MY MOVIE SHELF: Shining Through

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 191  Days to go: 134

Movie #247:  Shining Through

I’ve never really hated Melanie Griffith the way some people do. Maybe it’s because my introduction to her was Working Girl, inarguably the greatest thing she’s ever done. Maybe it’s because I’m not somehow offended or insulted by a woman with a breathy voice, nor do I assume it makes her dim or vilify her for playing “airhead” roles (not that I think she does this, on average, any more than other actresses — there’s an outcry about the dearth of quality roles for a reason). I don’t know. All I know is that I like her fine. I love Working Girl. I love Shining Through. And I really like Now and Then. I don’t even mind her remake of Born Yesterday (I actually think of her constitutional amendment scene any time the subject comes up), and just last night I happened across her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold flick Milk Money on some channel or another and stopped to watch the rest of it. On purpose. So she’s not the most transformative actor. Neither are lots of people who still make popular movies. We all get by.

Shining Through is about a woman named Linda Voss (Griffith) being interviewed by the BBC for a documentary on women who played a part in WWII. She’s in awkward aging makeup (awkward because that’s always awkward, no matter how well it’s done) and she clumsily (on purpose, because the character is unfamiliar with the process) begins her tale. It’s possible that the main reason I’m so drawn to this film is that I saw in Linda Voss a kindred spirit. She loved the movies, you see, and she became fascinated with the war through them. As a half-Irish, half-Jewish girl from Queens, with grandparents who immigrated directly from Berlin and family still living there, Linda had a personal interest in the war with Germany as well, but until she met Ed Leland (Michael Douglas), she had no entry into the war effort itself.

What follows is a story of romance, intrigue and betrayal, set entirely in Linda’s flashback. She discovers Ed’s connection with military operations by using her knowledge of war movies to deduce his dealings, and she finds herself eventually placed in Berlin as a temporary operative under the supervision of Ed’s contact, code name Sunflower (John Gielgud). She chronicles her harrowing time there, from her disastrous attempt at her initial mission to her devastating relationship with dear friend Margrete (Joely Richardson), to the fortuitous and treacherous situation she finds herself in with high-ranking officer Franze-Otto Dietrich (Liam Neeson) — a dynamic that is fascinating not just for the precarious position she is in amid all her incongruous deceptions, but in the way Dietrich increasingly acts toward her, never dismissing her as an inferior (as Ed had done in the past, referring to her as “only a secretary”) and even taking her as his date to an opera (which Ed, once, simply brushed her inquiries about with “It’s not for everyone”). If he wasn’t an enemy combatant who wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if ever he knew her true identity, Franze might have been a better match for Linda than Ed had ever been in the past. And yet he never has a chance at her heart.

There are wonderful things here, too, about Linda’s character. She’s hot-headed and rash at times, calm and calculated at others. She believes in things passionately. She’s her own person. She does incredibly dumb things and incredibly smart things, just like any regular person thrown into the fray with a lot at stake. She’s brave and bold and horribly naive at times — traits that can both help and harm her — and she can be stubbornly, maddeningly single-minded. But she’s not just some woman who falls in love with a fascinating man and waits for him to come back to her. When she gets the chance, she goes out and makes something of her life, driven by her own deepest desires, and is willing to accept and attempt to conquer the hardships that come with it.

Shining Through is a movie my mother and I both love together, which also, no doubt, endears it to me. It’s not a great movie, by any critical standards, but it’s left an impression on me that’s lasted all these years. I always, for example, hide things in my gloves since seeing this film. And considering I learned that from this movie and Linda learned it from one of hers (“Did you ever see a movie called Victory at Dawn?”), it feels like synergy: Two opinionated girls living decades apart (okay, one’s fictional, whatever), learning everything they know about life from the cinema.  Makes me think somebody out there gets me after all, and maybe they’ll hire me to be a spy or something. (I’d be a terrible spy, but I could totally be an actress or something. Call me, Hollywood!)

MY MOVIE SHELF: The American President

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray (I’ll know for sure how many at the end of this project). Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #16: The American President

Think back to November 1995. Monica Lewinsky had just entered into an affair with President Clinton, but the public wouldn’t know about it until more than two years later. Congress wasn’t an intractable, immovable force. The internet was still new and largely untested in the average home. If you did access the internet, it was via dial-up modem at ridiculously low speeds, and you probably did nothing more than check your email and maybe visit a message board or chat room. Newspapers and magazines weren’t yet a dying industry. The news was still something most people only got once or twice a day. And The American President was released in theaters.

I think this is one of the best things Aaron Sorkin has ever written. The West Wing is of course his crowning achievement, but The American President is like a precursor to it, a two-hour sampling of all it would accomplish over its entire series run. There’s lots of pedeconferencing (something he’d done a little of in A Few Good Men, but here really found his stride with it, so to speak), lots of liberal politics, and yes, even his trademark sneering condescension for people who see things differently than he does. But he also succeeds here in a lot of ways he’s struggled with since. Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening) is second only to The West Wing‘s C. J. Cregg (Allison Janney) as far as strong, confident, outspoken women go, but even more than that, her romance here with President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) is both touching and believable. Where Sorkin really struggles with the script is with regard to the believability (or lack thereof) of almost everything else.

The American President is a utopian fantasy film. There are no spaceships or fairies or magic, but it’s a fantasy all the same. It lives in a world where the President of the United States doesn’t acknowledge the fact that having a girlfriend, regardless of the fact he’s a widower, could be a huge public relations problem, where someone who’d campaigned in elections almost his entire adult life thinks the general public will accept that his personal life is his own and leave it at that. It’s a world in which congressional votes can be won or lost merely on the basis of personal loyalty or a well-reasoned argument. It’s a world before Twitter, yes, but it’s also a world in which every political opponent doesn’t take his “Americans can no longer afford to pretend that they live in a great society” soundbite and tear him to shreds. It’s a world in which policy is made because it’s right, and in which the President believes he can convince people, just through the power and persuasion of his own voice, that access to guns should be severely limited. It’s a world that doesn’t exist — not then and definitely not now.

I share a lot of Aaron Sorkin’s political views. I wish a lot more people did too. But I know from personal experience that simply offering up a well-reasoned argument isn’t going to change a lot of minds. In that way, much of Sorkin’s work ends up preaching to the choir more than anything else. However, it’s still brilliantly, beautifully written stuff that really resonates emotionally. The man knows how to write an eloquent speech, no doubt, but he’s never going to be the changer of minds he’d like to be.

On the other hand, I know that in my life movies have had a huge influence, not just as entertainment but in opening my eyes to all sorts of issues and perspectives I never would’ve witnessed growing up in an upper-middle-class town in central New York. I know that there are countless people in the world who don’t see movies the way I do, who don’t feel the same connection, who haven’t learned much from them, but maybe it’s enough to know that somewhere, one person does learn, does change, does see things differently. That one person might end up changing the world. I still believe that’s possible, even if we don’t live in a utopian fantasy.