..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Play the Game and Still Walking

Sometimes, all too often, life supersedes the movies. Last week, just days after her 94th birthday party, my mother Edna Wilmington, whom I’ve mentioned here recently, had to be taken, for the second time in a month, to the hospital. It was a sad occasion. A terrific painter, sculptor, artist, writer and amateur scientist, an all-around great lady -- and forever feisty, though she never got her due  from a world that, back then, was tough on single mothers -- she got back home again, but not without troubling, scary moments.
     
So, I made a calculated gamble to skip the Taking Woodstock screening during all this (to be with her), and therefore missed what would have been my lead item this week. I‘ll have to file on it later. Meanwhile, here are two movies which take a look, with varying depth and success, at the problems of old age, a condition we all too often trivialize or neglect. My mother is better, and I pray she stays that way.

Play the Game (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Andy Griffith, 2009
    
The problems of old age? Attention should be paid to this movie -- a lewd, sometimes funny, often predictable little comedy about an 80-something retirement home resident who enlists his lady-killing car-salesman grandson to teach him how to chase women -- because of one prime old reason. Andy Griffith.
     
Griffith plays Joe, the late-life would be Casanova, and he’s an actor who means something to us above and beyond his skill as a performer. And he proves it again here, in a movie so occasionally tawdry that the big comic scene here shows the now 83-year-old actor’s reactions to a blow job. (Don’t worry; Griffith does the scene and Joe’s goofily blissful response superbly; I’d even say tastefully, if, in this case, good taste weren’t such a joke.)
      
The rest of the film, which also stars Paul Campbell, of Knight Rider and Battlestar Galactica, as David, Joe’s ego-mad “sex expert,” David; Doris Roberts and Liz Sheridan as Rose and Edna, two of Joe’s targets at the home; and Marla Sokoloff as Julie, Rose’s tempting (to David) granddaughter, is okay but unremarkable. It‘s fitfully funny, fitfully sexy -- done by writer-producer-director Marc Fienberg with a cheerful but uninspired competence that keeps comfortably inside the TV sitcom game-lines.
      
That, of course, sets off and suits Griffith fine, since he‘s one of the genuine American TV sitcom geniuses. How many classic sitcoms still give us even half the kick and pleasure of the old ‘60s Andy Griffith Show? Few better TV ensembles exist than the original team of Griffith as Mayberry, North Carolina’s easy-going single father Sheriff Andy Taylor, child-actor phenom Ronnie Howard as his model son Opie, Frances Bavier as matronly Aunt Bee, all the local yokels (like Howard McNear as Floyd the Barber and later, Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle) and the incredible neurotic-clown Don Knotts as nervous, bullet-in-the-pocket, gun-challenged, blowhard deputy Barney Fife. Few TV comedy teams can top Griffith and Knotts. (Indeed, the show was never really the same after Knotts left, taking with him, except for infrequent guest shots, all his tics and whines and phony bravado.)
    
At the center of it all, seemingly one of the most generous, least star-conscious stars imaginable, was Griffith. A drawling country type with a foot-wide grin, and a native of (no kidding) Mount Airy, North Carolina, with a honey-likker-thick Blue Ridge accent to prove it, Griffith first became famous back in the ‘50s, with the TV, Broadway and Hollywood Ira Levin hit No Time for Sergeants,  the cornpone sports comedy routine What it Was, Was Football, and Elia Kazan’s and Budd Schulberg’s  scathing media politics expose drama A Face in the Crowd -- where Griffith went Brando, digging deeper and playing a darker, more vicious character, a kind of hobo-fascist mix of Arthur Godfrey, Buck Owens and Willie Stark called Lonesome Rhodes.
     
But it’s Andy Taylor and company we remember best -- at least before the show got gooberized and became more self-conscious and calculatedly corny after Knott‘s departure. I‘ve got one of the complete DVD sets of the show, and it’s one of the few sets I own that friends keep asking me for.
      
Here, Griffith is moving with the times -- which definitely include oral sex, even in retirement homes. But, as with his old show, Andy makes it all go down easy -- he‘s just a-funning‘ us -- and he can even make Joe somewhat unpleasant and self-indulgent, when called for. (David is definitely a schmuck at times too; indeed, the whole point of Fienberg’s comedy is that sexual gamesmanship is not quite what at seems.)
    
Despite No Time for Sergeants and A Face in the Crowd, Griffith never conquered the movies the way he did TV. So it’s a country tonic to see him, in his 80s, enjoying a late career cinematic resurgence with films like Waitress and this one. Even if Play the Game is no great shakes, it will survive, courtesy of Griffith. What’s that Andy would say? “I ‘preciate it, and good night.”


