Woody Allen's The Lost Generation

Nikki and I watched and enjoyed Woody Allen's new Midnight in Paris tonight, a film that plays with and examines the nostalgia that saturates so much of his work (and the imaginations of so many of his fans, myself included). The movie takes place in modern day Paris but the main character travels back to the Paris of the 1920's which he glorifies and loves from books.

The movie reminded me of a sketch from an old Woody Allen stand up record that I have, where Woody imagines himself hanging out with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and the "Fitzgerarlds." It is very clear to me that this 30 or 40 year old stand up routine is the germ of the idea that became Midnight in Paris. And its also just really funny.

Blue Valentine

Earlier this week, I watched and loved Blue Valentine, a movie whose characters you can recognize as actual human beings whose flaws, struggles, and hopes are not dissimilar from your own. I rarely see movies where the characters are drawn so true to life or where a relationship, particularly a relationship that is falling apart, is reflective of the virtues and vices of both individuals, like the relationships that actual human beings like you and me have been in, and where no one is demonized.

The realistic portrayal of the lives of the characters (and their drinking, which also seemed true to life) reminded me of a favorite writer, Raymond Carver. And then there was a scene, where in intoxication and frustration, the male character pulled his wedding ring off his finger and threw it into the grass, which I remembered from a Carver story and which I took to be a conscious reference on the part of the filmmaker.

In my recollection, the character in the Carver story, in a burst of drunken and momentary animosity and foolhardiness and in the presence of his spouse, pulled off his wedding ring in threw it off a deck out into a field. He immediately regretted it and realized that he could never find the ring, or repair the damage that he had done to his marriage.

I have looked for the story but, as near as I can tell, it does not exist, at least not as I remember it. Instead, in a wonderful story called "Chef's House," about a couple who are long separated because of drinking and strife, they come together at a summer house after the husband goes on the wagon and they remember what they loved about each other, only to see it fall away again. In that story, in his book Cathedral, Carver wrote the following paragraph, the only one in his work I can find about thrown wedding rings:

We drank coffee, pop, and all kind of fruit juice that summer. The whole summer, that's what we had to drink. I found myself wishing the summer wouldn't end. I knew better, but after a month of being with Wes at Chef's house, I put my wedding ring back on. I hadn't worn the ring in two years. Not since the night Wes was drunk and threw his ring into a peach orchard.

I guess its possible that I made up the other details, or filled them into my understanding of this moment in Carver's spare and brief narrative. Whether or not it was a conscious reference or a reference at all, I still regard the film as Carveresque, which is to say beautiful, true, and as sad as life.

If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise

An essay I wrote for Salon about Spike Lee's new documentary and New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina.

"If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise": Spike Lee's riveting look at New Orleans, now

The filmmaker's new documentary argues that the troubled, extraordinary city holds the key to our redemption

By Billy Sothern

A still from "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise"

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans remains one of the most troubled places in the United States. Its woes are a consequence of the civic collapse that preceded Katrina, the devastating levee failures following the storm, and most recently, the unrivaled environmental devastation from the BP oil disaster. But New Orleans also remains the heart of American culture. It's a place unrivaled in vernacular richness where people come from world around to eat, drink, listen and see — to live for a few days like many of us here live every day. Is it possible that the national seat of American tragedy can also redeem this country by refusing to give up its bon temps while fighting for its survival?

Spike Lee gives his answer in a new documentary, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise," a loosely structured, four-hour meditation on everything right and wrong with New Orleans five years after Katrina. It premieres Aug. 23 and 24 on HBO.

The tensions are on display from the film's opening. Its first scenes include, in sequence, an angry and defiant poem ("No more use of our Gulf Coast waters, wetlands, heritage and soil/ No more 'Up yours Louisiana,' because we all know there's blood in that BP oil/ If God is willing and the creek don't rise") read by the star of Lee's earlier New Orleans documentary, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc (now a star of David Simon's "Treme"); images memorializing Katrina's devastation; and the joyous celebrations of the Saints' improbable 2009 Super Bowl victory. Interviewed in a throng of people following the Saints win, an unnamed woman sums it up, "Four and a half years ago we lost our home during the flood, and we are so privileged and honored to be here. Living in New Orleans is a privilege. It's not easy, but it's a privilege and a blessing."

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The claim that it is "not easy" to live in New Orleans turns out to be one of the very few understatements in the documentary, which dwells at length on the many things that create this dis-ease — separate and aside from the storm that drew the country's attention and the oil spill that refocused it. The viewer is led through policy debates and critiques and personal stories highlighting the demolition of New Orleans' public housing projects and consequent housing crisis; the collapsed healthcare system (New Orleans' public hospital remains shuttered because of political wrangling about the future of healthcare); the mental health crisis that has been responsible for murders, suicides and less-than-joyous substance abuse and drinking since the storm; the incompetence of FEMA in providing post-storm assistance to the city and the agency's mismanagement of its emergency housing plan; the civil engineering missteps by the Army Corps of Engineers that made the city vulnerable to flooding and that have degraded our wetlands; the shattered education system; the out-of-control crime and violence that have plagued the city; the police corruption and history of police violence that have led to numerous federal murder and conspiracy indictments for officers involved in several, separate incidents; and deregulation that provided the opportunity for corporate greed's fouling of the Gulf.

Any New Orleanian living here during the past five years will be familiar with these issues from their daily lives and from the news on the front page of the Times Picayune. They are issues that you live when you can't find a place to rent that you can afford, when you cannot find a school where your child will receive a decent education, when you wake in the middle of the night to hear gunshots and know that someone's life may have just come to an abrupt and violent end. These are the daily challenges of living here. And it's useful to recall, in watching this documentary, that our individual efforts to overcome these obstacles are not just personal but part of a collective effort to keep this city alive.

The people telling the story in this documentary are many of the same people whose names appear in the paper. Some are policy wonks; others, activists or artists; but nearly all are fervent New Orleanians. Some of them speak in a strongly held hyperbole that hints at madness or mania, both about the good and the bad here. There are angry words, never precisely defined, about "the powers that be" and their efforts at "ethnic cleansing" on the one hand, and on the other, references to the Saints' Super Bowl win that suggest a local belief that the victory was an act of God, as if New Orleans, like the long-suffering Job, had been rewarded for its faith. This is the bipolar parlance of life here, stemming from the widely held belief that the city is vastly better than, worse than, and not really a part of the rest of the country. Most of these sentiments are presented in the documentary without any evident endorsement from Spike Lee, who seems more enamored with his subjects' intense feeling for their homes and threatened way of life than with the specifics of their claims. He is particularly interested in their suspicions about race, the government and corporations. The firmness of the beliefs held by so many people here is just as important as the accuracy of their claims.

But implicit in the framing of the documentary, and of most of the engaging books and films to come out of New Orleans since the storm, is the notion that the challenges that define life in post-Katrina New Orleans are the same vexing national crises on which the quality and success of 21st-century America will be, and should be, judged; that the same problems also exist in Lee's beloved native Brooklyn and so many other places in this country. Despite Lee's critique of the political and social realities that made the Gulf's twin disasters possible, despite the seemingly endless images of dead bodies — human and animal — that we see in this film, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise" shows that Lee is not without hope.

He is clearly a partisan of this city, a place where real recovery and reconciliation are the daily work of thousands of people. The efforts of the people of this city and region appear to have given him reason to believe — despite the ever-present risk of rising water — that something better may yet emerge from the tragedies along the Gulf.

I've Loved You So Long

This weekend I watched I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), a 2008 French film in which Kristin Scott Thomas stars as a woman recently released from prison after a fifteen year sentence for murdering her six year old son.

The film presents a jarringly compassionate portrait of an infanticide, her strugglings to regain her footing in life following release, her reintegration into her family, and her inability to forgive herself for her past.

Both the relatively lenient sentence (by American standards) and the generosity with which the character is generally treated, both by the film itself and the other characters in the film, made the film seem truly foreign in sensibility.

I have posted here previously about my concerns about a general lack of forgiveness in American society for those who have strayed from the path and the remarkably different approach that seems to animate criminal justice in Europe.

A comment by one of the characters, when he found out that Kristin Scott Thomas's character had been in prison for murder, struck a chord with me, reminding me of one of my favorite lines from Capote - "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front" - though without the solipsism.

