#almodovar – Mouth of the River

There’s an adage attributed to everyone from Elie Wiesel to Pope Francis, from John Le Carre to Leviticus:

The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

With a title that describes Charlie, an obese English teacher hoping to reconcile with Ellie, his estranged and beyond troubled daughter, The Whale illustrates that point as well as any of those writers or clerics could have.

The title also refers to a most unusual plot device, a high-schooler’s essay on Moby-Dick, although the film bears more resemblence to a later Herman Melville novel, The Confidence-Man, than to the one which was originally published in England under the title, The Whale. For that reason, any detailed account of what the five characters do would be as much of a spoiler alert as a review. Suffice to say it is well acted, and Brendan Fraser is now picking up the awards to prove it. Hong Chau’s Liz is as memorable as her Elsa in The Menu, and Samantha Morton’s Mary is as riveting as her brief role as a victim being interviewed in She Said.

Fittingly–and, in this case, equally unfittingly–the English teacher keeps his video off during his Zoomed classes, a blank, black square in the middle of 14 youthful faces. Later on, that will change in one of several scenes in The Whale that plays like a horror film.

With unrelenting intensity, even the sight of a bird feeding outside Charlie’s window feels ominous.

In a story of deception that would do Almodovar proud, assumptions are easy to make about characters when we meet them–Liz is a care-giver, Thomas an evangelical–only to take us by surprise when we hear their backstories. But The Whale is as much about the great divides of modern life: Despite his morbid condition, Charlie’s optimism is as boundless as his belly, contradicting Ellie’s cynicism even as she throws it in his face. If Charlie is a shadow of Uncle Vanya, Ellie is his anti-Sonya.

Nevertheless, he persists. In a tone that begs for affirmation, he asks Liz:

Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring?

Whether to grant that affirmation is left to the audience when the film ends. Does he break through Ellie’s indifference? Is that indifference a defense mechanism? Or is it pure hate? Her own mother calls her “evil” after all. Rather than answers, the screen turns white and the credits roll.

We’ve seen this before. In 1999, Limbo, a film set in Alaska, ended with a stranded family awaiting the arrival of a plane. Two possibilities have been set: Rescue? Or execution? Neither. The screen went white and we were left to debate which was likely. The very title of the film should have warned us: “Limbo (n): A condition of unknowable outcome.”

As a title, The Whale may not hint at an inconclusive ending any more that it does at the characters’ layered identities, but the essay that Charlie keeps reading and having read to him, and sometimes reciting does. Like a typical high school paper, it’s filled with simple observations: Ishmael and Queequeg share a room. Pure filler: … written by a famous author named Herman Melville. Absurd misnomers: In a seaside town. And errors: A pirate named Ahab. But it has one line that might raise the eyebrows of scholars who still debate whether Melville wrote one unified book or combined an adventure story with an industry manual:

I think Ishmael wrote the boring parts to give us some pause from his own sad story.

As with the film’s characters, the identity of the essayist is unknown at first and then later unravelled more than revealed. That may be the best reason to see The Whale. It invites assumptions to give us pause from assumptions.

No matter what the daughter thought of the bird feeding off the full plate Charlie leaves outside his window, this film is the opposite of indifference.

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Post Script: With an evangelical character, The Whale was bound to contain the line, “Everything happens for a reason.” A Bible-adhering friend back in my South Dakota days took that a few steps further when he insisted every chance he got, “There’s no such thing as coincidence.” Today, it occurs to me that readers of my most recent blogs are wondering about the coincidence of this one.

For those just tuning in: Two weeks ago I was among the 211 readers in the annual Moby-Dick Marathon in New Bedford, Mass. While there, I attended two of the three side-sessions called “Chat with the Scholars.” Also while there, I was unnerved by the sight of myself in a full-length mirror while walking out of a men’s room and into a corridor filled with paintings of whales. Days later I began daily workouts at a gym after months, actually years, of procrastination. Days after that, the Screening Room opens The Whale.

Let me hasten to say that, by comparison, Charlie makes me look anorexic, nor do I need any reminder to keep walking three miles a day. I’m already feeling better, and I have some nice shirts I’d like to button once again. Still, I waver between the idea that this is coincidence or that it has played out with purpose.

If the former, it’s a joke on me that I can laugh at. If the later? One year will be a painful amount of time to wait before I can ask those scholars what they think of the “pause from (Ishmael’s) own sad story” theory.

If there’s anything to the theory that a way to understand a controversy is to put it in other contexts, Parallel Mothers may well be called a gift to the USA.

Set in Spain, director Pedro Almodovar’s new film begins with Janis (Penelope Cruz) enlisting the aid of a forensic archeologist to exhume the remains of several of a small town’s ancestors who were “disappeared” by the Franco regime.

Her rural home town needs closure, her grandmother and aunts need closure, and one of them knows where the shallow, mass grave is. Janis has since become a fashion photographer in the city with plenty of connections. She can get this done for them.

Whether Janis and Arturo were already lovers or were turned on by this grim investigation is a question that Almodovar lets hang, as he so often does, throughout the film. Historical intrigue and the archeologist recede into the background as the film focuses on Janis in a maternity ward about to deliver.

Nearing 40, she befriends an unwed teenager, Ana, also about to deliver. The next scene is a scream in both senses of the word, and could easily become a social media sensation titled, “Dueling Deliveries.”

All of that serves as a launching pad for a classic Almodovar labyrinth of mistaken identity, contradictory clues, unexpected twists and turns, every frame of it vibrant with color and rich with curious wall-hangings, furniture, and oddities all around. A t-shirt that Janis wears when she has Ana over for dinner works both as sight gag and as a statement of the underlying theme of Parallel Mothers–perhaps of all of Almodovar’s films.

No, I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it is an indirect reminder of the grave historical plot that lurks in the film’s background.

Though the two moms have nothing more in common than due dates, their relationship takes us from the hope of one to uncover difficult history to the realization of the other, a generation younger, that history matters.

As he often does, most memorably with writer Alice Munro in Julieta (2016), Almodovar pays tribute to artists he admires. Janis is named for Janis Joplin, whose soulful rendition of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” accompanies a love scene, and he gives Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano the last word:

No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.

In a time when American news is flush with reports of attempts to restrict the teaching of history in schools and keep our past buried, Parallel Mothers reflects what’s at stake for us by putting it in a different context. When Janis has to explain the need for closure to Ana, no American fan of Almodovar can help but hear pleas made to those who would rather not know history, who accept white white-wash.

Though most of the film is a classic Almodovar romp, entertaining and fascinating at every turn, the relationship of Janis and Ana turns from parallel mothers (and then some) into mother and child (with child).

In the end, from this side of the Atlantic, the parallel is of Spain and the USA.

So good to see that Almodovar is back to the form of All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), and Volver (2006).

If I may be more blunt, it’s a relief that he is well beyond that dreadful airplane film that was even worse than its inane title, I’m So Excited (2013). Truth is, he recovered from that wreck with excellent films since, Julieta and Pride and Glory (2019), but the airplane film was such a crash-landing piece of stench that it had to have discouraged Screening Room patrons from seeing those two gems.

Three decades ago, Almodovar gained a faithful following with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) and the equally provocatively titled Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). From what I’ve heard, I’d say that Screening Room fans are evenly split between those who consider those two his best, and those who prefer Mother and Talk.

I’m in the latter category, but I must add there’s not a lot of difference between the two camps, as we all praise the other’s choices. And the few who saw Julieta and Pride & Glory praise those as well, and now Parallel Mothers–all eight patrons who, combined, saw it in two shows Wednesday.

Another film highly regarded by all Almodovar fans is Bad Education (2004). My recollection of it is clouded by a scene that begins with the outlines of two people blocking half the view of a school building across a street. In the audience, I might have turned my head to see who was blocking the projector from the screen, but as the projectionist, I was compelled to go into the audience and ask them to move or sit.

But no one was standing. So what happened to the lens!!! Race back up into the booth, but find nothing wrong. Instead, after an impossibly long, nerve-wracking minute, the two shadows move forward, turn into the two main characters, and cross the street to enter the school.

Apart from this and other tricks he plays on projectionists, it’s tempting to say that you can’t go wrong with Almodovar. Too bad the airplane film grounded that notion. If we were to compare filmmakers to musicians, his use of color, his playfulness, his reverence, his tight focus, his deft presentations of serious themes and psychological drama would make Almodovar analogous to the best in any genre.

The airplane film? It’s as if Jimi Hendrix paused between “Purple Haze” and “Voodoo Child” to write “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

Sorry for harping on it, but a projectionist at an art cinema in the Hudson Valley noticed the same drop in attendance of Almodovar’s films following the belly-flop of I’m So Excited. And if you were ever wondering where Pepto-Bismol got the idea for a commercial where flight attendants emerge from the cockpit to serenade passengers with an upbeat song about heartburn and diarrhea, you can thank Pedro.

I’m still thanking Pedro for his acceptance speech at the 2003 Oscars for Talk to Her‘s Best Screenplay award. In a ceremony charged with the conflicting cries for and against war in the Middle East, Almodovar offered a short, soft-spoken most heartfelt tribute to “all those who are raising their voices for peace, respect of human rights, democracy, international legality, and all that is essential to live.”

At the time it was lost among louder, angry declarations in the run-up to American and Allied troop commitments. In memory, it stands as one of Oscar’s finest moments.

Would be remiss not to add how Parallel Mothers echoes a 1990 German film, The Nasty Girl. In translation and context, “problematic” would be more accurate for the German schreckliche, but box office success in the USA called for the far more alluring “nasty.” Either way, both are stories of reconciling the present with an uncomfortable past.

In a country highly and increasingly conflicted about how–or if–our past should be taught in schools, these are other contexts that can shed light on our own.

That light had to be in Almodovar’s focus when ended his new film with a quote from Galeano’s 1998 book, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, so let’s end this review of the film and retrospective of the director with the line that follows it: