E.D.

You’ve heard of E.T., the Extraterrestrial and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Is there by any chance a new film coming out entitled, E.D, the Erectile Dysfunctional? You never know what new blockbuster will emerge from DreamWorks and the forever fertile imagination of Steven Spielberg. One thing's certain. Anything will be better than the commercials for Viagra and Cialis which depict sedentary couples who have overstayed their welcome on earth, preparing themselves for the unlikely moment when desire will hit. In E.D. Spielberg will treat erectile dysfunction as the monster that it really is, providing a countervailing force of good in the form of the superhero, E.D. created to meet the challenge of the scourge. Instead of bucolic settings, the movie will start in a second story tenement apartment with the neon “Bar” sign flashing outside the window. You’ll recognize the terrain which Anthony Quinn navigated in Requiem for a Heavyweight. The couple are on their last legs after a lifetime of disappointment and failure and sex is the last thing on their minds, when E.D. magically appears. Suddenly, the dreary surroundings are transformed. The husband’s front porch is turned into a six pack and the wrinkles and cellulite mysteriously vanish from the spouse without the help of Botox. E.D.’s magical powers extend into the financial realm too. The rent is overpaid rather than being overdue and the healthcare system actually turns out to owe our couple money. You don’t find a helluva a lot of sex in the average Spielberg movie, but E.D. will earn an NR rating.

The Last Will

Imagine Through a Glass Darkly with Shakespeare as the writer returning home to his family. What greater palette for the examination of the narcissism and brilliance of the artistic personality than that of the greatest creative mind of all time! That’s what Robert Brustein is up to in The Last Will, his wistful look at a Shakespeare who comes home to make peace with his family, currently playing at the Abingdon Theater and directed by Austin Pendleton. Like Stephen Greenblatt who wrote Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Brustein plays upon the double and triple entendres of the playwright’s name in examining both his literal will and his legacy. In The Last Will, flashes of Othello’s jealousy, Lear’s paranoia and host of other affects are conscripted in the service of the venereal disease which has afflicted Shakespeare’s (Austin Pendleton) mind in his last days. Indeed, he’s decided to leave  everything to his daughter Susanna (Merritt Janson), an Anabaptist, whose dream is to shut down the theaters which play her father’s sinful works. In his fever, Shakespeare calls Anne Hathaway (Stephanie Roth Haberle) Gertrude and his other daughter Judith (Christianna Nelson), Desdemona then Perdita. He can no longer distinguish the characters he’s created from family and friends, like the great actor Richard Burbage (Jeremiah Kissel). Curiously Brustein’s portrait of Shakespeare’s marriage is reminiscent of the conflict between the Lincolns portrayed in the Spielberg movie, right down to the presence of a dead son who haunts the narrative. Long a scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brustein, founder of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, and one of America’s most brilliant theater critics, is uniquely qualified to find a place for Shakespeare in a pantheon of characters whose flames burned too brightly.

Lincoln

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was a seminal work in shaping thinking about consciousness and history. Steven Spielberg has created the cinematic equivalent of Hegel in Lincoln. You don’t need or want Hollywood if you’re trying to make a Bergman movie or Jules and Jim, but there’s a place for Hollywood when you’re seeking to create a sense of the grand and the majestic, the cinematic equivalent of a classic l9th century novel. And only the director of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, the hugely underrated A.I. and Empire of the Sun could have the resources to bring together so many iconic actors--Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Hal Hobrook--in addition to the composer John Williams and the Chicago Symphony orchestra to make this Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. What is remarkable is that the movie based upon Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln moves so seamlessly from the private world (it’s fun to realize that Abe and Mary had the kind of guilt inducing fights that bring modern couples into marriage counseling) to the historical stage on which the politics by which the 13^th Amendment to the constitution, outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude, is so keenly described. You begin to understand where Roosevelt and LBJ learned their lessons and you would wish Barack Obama would attend the same school, but history is the real subject of Lincoln and Spielberg’s liberal use of the close-up makes the movie look like Mount Rushmore. Those who grew up in the 50’s will remember Random House’s children’s series of Landmark Books which had titles like Lee and Grant at Appomattox. The imprint that Spielberg’s Lincoln leaves is a little bit like the power those simple titles had over the child’s imagination.

The Grapes of Wrath

The imagined traffic jam of Godard’s Weekend, the imagined dispossession of Empire of the Sun, the Spielberg classic derived from the novel by J.G. Ballard—we have become the repository of these two images. In a massive traffic jam filled with cars loaded with goods from foreclosed homes, where will the traffic go when it’s finally gotten off the highway? Steinbeck imagined the refugees of the Dust Bowl traveling from Oklahoma to California in The Grapes of Wrath, but now the ground is shifting under our feet, and there are whole populations that have become unseated from their once familiar worlds. What will be the fate of Floridians who have left acres of deserted condos? What will become of itinerant Katrina victims, whose lives were turned upside down by nature just in time to meet up with an economy that is as unresponsive to stimulus as a patient suffering from flesh-eating bacteria is to the most potent intravenous antibiotics? California, under constant threat of defaulting on its borrowing, has its own problems, and no longer holds out the hope it did during the Depression. Meanwhile, a new tax package that will add over $900 billion to the debt over the next two years competes with a federal judge’s rule about the unconstitutionality of compulsory insurance. The safety net of social security is under siege, and what will be the fate of Medicare and Medicaid in our deficit economy? The Joads were Steinbeck’s archetypical family. Who will rescue their contemporary counterparts? Who will make a place for them at the table?