The character, a professor who befriends the woman, tries to comfort her when others discovery her secret:

I spent ten years teaching in prison. I never mention it. I went there three times a week. And I got out three times a week. Nothing was the same after. I saw everything differently. Other people . . . The sky . . . The passing of time . . . I realized that people in prison were like me. They could have been me, or I them. It's such a fine line sometimes.

I have spent the last decade meeting with men in prisons - mostly men facing the death penalty for murder - and I have never walked through the gates without a sense of gratitude and good fortune because that fine, and often well out of our control, line between praise and blame is no where more obvious.

* Here's the trailer.

Al Pacino's Doppelganger

I recently rewatched the Norman Jewison, Al Pacino film, And Justice for All . . ., about a good defense attorney in a bad system.

There a few things to like about it as a movie but its a weak piece of social commentary that essentially takes aim at the adversarial process in criminal court.

The New York Times review from 1979, by Vincent Canby, sums it up as follows:

With the exception of two old men, one of whom is senile, all of the characters in " . . . and Justice for All" have such low thresholds of emotional distress that I wouldn't trust one of them to see "The Sound of Music" unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. They dress sloppily. They talk dirty. Yet they are of an innocence that boggles the mind and sinks the movie.

And, concerning Al Pacino's character's distaste for representing someone guilty, Canby rightly observes that the system requires just that:

If you follow what seems to be the film's feeble point to its logical end, it is that our judicial system is rotten not only because of the people who administer it, but also because it provides safeguards for the accused. The next step, one should think, is a nice, predictable law-and-order state.

(I don't often see people get that issue right, as Canby did. You have to provide a defense for everyone, whether or not they appear guilty or innocent, because there is no way to determine guilt or innocence until you provide that defense. And because the question of culpability is often a hard call, we err on the side of acquitting the guilty because we have far greater abhorrence for the possibility that the innocent might be convicted.)

The only reason why I am bothering to comment about this imperfect film is that it made me blush. You see, Al Pacino's character is a lawyer in his thirties. I am a lawyer in my thirties. Al Pacino runs around an old criminal courthouse in Baltimore. I run around an old criminal courthouse in New Orleans. Al Pacino makes pompous legal arguments to indifferent judges. I make pompous legal arguments to indifferent judges.

But here's the kicker, Al Pacino drives around town in a blue/green 1973 BMW 2002. And I drive like a maniac in a blue/green 1973 BMW 2002.

I would prefer to think of myself as Pacino's Frank Serpico, or his Michael Corleone, but instead my doppelganger is Pacino's Arthur Kirkland. I'll live.

If you are interested, Pacino's slightly famous (and ridiculous) "You're out of order" speech from And Justice for All . . . is on You Tube. It denigrates the Sixth Amendment and Blackstone's maxim that its better for ten guilty men to walk free than one innocent man to languish in prison but it's fun to watch and a classic Al Pacino-yelling scene.

***The photo of the BMW 2002 is the same year, color, and model as mine but its in far better shape (and I am sure has much less character).

Coiled Sexual Power of a Jungle Cat

From Woody Allen's Manhattan:

Chapter one. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. New York was his town and it always would be.

While driving into Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge, or walking into a quiet bar off the busy city streets, I felt this way about New York when I lived there.

But the soundtrack in your mind in New Orleans is different. Here, it's more like:

Chapter one. He was as broken and beautiful as the elegant, old double gallery houses that lined the streets in the city he loved. Under his blue cotton suit, dark with sweat in the summer heat, was the animal ferocity of one of the small, feral street cats that fight off the packs of pit bulls that roam his neighborhood. New Orleans was his town and, though he hears gunshots in the night, it always would be.

And in the background, instead of Rhapsody in Blue, Glen David Andrews singing Summertime.

John Waters, Leslie Van Houten, and the Possibility of Atonement

Filmmaker John Waters has bravely, and perhaps inadvertently, waded into the debate over life imprisonment in America by publishing an essay on the Huffington Post about his friend, Leslie Van Houten, a former "Manson girl" serving a life sentence in California for the 1969 murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianco. (He also discussed the essay on Fresh Air.) Waters was, admittedly, ghoulishly interested in Manson's followers when he first started corresponding with Van Houten over two decades ago. But they became friends over the years and this relationship has convinced Waters that Van Houten is a changed woman from the 19 year old who followed Manson and took part in an awful murder.

Waters asks good questions about his friend's ability to atone for what she had done:

Will there ever be a "fair" answer to how Leslie should pay for these crimes? Can you ever recover from being called "a human mutant" or a "monster" by the government, especially when you know that they were right at one time in your life? How can you feel optimistic about your own rehabilitation when you see yourself reproduced as a bald-headed dummy with an X carved in your head in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum? How do you begin to deal with the pain of the victims' relatives when the world has turned your former image into a Halloween costume?

With patience.

And he makes clear that during her long incarceration that she has made an effort to become the best person that she can be inside prison walls by finishing her college education and getting her masters degree, teaching illiterate women to read, making a portion of an AIDS quilt and bedding for the homeless, recording books on tape for the blind, and ably working all of the jobs that have been assigned to her.

We keep people locked up for a range of reasons - to keep them from offending again, to send a message to the community about the consequence of criminal behavior, to punish because we feel like their conduct merits our reprobation, to provide an opportunity for the offender to reform themselves.

Van Houten's punishment, her forty years in prison, has abundantly accomplished each of these things.

The question that remains for us as a society is whether all this is enough, whether the fact that her continued incarceration only serves to punish her for something that cannot be undone, that happened so long ago, reflects our values. Put another way, do we believe that people who do awful things can do anything to merit our forgiveness when we know that their acts will be unable to bring back the dead, to erase their past wrongs.

Can we follow the example of the Amish, as Waters offers, and give up our right to revenge, feelings of resentment, bitterness, and hatred, and replace them with compassion?

Van Houten seems like a remarkable woman whose crimes are in her distant past and who merits such compassion but she is not unique in that, and will become less so in the coming years, given the fact that "life without the possibility of parole" has become a widespread punishment over the past thirty years. The questions posed by Van Houten's possible release will have to be answered over and over in the coming years.

Waters' essay is a powerful expression about the possibility of human atonement and forgiveness and ought to help each member of the parole board see beyond Van Houten's forty year old crime and understand that if he "knew her the way I know her, he wouldn't be afraid anymore. He might even ask her to baby-sit his kids. Her crime was a long, long time ago and she has paid her dues to society. I hope Leslie Van Houten can be given a second chance."

For all of the men who I have met who I hope will someday walk out the prison gates, get cut a little slack and a second chance at life, I hope so too.

There but for the grace of God, goes Truman Capote

Last night I watched the admirable Truman Capote biopic Infamous, which you might have missed because it was eclipsed by Capote, which came out a year earlier and covered the same period - the time Truman Capote spent "researching" and writing about the murders of a Kansas family and the subsequent trial and execution of their killers.

I read the book that those efforts produced, In Cold Blood, when I was in college and both the writing and the story made an impression on me.

But the story of Truman Capote's closeness to Perry Smith, one of the men awaiting his execution for the murders, that both films tell was much more immediate to me, perhaps given my own personal and professional closeness with people who have been accused or convicted of murder.

One line from Capote rung in my ears when I saw it in the theater, and it has remained with me in the years since. Truman Capote is talking to his friend Harper Lee and explains his connection to Perry:

"It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front."

In a nutshell, that sense of sameness with my clients, people accused of awful things, is what drew me to become a criminal defense lawyer and it animates my opposition to the death penalty.

Over the years, that sense that we have come from the same place has made it hard for me to - literally - leave death row. Passing through the door from the visiting room, leaving my client behind the mesh screen to wait for a guard, then the sliding door of metal bars, the door at the top of the stairs, the door at the bottom of the stairs, another two sliding doors of metal bars, a door to the bright, neatly manicured grounds, and finally one chain link fence door, and then when that door is fully closed behind me, another, I would think to myself, at each point, Why do I get to leave, go through these doors, go home to New Orleans, to my home, to Nikki, when my clients must stay behind here?

Why do I get to leave through the front door and they need to wait to be taken out the back?