Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

It’s fun to watch epic movies with complex plots and multiple characters that retell ancient stories. If done right they are impressive to see on a big screen. So this week I’m looking at two such movies, one about a journey home, and the other about visitors from afar.

Steal Away

Dir: Clement Virgo

Fanny (Angourie Rice: Every Day) is a young woman from a wealthy family on the eve of her 16th birthday.  She lives in a stately manor house overlooking a large plantation beside a small medieval town. All her friends, and those of her mother and grandmother, are showing up for the cotillion to welcome her into the upper crust. Her family is highly respected. Her slender blonde mother Florence (Lauren Lee Smith) runs a program to welcome young female refugees into her house both as servants and as friends for Fanny. (They are always girls, never boys.) And after a year or so, she “sends them North” to be replaced by the next one. Everyone knows about it, but the details are kept hush-hush to protect the girls from being discovered by officials. There’s a major crackdown on immigrants going on right now, with ICE-like patrols rounding up suspects and taking them away.

The new “guests” are Cécile (Mallori Johnson) and her mother Mary (Isabelle Menal), direct from the Congo. She has a regal bearing and wears elaborate hairstyles that look like a crown. Fanny gazes at her in awe, and begs her to give her the same hairstyle. She wants to look and act as much like Cecile as she can, hoping some of her mystique will rub off on her pasty, white skin. Cecile also likes Fanny and they form a true friendship. But when Fanny sees Rufus, their groundskeeper (Idrissa Sanogo) staring lustfully at Cecile, she grows jealous. How dare he take her best friend away? Growing up in a house of women, she has no idea what men are there for anyway. Cecile scoffs at her: you’re just a little girl; stop trying to be me. 

While this is going on, sinister plots are brewing in the background. Fanny’s demented Grandmother is throwing herself, naked, on men. Her mother is scheming behind closed doors in secret rooms in the castle. She remains close-mouthed about what happened to past refugees. And the anti-immigration soldiers are closing in on them, looking for more hidden refugees. What terrible secrets are hidden within the estate and in the country around it?

Steal Away is a lush, gothic coming-of-age thriller set in an unnamed country. (I think it’s Belgium, whose colonial history in Congo is notorious.) But it takes pains to avoid reducing the conflict to simple colonists vs colonized; the  refugees in the story explicitly arrive from Eastern Europe and elsewhere (referencing past Holocaust movies.) The story is told both through naive, young Fanny’s eyes, and those of Cecile, who despite her more worldly ways is equally inexperienced when it comes to men. It all takes place within a multi-generational matriarchy — with men mainly as sex partners or authority figures, but kept firmly outside of their world. 

Steal Away is a fascinating and complex film, including elements of science fiction, historical drama and fairytails. That said, I found the story hard to mentally unravel for most of the film. But it all comes together before the shocking ending. The film is the work of longtime Toronto collaborators director Clement Virgo (The Book of Negroes, Brother) producer Damon D’Oliveira and writer (and Virgo’s partner) Tamara Berger (Maya & Samar) and is maybe the most lavish of their substantial roster.

While I can’t claim to understand everything about Steal Away, I’m glad I saw it.

The Odyssey

Wri/Dir: Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Rises, Oppenheimer, Inception, Tenet, Dunkirk)

It’s many millennia in the past on an island kingdom in the Ionian Sea. Ithaca is ruled by wise King, Odysseus (Matt Damon), and regal Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Odysseus is famous for his hunting prowess, his skills with a bow and arrow, and his cunning military tactics. He is called away — along with his best soldiers —  to fight a war against Troy, promising to return afterwards to resume his life at home, and to see his toddler son Telemachus (Tom Holland). 

The war is a triumph, but Odysseus is slow to return home, first so he and the troops can enjoy the spoils of war, and later, as they face a series of trials on their way back. He is gone for so long that rumours spread that he is dead, and that his widow Penelope, should marry a new king. A crowd of unruly suitors — led by the loathsome Antinous (Robert Pattinson) — have taken over the castle and refuse to leave. Penelope, however, won’t marry anyone until she finishes weaving a shroud (a seemingly endless task), and Telemachus, now a young man, also remains faithful to the father he never really knew. But where is Odysseus?

He and his men are facing a series of trials at different ports where the ships come ashore for water and provisions. On one island, they think they can loot fresh cheese and sheep they find in a cave to feed the troops, but they are stopped by a hideous, giant cyclops. On another, hungry sailors fall to the wiles of a magical demigoddess who turns them into animals. They are attacked by giants in shiny suits of armour, visit ghosts in the land of the dead, resist the seductive calls of the sirens, and navigate their way between a killer whirlpool and a narrow strait. Odysseus alone passes all of these trials, and ends up the captive of a beautiful nymph-goddess named Calypso, who feeds him lotus flowers so he will forget his past.

Will Odysseus ever make it back to Ithaca? Can Penelope fight off her suitors, and will Telemachus ever see his dad again? And is there anyone still alive in Ithaca who still remembers their king?

The Odyssey is an entertaining retelling of the stories in Homer’s ancient Greek poem, dating back 2800+ years. It’s fun to watch all the adventures the hero faces on his way home. And even though it’s almost three hours long — remember, it is an epic — I stayed interested all the way through. I totally enjoyed watching it.

The music, settings and costumes are just lovely. And it’s shot in 70mm IMAX film suitable for an odyssey like this one. The acting, though — and it’s a huge, all-star cast — is just OK, with few performances standing out (Anne Hathaway was excellent). I was not impressed by Matt Damon; he pales in comparison to Ralph Feinnes in the same role, in the same story just two years ago, in The Return. And for a movie that cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make, there’s no excuse for the uneven special effects. The Trojan Horse is magnificent — nothing like the rickety wooden statue on wheels I’ve always imagined. The cyclops, though, is just awful, the dog-headed monsters in Scylla and Charybdis are messy and hard to make out; and what I’m guessing are supposed to be the giant Laestrygonian cannibals are just a series of identical, shiny suits of armour. Probably cost a fortune, but still very cheap-looking. (Circe’s magical animal transformations, on the other hand, are quite fantastical).

Worse than that are the constant, contemporary moralistic finger-wagging the director inflicts on his viewers. The goddess Athena (Zendaya) is a strong warrior, but in this movie she’s more like a silent virgin Mary, sadly shaking her head whenever Odysseus takes a wrong path. In the original poems, Odysseus fights great battles, takes on various lovers and leaves children in his wake (eg with Circe), but here that’s mainly scrubbed clean. And in this version people are punished not for their hubris, but for their sins, a concept unknown in Ancient Greece, where heroes are admired for the tricks and lies they inflict  on their opponents.

But if you just want to see a fun, epic adventure, you won’t feel cheated. The Odyssey is well worth your time.

Steal Away and The Odyssey both open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website  culturalmining.com