Still Walking (Four Stars)
Japan; Hirokazu Kore-Eda, 2008

No filmmaker from any country made more exquisitely wrought and moving domestic dramas than Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu. The great, wisely funny-sad director of  the masterpieces Late Spring, Early Summer, Her Only Son, and There was a Father moves us like few other writer-directors -- most profoundly perhaps with that sublime, beautifully observed and fashioned 1953 tale of elderly patents and thoughtless children, Tokyo Story.
    
A bachelor who lived all his life with his mother and never had his own family, Ozu could lucidly perceive and recreate the dynamics of Japanese families like no one else. He will probably always stand alone, both for his consummate style and for his deeply humane and compassionate perspective on familial ties and quiet triumphs and tragedies.
       
But in Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-Eda comes very close to matching the master. Kore-Eda, the director of the austerely touching Maboroso and Nobody Knows, has been compared to Ozu before -- and he himself mentions another genius of the Japanese domestic drama, Mikio Naruse (Floating Clouds), as a prime influence here. But he’s never seemed more securely in that element than he does in this wonderful, touching, funny and finally profound ensemble tale of three generations of the Yokoyama family: the children and grandchildren of mother Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) and father, and one time doctor, Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), all gathering for their yearly memorial tribute to the brilliant elder son Junpei, who died years ago in a drowning accident, while rescuing a child.
      
It will be one of their last such Yokoyama family reunions, though none of them quite senses it at the time.  Quiet, introverted Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) -- who has recently married a pretty young widow, Yukari (You Natsukawa), with a ten-year-old son (Shohei Tanaka) -- is a modestly successful, but currently unemployed, art restorer, who ahs always felt overshadowed by his more affluent father, and wishes to leave early -- though Yukari insists that they stay the night.  His elder sister Chinami (played by rock star and TV personality You) is a sly minx with two children and a lazy husband, Nobuo (Kazuya Takahashi); she is scheming to move in on her parents, who live in a large home that once also housed Dr. Kyohei’s clinic. Also in attendance is a recurring guest at these annual affairs, the grown up “little boy” whom Junpei died to save.
     
Riding herd on this assemblage -- an expert cook, tireless housekeeper and sardonic matriarch -- is the sharp-tongued Toshiko, who worshipped Junpei, and the grouchy and diffident Dr. Kyohei, both of them far from the loving parents Ozu celebrated. Yet these are no less loving portrayals. Modeled on Kore-Eda’s own deceased parents, they are rich portrayals and intended, on some level, to bring them back alive once more.
       
In Tokyo Story, the callous middle-class children paid little attention to their elderly parents who were paying them a last visit , and father Chishu Ryu’s final observation “Isn’t life disappointing?” was quiet, Buddhist mono ne aware acceptance of their unspoken but deep disappointment. In Still Walking -- a title which refers to the elder Yokoyoma’s still active constitutionals --the second generation children Ryota and Chinami do pay seeming attention to family obligations. But they neglect their parents in subtler, less obvious ways. It stabs us to the heart no less, at the end of Still Walking, when Ryota and Yukari quickly decide, on their train back, to skip the next New Years celebration because “one visit a year is enough”  -- when we already know how much the mother looks forward to it.
      
But the Yokoyama parents are also hardly the suffering victims of Tokyo Story. Dr. Kyohei avoids his family and carps about everything most of the day. Toshiko is sarcastic, and she wants none of Chinami’s house-sharing plans, regards Nobuo as a slouch, makes tacit family deals with Yukari and isn’t fooled by Ryota’s dutiful front. Yet, when she suddenly becomes convinced, in the night, that a frisky moth contains Junpei’s soul, we can see how fragile and tormented she is, how dependent on her children. Her pain isn’t as obvious as that of the neglected parents in Tokyo Story. But that may make it all the more wounding at the end, when Kore-Eda stages another tribute.
      
The family party may be robust and lively, but Kore-Eda’s visual style is often as perfect and simple as Ozu’s. And, like Ozu, Kore-Eda reveals all these characters quietly, calmly, without illusions, but with unfailing empathy and compassion. As with that other respectful son and superb filmmaker, he fills his screen with life and emotion.
      
This is my personal favorite of all his films. Kore-Eda, as much as Ozu this time, invites us into a home, Japanese but universal, in all its contradictions, all its darkness and light, all its humanity.   

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs


- Michael Wilmington
August 27, 2009

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