84 CHARING CROSS ROAD

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“84 Charing Cross Road” is about bonds of friendship formed and maintained by a mutual love of literature or, more to the point, books.

Anne Bancroft’s earthy portrayal of real-life playwright and script-reader Helene Hanff (pronounced hell-ane han-f) is so effortless and effervescent that it’s enough to turn a generation of young women into chain-smoking, gin-swigging writers, if not full-fledged admirers of beautifully bound editions by the likes of Jane Austin, George Orwell, Chaucer, or Plato.

Helene Hanff was famous for saying that she never read fiction because she could “never get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.”

Personally, I know exactly where Hanff was coming from, and I concur. So it is that the nature of this film, directed by David Jones, calmly emphasizes the immediate surroundings and social conditions of its characters from the late ‘40s to the late ‘60s.

Love of poetry and the written word is intrinsic in the fabric of the narrative. Nothing is strained, even when characters break the forth wall after earning sufficient trust from its audience. We are glad to be spoken to directly. It’s a loving gesture that arrives as a reward.  

Helene Hanff lives in a weathered brownstone apartment on 95^th street off Central Park in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill. The address is actually on 94th street between Fifth Avenue and Madison. She frequents an actual bookstore at 1313 Madison that is still in business at the time of this writing. Unable to locally acquire the specific titles that her ever-hungry literary appetite requires, she responds to an ad for Marks & Co., a London-based antiquarian booksellers overseen by Anthony Hopkins’s Frank P. Doel. What follows is a 20-year relationship of loving commerce elucidated by letters written back and forth across the pond.

Oh what a difference casting makes. There can be little doubt that the separate but resonate chemistry between Bancroft and Hopkins rings as a clarion bell of mesmerizing harmony. Through their constant correspondence we savor Hanff’s lean sense of nearly ribald humor as it rubs on the dry paint of Frank Doel’s heartfelt sense of honest propriety. It should be noted that Judi Dench’s restrained performance as Doel’s loyal but tightly-wound Irish wife Nora adds a layer of stoic resolve to the couple’s marriage.

The primary action of the story revolves around Hanff’s written requests for specific books that she augments with gifts of food stuffs meant for the appreciative staff of Marks & Co., located at the address of the film’s title. Hanff always sends cash.

So it is that the seemingly pedestrian story catches the viewer off guard when the cumulative emotional effect takes its inevitable toll in a tear-jerking sequence of satisfying catharsis. “84 Charing Cross Road” is a valuable film for all of the right reasons of theatrical balance and narrative truth. It is a movie that hits you like a live play. I can think of no higher compliment for the source material of soul-bearing experience.  

Rated PG. 100 mins.

MOONLIGHT

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“Moonlight” normalizes racism. It also perpetrates stereotypes about homosexuality and the repressive conditions of blacks in a country that has been carrying on an incremental genocide against this minority since the first slaves were brought here.

As in “Brokeback Mountain,” Hollywood maintains its knee-jerk assertion that gays must always be punished for harboring non-conformist sexual ideas. It’s only rich white people who get to indulge in wild sex fantasies (think “50 Shades Of Grey”). In “Moonlight,” black on black violence is the norm.

Here is a movie designed to make white audiences proud of the tears they shed in a darkened theater because those salty drops of water prove just how sensitive they are, except not really. Sentimentality comes cheap, especially when it’s about a gay black guy running back into the arms of the man who betrayed him in a violent and humiliating way years earlier.

Based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s stage play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” screenwriter/director Barry Jenkins shows black characters that, regardless of how much the film’s well-cast actors elevate the baited source material, come across as cartoon people with limited intellects and imaginations.

Split into a three-act structure, the time-jumping narrative follows 10-year-old Chiron, a.k.a. “Little” (Alex Hibbert), a frightened weakling constantly bullied and harassed by boys in his economically depressed South Florida neighborhood. That fact that Chiron’s dad is long gone, and that his mother is a nurse and a crack addict, puts the boy under the mentorship of Juan (Mahershala Ali), a local drug dealer with a soft side. Juan might not be an ideal surrogate father, but beggars like Chiron can be choosers. At least Juan isn’t a pedophile, or is he?

At school, Chiron’s detractors identify him as gay even before his first sexual experimentation goes in that direction. The power of peer suggestion is strong in this oversimplifies setting.

Cut to act two where Ashton Sanders plays a teenage version of Chiron who enjoys a moonlit handjob and a kiss with his pal Kevin. Alas, Chiron’s dreams of romantic fulfillment are short-lived when Kevin turns on him in a disgusting scene of physical, emotional, and intellectual abuse that seals Chiron’s fate for the years that follow.

The filmmakers allow Chiron a few moments of doomed emotional satisfaction in a narrative that barely hints at the racist system pulling the strings. Chiron deserves more than the hug he eventually receives, or the return to prison he seems destined for if he survives the unseen encounters with he will most certainly experience.

Rated R. 110 mins. 

In episode #29, Mike and I welcome Armond White on the show to discuss MOONLIGHT while drinking C.O.B. from FREE WILL. They said it couldn't be done, so we did it anyway. 

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

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What a difference a remake can make. Audiences familiar with John Schlesinger’s languorous 1967 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel may have their breath taken away by Thomas Vinterberg’s streamlined women’s-lib update. For the record, Schlesinger’s rendering was the second of (now) four versions of Hardy’s 1874 book. Those who haven’t seen Schlesinger’s original are in for something unexpected and delightful. 

Much credit goes to screenwriter David Nicholls’s instincts for fleshing out the dramatic and personality-rich themes in Hardy’s story of misplaced affections, creating a modern reading of a headstrong woman living ahead of her time in rural 19th century England.

Here is a textbook example of how a remake can improve on an older film. Vinterberg’s picture may still not come close to the most successful film adaptation of Hardy’s work — that would be Roman Polanski’s exquisite “Tess” (based on “Tess of the d'Urbervilles”), featuring Nastassja Kinksi’s earth-shattering breakout performance.

Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba Everdene has been imbued with a more 21st century sense of independent womanhood.

When the time comes to bathe her farm’s sheep, she plunges into the filthy water to help, regardless of the inappropriate dress she wears. Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene with more of an intellectual bent than was afforded Julie Christie’s haughty sexpot portrayal of the same role in Schlesinger’s film. Christie’s Bathsheba veered toward bitchiness, whereas Mulligan’s character is more of a sprite who knows how to listen and act. When the shrewd Bathsheba negotiates the cost of her grain at a wholesale market, in this version we witness the details of the transaction. Her introduction, wearing a cordovan leather corset-styled riding jacket, embodies Bathsheba’s down-to-earth qualities.  

Bathsheba rebuffs the marriage of her (ostensibly) most compatible suitor Gabriel Oak (brilliantly played by cinema’s best kept secret Matthias Schoenaerts). Gabriel herds his sheep nearby to the home where Bathsheba lives with her aunt. Having admired her from afar, Gabriel brings a baby sheep as a gift in order to steal a private audience with Bathsheba and make his proposal of marriage. Bathsheba plays coy and keeps herself at a distance  

The storyline remains comparatively similar to the 1967 version. Some camera angles seem to match shot for shot. A major exception lies in less emphasis on Bathsheba’s firebrand soldier boy suitor Sergeant Francis (Frank) Troy, with whom Terrence Stamp ran away in Schlesinger’s version. Here, the little-known Tom Sturridge inhabits the role with less a physically imposing frame than Stamp’s same character.

One significant third-act modification of Sturridge’s reliably unreliable character elevates the story’s most climatic moment to a revelation of horrific proportions.

The film’s secret weapon is Michael Sheen in the role of Bathsheba’s love-struck neighbor William Boldwood, who selflessly awaits her acceptance of a marriage proposal that she blithely incites on a lark. In a scene of self-revelation, Sheen’s tragic Boldwood exposes his subservient romantic identity in a way that stings for the cruelty that it exposes in Bathsheba’s otherwise admirable character. She can’t resist stringing him along. Bathsheba has a sadistic streak. Sheen’s beautifully muted but expressive performance is impeccable.  

Thomas Vinterberg is best known as a co-founder of the Dogme 95 movement (with Lars von Trier, Kristian Levring, and Soren Kragh-Jacobsen). His remarkable 1998 Dogme film “The Celebration” established him as a dynamic auteur able to dig deep into the marrow of familial conditions. As unlikely as it seems on the surface, Vinterberg’s transition from a relatively unknown Danish filmmaker and film theorist to the director of what promises to be an enormously successful romantic period drama, has an intrinsic logic. He knows how to get to the crux of drama.  

Rated PG-13. 119 mins.