reach out to the other. They are like two swimmers trying to save one another from drowning. As in Mr. Turner, their loneliness is palpable force, and, by turns, their loneliness moves them to be reckless, impulsive, playful, upset, tender, bewildered,  affectionate, and intimate with each other, both physically and emotionally.

The movie also follows the lonely days of the men who sleep at the shelter as they venture out into their daily routines on the streets of Queens and it gives us some unsettling glimpses into Madeline's marriage.

Watching David Souchet and Lisa Harrow play these lonely, confused, perplexing, mysterious, aching characters thrilled me. Working in an independently made movie freed the entire production of conforming to the demands of movies made to be popular.  The movie dared to be confusing, to examine the baffling nature of homelessness, joblessness, marital disintegration, and the resulting loneliness of these experiences.  I enjoyed the demands this movie made on Lisa Harrow and David Souchet and the many ways their brilliant and sensitive work exposed us to the contradictory aspects of their characters and rendered deep insight into the solitary confinement inside our skins that Tennessee Williams asserts we are all confined to.


No comments: