Midway

American bombers begin their dive toward the Japanese fleet in Midway

A few months ago I wrote up a few of my thoughts and worries after watching the trailer for Roland Emmerich’s Midway. That blog post was mostly worries. It also got a ton of traffic compared to my usual fare, so it seems right to follow that up with a review now that I’ve seen the film.

I’m happy to say that Midway was a very pleasant surprise. 

Midway tells, in broad but surprisingly detailed outline, the story of the US Pacific carrier fleet from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the titular battle in June of 1942. The film brings us into the story via a handful of major characters at various levels of and with varying perspectives on the conflict—Navy aviator Dick Best (Ed Skrein) and several other pilots and enlisted men of their carrier, the USS Enterprise; Naval Intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson); Admirals Bull Halsey (Dennis Quaid) and Chester Nimitz (Woody Harrelson); and a handful of civilians on the home front, especially Best’s wife (Mandy Moore). Along the way we learn a little about intelligence gathering and the fog of war (some of the best stuff in the movie), how the United States began its recovery from Pearl Harbor, the incredible efforts to keep the ships afloat and the planes in the air long enough to hold back the Japanese, how difficult naval warfare is, and—with especially chilling detail—the dangerous life of carrier pilots, in which even minor training accidents take lives. 

The film also offers a Japanese perspective, Tora! Tora! Tora!-style, which allows us to see some of the internal tensions on that side. We get a little bit of the violent army-versus-navy conflict that divided the Japanese high command, differences of opinion about strategy in the lower echelons of the navy’s command structure, and even cameos by Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito. This gives the film a laudable sense of balance and humanity—I was surprised by the sympathy I felt for Admiral Yamaguchi, who chooses to go down with his defeated fleet at the end. Fortunately, though, the film doesn’t fall into the moral equivalence trap—the Japanese are clearly the aggressors and we get mentions, and even a few glimpses, of their often forgotten brutality in China.

This pairing of American and Japanese perspectives also helps tackle one of the most difficult problems a historical film has to confront—historian’s bias, the fact that we know what happened. By showing us people living through these events and making choices between multiple options based on limited information, Midway gives us a sense of the potential for things to turn out other than they eventually did. That brings the viewer into the uncertainty of the historical experience, something I’ve seen done effectively by very few historical films. It’s an accomplishment.

The film also does an excellent job of dramatizing what to me is one of the most astonishing aspects of naval warfare—not only sailing out onto a vast, almost featureless, and implacably hostile plane but searching for, feeling out, finding, and attacking enemies. Despite its narrative omniscience, Midway makes the fog of war feel real.

A few other things I liked: 

• Following the Pearl Harbor sequence we get a few scenes that almost never make it into war films. Dick Best visits a warehouse where the Navy is collecting the bodies and parts of bodies they have retrieved from the harbor. Best is there to identify an old friend from Annapolis so he can take the news to the man’s widow. This scene makes the phrase “burned beyond recognition,” a phrase Tom Wolfe made visceral in the opening chapter of The Right Stuff, horribly real. It’s also subdued and tastefully restrained, and all the more moving as a result. We also see the ongoing military funerals in the attack’s aftermath. 

• In my trailer reaction I wondered about the inclusion of the Doolittle raid. It’s handled very quickly but doesn’t feel artificial or out of place, but rather a milemarker on the US military’s journey toward effective retaliation.

• The flight scenes, the main attraction for me and my dad (who took me to see it despite my hesitations), were very well done. We get a good sense of the vast distances involved and the difficulty of both finding and attacking targets. And the divebombing sequences make us feel the danger and the trickiness of targeting something even as huge as an aircraft carrier.

• I also appreciated the attention paid to the dangers of aviation. More than one crew is lost to accident, and equipment failure undermines even successful attacks. The dramatization of these difficulties only underlines the sheer guts it took to do what these men did.

• The mechanics of running an aircraft carrier get a little attention too, with a variety of crewmen omnipresent any time we’re on the deck and, in the aftermath of a crash, a line of them walking across to police any debris left behind. Details like this make the locations feel real despite all the green screen.

• I liked most of the performances as well, but as with any ensemble historical epic these aren’t the main draw. Patrick Wilson as Layton and a subdued Woody Harrelson as a Nimitz struggling under the weight of his new command were particularly good. The pilots were mostly good, but Ed Skrein as Best and Luke Evans as Wade McClusky were the only real standouts. Skrein in particular struggles with a hokey accent (see below) and some awkward dialogue, but you remember him and hope he survives, and that’s an accomplishment in a film with such a large cast.

The film isn’t perfect. The internet is already full of the minor details that it got wrong, that bedevil any military movie—paint schemes for the planes, breaches of military protocol, men wearing the wrong rank, enlisted men in an officers’ club, and so forth. Those are real issues but don’t sink the movie. There is a great deal of CGI, and while some of it is excellent, effectively blending the real and the special effect, there’s also a lot of dodgy green screen work and some outright cartoony explosion sequences. In a few places, Emmerich gives in to some of his disaster movie impulses and we get some lapses of the uncharacteristic restraint that he brings to most of the movie. I’m thinking particularly of the Pearl Harbor sequence and the destruction of the Arizona, which had some over-the-top moments. A few subplots, such as Best’s relationship with his wife, feel underdeveloped and at least one of them—Hollywood filmmaker John Ford, risking his life to shoot footage of the Japanese attacks on Midway Island—disappears from the movie.

More critically, the script, while it does a good job outlining the events between December 1941 and June 1942 and is stuffed with information, often has its characters talking like exposition machines. It’s to the credit of the actors that most of them sell the dialogue as well as they do. That said, there is some overacting (Nick Jonas as a sinewy tough from 1940s central casting, Dennis Quaid as a scenery chewing Halsey), and Ed Skrein’s much commented upon New Joisey accent is phony, but the film’s strengths overwhelmed all these problems—for me, anyway—and I came away appreciating it.

A few critics have dinged Midway for its perceived schmaltz—“Men like Dick Best are the reason we’re going to win this war,” McClusky intones at the end, a line I’ve seen as the object of snickering or harrumphing elsewhere—but I think that has more to do with the receptivity of those viewers than any fault in the performers or the film’s sentiments. Midway is not a subtle movie. It’s also not a cynical movie. The things that matter to these men are their families and friends and it’s these concrete goods that move them to their incredible actions and sacrifices. The film ably captures the spirit of a time defined by shock, strain, and especially loss and the struggle to survive, a time in which cynicism, with its suspicion and moral muddle, is the real naïveté, and a time in which the man who can, in the unforgiving minute, decide and act and give up a part or all of himself for his friends will win the day. 

Unknown Soldier

Lieutenant Kariluoto (Johannes holopainen) leads an attack early in Tuntematon Sotilas (Uknown Soldier)

This is a review I’ve been trying to write since March. Back in the spring I learned that Unknown Soldiers, a new film version of Väino Linna’s great war novel, which I reviewed here last year, had just become available in the US. I immediately ordered a copy. Since then I’ve watched it five or six times. The 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Winter War finally got me to finish this review.

A little background

Eighty years ago tomorrow, Soviet Russia invaded Finland, an unprovoked act of aggression meant to subjugate Russia’s northwestern neighbor as it already had other smaller, weaker countries like Estonia. That war, the Talvisota or Winter War, lasted just over one hundred days. The Finns fought the Russians to a standstill, killing over 200,000 and wounding many more, and forced Stalin to the bargaining table. In exchange for peace, Stalin forced the Finns to concede border territories that the Russians had long coveted, including the Karelian isthmus, from which thousands of civilians fled before the Soviet takeover.

The Winter War is the stuff of legend. It was also only the first of three wars the Finns would fight between 1939 and 1945.

The second and longest of these wars is known as the Continuation War, which began in June 1941, about a year and a half after the end of the Winter War. This time the Finns went on the offensive. They partnered with the Germans and, with the Wehrmacht, planned and coordinated their attack to coincide with the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa. The Finns quickly recaptured former Finnish territory and pressed onward, capturing Russian territory and holding it tenaciously for several years. But in the end the Russians turned them back and, through overwhelming numbers and vast superiority in armor, air, and logistical power (helped indirectly by the United States, our Lend-Lease program propping up an ungrateful Stalin for a long stretch of the war), the Russians forced the Finns to conclude a second peace agreement with Stalin in September 1944. They regained none of the territory lost in the Winter War, and lost yet more.

Little of this matters very much to the characters of Unknown Soldier—at least, not on the grand geopolitical scale. Their concerns are simpler, more concrete—life and death; food, warm clothing, dry shelter, and good cover in a bombardment; and, in some cases, quite literally hearth and home.

The company of soldiers

Jussi Vatanen as Lieutenant Koskela in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier (Finnish title: Tuntematon sotilas), based on the novel of the same name by Väino Linna, a veteran of the Continuation War, tells the story of a company of machine gunners in the Finnish army through the whole course of the war. Linna’s novel is a classic of Finnish literature and of the war genre—it’s one of the best I’ve ever read—and has been adapted for film twice previously. I haven’t had a chance to see those versions, but this new one, based on the novel’s unedited manuscript version and co-written and directed by Aku Louhimies, is excellent.

The film introduces its main characters as they muster in for the invasion of Russia. The film narrows the novel’s large cast down to a core group with whom we’ll spend the majority of the three hour story. Young Hietanen and his giggly buddy Vanhala are two major characters introduced at the start, along with some of their buddies: Lehto, a tough, ill-tempered plug of a man who embraces hard duty; Lahtinen, a stalwart leftist who doesn’t believe in the war; Rahikainen, a ne’er-do-well who always has an angle, and others. We also meet several officers who will offer widely varying examples of leadership: young, idealistic, naïve Kariluoto; the stiff disciplinarian Lammio; and Koskela, the ideal combination of guts, good sense, and endurance.

The men join the attack and days, then weeks of the endless forests of Karelia pass by. Casualties mount—first the unit’s original commander, an old White from the days of the Finnish Civil War, then men killed in attacks on the Russians or ambushed on patrol. One patrol ends particularly badly, with a good man left behind—when they find him later, he has not been killed by the Russians as first reported, but has killed himself rather than be captured.

Reinforcements in the form of reservists arrive, including young, inexperienced men, eccentrics like Honkajoki, who carries a longbow and experiments with perpetual motion machines in his spare time, and perhaps the best character in both the book and the film, Antti Rokka. Rokka is a Karelian farmer and for him the war is personal—he lost his farm in the settlement from the Winter War, and hopes to get it back for himself, his wife, and their growing family. For Hietanen too the war becomes personal, as he strikes up a romance with a Russian girl he befriends in Petroskoi, a Russian city on Lake Onega that the Finns capture as a bargaining chip.

As the first winter of this war arrives and the Russians recover from their surprise at the onslaught, the men repel repeated Russian counterattacks and settle into elaborate networks of trenches. Koskela proves himself a caring and capable leader, courageous, unfussy, and popular with his men, and Rokka proves himself a tough and uncompromising warrior, singlehandedly wiping out a Russian platoon sent to flank them in one instance and escaping capture during a trench raid only to turn the tables and wipe out his attackers in another. Nevertheless both men come in for criticism by their superiors—the injustice of it is bewildering in the face of what we’ve seen.

The war drags on. Two Christmases pass. Rokka’s family grows. The weight of the accumulated boredom and separation from family piles onto these men. If a sense of melancholy hangs over the film it is not only because of the grind of modern warfare, but because of its almost Homeric sense of dramatic irony—we all know how this war must end. The drama comes in worrying about which characters will make it.

The final hour of the film covers the Finnish retreat. It’s harrowing. The line repeatedly crumbles and acts of desperate courage and self-sacrifice are all that keep the Russians from overwhelming and completely destroying the Finnish troops. We see incredible bravery—men counterattack in ones and twos to save their retreating comrades—and not a little stupidity, and the highs of individual courage are sometimes immediately smothered by the wasting of blood by the soldier’s commanders. It’s a mess.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but a great number of characters we have come to know and love die, sometimes with cruel pointlessness. The film ends with wordless images of the war’s cost—a grieving mother, photographs of young soldiers with black ribbons across their frames, civilians fleeing the Russians, a pregnant widow.

On the attack

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier is one of the most beautiful war films I’ve seen. Shot digitally using almost all natural light, it’s magnificent to look at and the naturalism of its imagery helps sell the combat as real. Other scenes, especially those on the homefront—a perspective missing from the book and presented in poetic, often wordless vignettes here—echo the composition and lighting of the masters of the northern renaissance. The scenes back home at Rokka’s farm are especially beautiful and moving.

The battle scenes, always excellent in Finnish movies, are intense and carefully staged, with exacting attention to period equipment and detail. I especially appreciated the care taken to put the viewer in the perspective of the troops themselves—the camera mostly stays at their level and the enemy is almost always seen from a great distance, if they’re seen at all. It almost comes as a shock when Rokka captures a Russian officer and we see that the Russians are just men, not malevolent spirits that strike pitilessly from the woods. The sense of danger the viewer gets from this presentation is intense and sometimes uncomfortable—you really can’t see what’s out there in the woods, and sometimes it gets the jump on you. While not exceptionally gory, the combat really feels violent, and the guts of the men who stand up and face death in the moment they’re needed is all the more awe-inspiring as a result.

The performances are also excellent, particularly those of Eero Aho as Rokka, Jussi Vatanen as Koskela, Aku Hirviniemi as Hietanen, and Hannes Suominen as the cheerful jokester Vanhala—who reaches the end of the film, true to his counterpart in the book, greatly sobered. Vatanen’s Koskela in particular wears a heavy foreboding in his otherwise warm and down-to-earth expression that only underlines his bravery. He knows what the war is eventually going to demand of him, and marches to meet it anyway. You can see why his men follow him, especially as he holds the disintegrating unit together in the face of the Red Army’s onslaught at the end of the war.

In conclusion

I’ve written before, in my essay on the Finnish film The Winter War, about the different perspectives a war film can take—God’s eye, worm’s eye, and so forth. For over twenty years now, since Saving Private Ryan reinvigorated the genre, the worm’s eye view has been predominant, and rightly so—that perspective, which so carefully limits knowledge and so heavily emphasizes the grit, discomfort, and terror of war, is perhaps the best for conveying what a war is like. Unknown Soldier is an outstanding example of the technique.

But the war film Unknown Soldier reminds me of most is The Thin Red Line. Both are thoughtful, poetic, and sometimes mournful in tone, both feature wide casts of characters battling both the enemy and the environment, and both give attention to the look and feel of that environment. Its beautifully moody score by Lass Enersen also reminds me tonally of Hans Zimmer’s work on that film. But Unknown Soldier never drifts into the meandering abstraction of The Thin Red Line and, while tragic, the narrative never feels aimless. Where The Thin Red Line is almost a philosophical allegory, Unknown Soldier is an invitation to reflect on what war means and what it costs, using concrete examples, soldiers who feel like living and breathing men, from a truly brutal conflict.

Again—it’s excellent, and well worth seeking out.

What I found in my glove box

A week ago today I was in a seemingly minor car accident, a fender bender in which I narrowly avoided T-boning a car that pulled out in front of me. I was found not at fault and was grateful that the other drivers’ insurance would take care of the damage, and dropped the car off at a body shop a few days ago for an estimate and repairs. The damage proved greater than it seemed. Yesterday the insurance company called to tell me they were treating the car as a total loss.

I’ve never been sentimental about cars. I can regard them only as tools, as mere machines. I’ve never thought of them as having personalities, just mechanical quirks to tolerate or have fixed, and I’ve almost never given them names—at least, no names beyond nicknames meant to transmute irritation into humor. When I was in grad school I drove a 1985 Camry that had belonged to my great-grandmother, and where my best friend and his brother named their cars Dapple and Rocinante, the perfect blend of fun and well-read names, my car, when I called it anything at all, was “the Punishment Hut,” after the place where Alec Guinness is locked up for the first half of The Bridge on the River Kwai—a tiny metal box built by the Japanese to torture people with heat. That’s about my speed.

So when the insurance company told me I should go clean out this car and hand over the keys, the pang I felt surprised me.

It was a 2011 Ford Fiesta. It technically belonged to my wife. We were dating when she bought it, but when we got married it became ours. We left on our honeymoon in it, shared it on our morning and afternoon commutes every day for over four years, and brought two of our children home in it. When I went to clean it out I felt, for the first time, that I was losing a little something in losing this hunk of steel. As I dug through the glovebox and trunk and the cupholders I realized that if time is a river, this car was a whirling eddy where flotsam gathered and, saturated, sank, gathering in sediment at the bottom. Now, having dug the sediment out, I’ve left that eddy behind, never to go back.

Near the beginning of his great essay “A Piece of Chalk,” Chesterton wrote that he “once . . . planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.” I don’t intend to shape an epic out of the things I found in the car, but I did want to catalog a few of them. (And Chesterton may not have composed his epic, but he did write an essay about the things he found in his pockets.) I have the kind of memory that fixes on and is most rapidly stirred by particular things. Take virtually any book from my library and I will remember when and where I got it and at least one of the times and places where I read it. All of that is imprinted in me with the object itself, and as I cleaned out the car I found myself reliving many years in tiny snapshot moments.

Here’s some of what I found:

• At least a hundred napkins and assorted plastic cutlery and straws gathered from probably a half-dozen different Chick-fil-As.

• Some favorite CDs, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I’ve owned since high school, and a two-disc set of Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, a set I bought in college. I remember listening through this Beowulf several times as I worked a temp job in a tiny cubicle to earn the money to buy Sarah a ring.

• Two copies of the Georgia Mountain Laurel’s annual wedding issue in which our wedding was featured.

• A fabric “eyewear retainer” in desert MARPAT, purchased on my first trip to Texas a few months after our wedding.

• Several years’ of visitor ID badges for my wife’s school, and one small staff hangtag for the year I tutored a German student there. That was the year our daughter was born, when I was working four jobs.

• The roll-up sunshades for the back windows, which we bought somewhere between Newnan, Georgia and St. Simons Island the day after my brother’s wedding. The low, sharply angled sunlight, already hot in the central Georgia morning, had been making our infant daughter cry.

• A tiny clip-on hairbow, the kind we used to put in our daughter’s hair when she didn’t have enough for real bows. She’s almost five now.

• A CD of Sunday school songs in earworm kids’ choir styles, a great favorite among younger passengers on our trips around town a few years ago.

• A small green envelope with my name written on it in my late grandfather’s handwriting. It held the money he gave me for Christmas a few days before he died.

And perhaps the greatest surprise of all:

• The keys to the Punishment Hut.

Then there were the things I couldn’t take with me—a bumper sticker for my brother’s company; the parking decal for my first teaching job, an oval sticker now bleached white by the sun; and most especially the flecks of yellow paint from where our friends decorated our car during the wedding reception, baked onto the rubber windowseals and hanging on for almost seven years.

What struck me is that none of these objects, in an of themselves, have value or really matter. Certainly not to anyone else. But taken together, as bits and pieces of life built up like silt that machine, which I so often took for granted, they mean so much more than whatever matter they are made of. They are pointers, not just showing the way but bringing us into the presence of immaterial things—memories, times and places and people. Everything I noted above came back as I fished these odds and ends out of the car, and when I was finished I found I had a hard time closing the doors and leaving the Fiesta behind for the last time.

As I have come to understand and appreciate more and more the sacramental vision of the world offered by the oldest forms of the faith, I see that God gave us his good physical world precisely to point to the things not just beyond the matter they are made of, but that are embedded, imprinted into the things we see and touch and feel every day. The whole world is an eddy silted up with meaning, a car full of the bits and pieces of everything you’ve lived. And that’s a blessing—you reach into the glovebox and touch little reminders of eternity.

“You have never talked to a mere mortal,” CS Lewis wrote. And I have never driven a mere machine.

The Iliad XXIII-XXIV on Core Curriculum

Giovanni Maria Benzoni, Hector Lying on his Funeral Pyre

This is a melancholy day—the final episode of the Core Curriculum series on the Iliad dropped this morning. In this episode, host Michial Farmer talks with Coyle Neal and me about the two final books of the poem, XXIII and XXIV.

In this episode we cover the funeral games for Patroclus and the incredibly moving penultimate episode of the poem, Priam’s trip to Achilles to beg for the return of Hector’s body. Along the way we discuss mercy and its role—or absence—in the Iliad and ancient pagan society; the “breather episode” of Patroclus’s funeral games, in which things that would ordinarily seem to call for violent retribution are given a pass; and we spend a lot of time talking about Priam and Achilles and what their encounter at the end of the poem tells us.

We conclude by reflecting on the rather small question of what the Iliad means and what it can teach us today. This was perhaps my favorite part of any of the episodes I got to participate in. We reflect on things like the fleeting glory of victory, the inevitability of death, and especially the appreciation the Iliad can give us for the loser’s side in human conflicts. A quotation I didn’t think of at the time, but wish I had, is this from Richard Weaver, which I actually used as an epigraph to Griswoldville:

“It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those who were left behind.”

— Richard Weaver

You can access this episode’s exceptionally thorough and detailed shownotes here. The shownotes include a lot of the allusions we make as well as full blockquotes of some of the passages from other writers that we talk about, including those from CS Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost and Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. In the episode I also mention writing a blog post about one of Chesterton’s reflections on the Iliad. You can read that post here.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services, or via the embedded player in this post.

I was honored to participate in this series and have enjoyed this deep read back through Homer’s masterpiece. The Core Curriculum will return with a second series on Plato’s Republic, a series I’m looking forward to listening to. Thanks as always for listening! I hope y’all have enjoyed this as much as I have.

The King

Timothée Chalamet as King Henry V in Netflix’s The King

At the beginning of the month, Netflix released The King, their second action drama—after Outlaw King—based on the reign of a medieval British king to be released in November. I hope this becomes an annual event. I also hope the movies get better.

The King, directed by David Michôd and written by Michôd and actor Joel Edgerton, tells the story of England’s King Henry V. All retellings of Henry’s reign move in the shadow of Shakespeare’s play, so there are a couple of ways a new film about him can go. One is simply to adapt the play, which has been done plenty of times before—by Sir Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and most recently as an episode of The Hollow Crown. I had hoped The King would go the other route and give us a straight historical film about Henry. Michôd and Edgerton split the difference—the film is not precisely historical but more a reimagining or updating of Shakespeare. It doesn’t quite work.

A kingdom for a stage

The film begins with material from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, in which the Percys—erstwhile supporters of Henry IV in his seizure of power from his cousin Richard II—rebel against the king. (Here’s more about that, courtesy of Netflix.) Henry or Hal (Timothée Chalamet), the wastrel Prince of Wales, learns that his younger brother Thomas (Dean-Charles Chapman) has been given command of his father’s army. He leaves his slumming and wenching in a snit, rides to the battle, seizes control of the army from Thomas, and defeats the rebels by killing their leader, Harry “Hotspur” Percy (Tom Glynn-Carney), in single combat. Hotspur’s death ends the rebellion and Henry’s risking of his own life spares those of the soldiers on both sides.

The film sets up a number of rivalries in this opening act—Henry IV vs Hotspur, Hal vs his younger brother Thomas, Hal vs his ailing and distrustful father. But shortly thereafter the king (Ben Mendelsohn) dies and the prince, now King Henry V, ascends the throne. Thus one more rivalry ends. Then Henry receives word that his brother has died subduing rebels elsewhere in the kingdom. There goes another.

So by the time we reach the thirty-minute mark, Henry rules in reasonable and uncontested comfort and has already begun carrying himself like a king. Already the narrative begins to sag, and Falstaff (co-writer Joel Edgerton) occasionally appears to give the film the appearance of some kind of throughline, but has little to do but mutter and banter with his landlady.

The bulk of the movie, beginning with the tennis ball incident, is spent on Henry’s first campaign in northern France, renewing the English claim to the French throne that had begun the Hundred Years’ War under Edward III. Henry is presented as motivated by retribution—first for slights to his person by the French, then because of an assassination attempt that is foiled by his adviser William Gascoigne (Sean Harris), and a French-sponsored conspiracy to remove him from the throne. From this point the film follows the historical record and Shakespeare reasonably closely, first with the siege of Harfleur and then the Battle of Agincourt. Neither is presented particularly accurately, but they are dramatic and visually stunning, and Henry emerges bloodied and muddied but victorious.

Even if the film was a bit dramatically inert, I enjoyed it up to this point and especially liked the scene the screenwriters give to Henry and his ultimate rival, Charles VI, King of France (Thibault de Montalembert), in which Charles tenderly reflects on the sources of their conflict and the role of family. But then we reach the final scenes of the film. Henry meets his betrothed, Charles’s daughter Catherine (Lily-Rose Depp), and she gives him a woke show of force, refusing to submit to her new husband—“You must earn my respect”—and throwing shade at the entire structure of medieval life: “All monarchy is illegitimate.” Okay then.

Regardless, Catherine rattles Henry enough that he seeks a private audience with his adviser William Gascoigne, who has skulked in the background through much of the movie without really being fleshed out. William reveals that he was behind the assassination attempt and he helped construct the attempted coup in order to give Henry an enemy to prove himself against. It’s Henry’s court as the Bush White House, complete with Cheney. The Hundred Years’ War was an inside job.

Henry then kills William in a fit of rage, just to seal the stupid in for added flavor.

Princes to act

Robert Pattinson as the Dauphin in The King

It’s probably clear what I disliked about the movie, but I did like a great deal of it. It is technically brilliant, with beautifully lit and composed cinematography that, especially in the cool, moody interiors of the opening act, evokes the great Roger Deakins. The cinematographer and editor, Adam Arkapaw and Peter Sciberras respectively, also resist overreliance on handheld (so-called “shaky cam”) and fast cuts and give us battle scenes that are both impressionistic and comprehensible, which was refreshing. Everything from the cinematography to the costuming to the droning string score is austere and moody to a fault. It’s heightened and operatic and I really liked the look and feel of it.

The film’s greatest strength—and weakness, as I’ll discuss below—is its performances. The supporting players are all excellent. Ben Mendelsohn, everyone’s favorite lip-smacking baddie, stands out in a short appearance as Henry IV and Tom Glynn-Carney, who played Mark Rylance’s son in Dunkirk, was so good as Hotspur that I wish he’d had more screentime. I’ve already mentioned Thibault de Montalembert as the King of France, who makes a strong impression as a fragile and weary monarch in his one scene, and Sean Harris as Gascoigne. Harris, who was great in the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies and as Macduff in the 2015 Macbeth, is very good in a severely underwritten part, using a stoop and a serpent-like hissing voice to suggest wisdom and insight as he steps up to mentor the young king. The twist with his character at the end would have worked well if Harris had had more to work with, if it had been more carefully set up from the beginning, and if it weren’t so stupid. Harris acquits himself admirably, though, and until that final scene I enjoyed him every moment he was onscreen.

But the standout member of the cast, to my surprise, was Robert Pattinson as the Dauphin. Despite his misuse in the Twilight films, Pattinson has talent and indulges in his part, speaking in a mincing Inspector Clouseau accent that suggests he is mocking Henry every time they interact. He also, as the internet was quick to appreciate, gets in some sick burns before dying at Agincourt. He steals every scene he’s in.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with The King is the king himself. Timothée Chalamet, alumnus of Oscar-bait films Call Me By Your Name and Beautiful Boy, plays Prince Hal as an emo kid, slouching around in black clothes and a stringy haircut and hating on his stupid dad. I’ve had this kid in the back row of many classrooms over the years. If you’ve ever tired of Shakespeare’s “warlike Harry” and wanted something more punchable, your ship has come in. Chalamet shows more life and intensity at the beginning of the second act, after he has assumed the throne and has steeled himself to take charge of the kingdom. But this energy flags and by the time his army has reached Harfleur he is mooning around his tent soliciting advice from Falstaff. If Pattinson and the others consistently steal the scene, it’s because Chalamet lets them.

Piece out our imperfections

Posthumous portrait of Henry V

Before I say anything about The King’s “accuracy”—which I’ve already been asked about—a quick note about that. Accuracy per se does not make or break a movie. I love and adore Braveheart, perhaps the worst historical film ever made, precisely because it is a good story, well told. (For more on all those points, see here.) So even as I realized the film was going to be more fiction than historical, I was still ready to enjoy it.

As I said above, The King reimagines or repurposes Shakespeare, following the Bard more often than the historical record but frequently departing from both. Its borrowings from Shakespeare include Hal’s wastrel youth—for which we have no contemporary evidence but which had become a staple of folklore by the Tudor era—his friendship with the fictional Falstaff, his triumph over Hotspur in single combat at the Battle of Shrewsbury, the French sponsorship of the Southhampton plot (which was really a move by English nobles to place a cousin of Henry on the throne), the presence of the Dauphin at Agincourt, and quite a lot more.

Its departures from Shakespeare include killing off Henry’s brother Thomas before the invasion of France and killing the Dauphin during the Battle of Agincourt, giving Falstaff a longer life and an active role in the leadership and fighting in France, as well as a battlefield death—the meaning or purpose of which eludes me—and, especially, having the plots against Henry turn out to be the work of a devious underling.

The real Henry V did lead his father’s army—at age sixteen—against the Percys at Shrewsbury, but there was no single combat. Henry was, in fact, shot in the face by a crossbow and his surgeon saved his life with a remarkable piece of medieval surgery. (A small scar on one cheekbone appears to be the filmmakers’ concession to this real-life event, but nothing is made of it and Henry emerges from Shrewsbury unscathed.) The timeline is compressed quite a bit, moving from Shrewsbury in 1403 to Henry’s accession in 1413 without so much as a speedbump. The real Thomas lived almost as long as his brother and was present throughout the campaign in northern France. The dauphin was not present—much less killed—at Agincourt, but did die shortly afterward in an unrelated incident.

I could go on, but that would become tedious—and that’s not even getting into nitpicking the reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt or other issues of authenticity. (Here’s one pet peeve: longbowmen shooting coordinated unaimed volleys high into the air rather than aiming.) That’s not what this movie is about. What’s here is fine, nicely realized and beautifully shot and orchestrated, but in the end it’s not enough.

Unworthy scaffold

When I had finished the film I was left wondering who The King is for. It is not and apparently was never intended to be a historical film, and its loose grasp on the real events and its otherwise forgiveable interest in atmosphere over authenticity work continuously against that kind of enjoyment. But The King doesn’t really work as an adaptation of Shakespeare either. In altering the plays it loses the Bard’s grasp on character and plot and, perhaps most grievously, his magnificent poetry. Whatever Michôd and Edgerton can come up with for the speech before Agincourt could never eclipse the words of Shakespeare’s Henry, and it doesn’t.

The King, like the title character himself, is handsomely mounted but lifeless, which is a shame considering the legendary stuff the filmmakers had to work with.

The Iliad XVIII-XX on Core Curriculum

Thetis commissions new armor for her son Achilles from Hephaistos

Episode nine of Core Curriculum’s ongoing deep read of Homer’s Iliad dropped this morning! In this episode, Michial Farmer, David Grubbs, and I talk through books XVIII, XIX, and XX of Homer’s great war epic.

In this section, Achilles, mad with rage at the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan prince Hector, vows revenge; his mother Thetis orders him a magnificent new suit of armor from the blacksmith god Hephaistos, including a remarkably detailed shield; Achilles has a short chat with his horses, who have definite opinions on what is about to happen; Agamemnon tries too late to make amends; and, with the gods agreeing among themselves not to interfere with whatever may happen next, Achilles returns to battle.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps, or via the embedded Stitcher player in this post. The shownotes, with pertinent links and glosses on our discussion including which translations we’re working from, are available at the Christian Humanist Radio Network website here.

I had a great time discussing Homer with Michial and David and, as always, I hope y’all enjoy our chat, too. Sad to say there are only two more episodes to go after this one. Thanks for listening!

The Iliad XVI-XVII on Core Curriculum

Episode eight of Core Curriculum’s series on the Iliad has arrived! I’m honored to appear as a guest along with host David Grubbs and fellow guest Carla Godwin. In this episode we discuss the drama, action, and tragedy of books XVI and XVII of Homer’s epic.

A lot happens in this chunk of the story, from Achilles’s concession to Patroclus that he lead the Myrmidons out to battle disguised in Achilles’s armor, the awe inspiring slaughter wrought by Patroclus, Hector’s intervention and Patroclus’s, the fight over Patroclus’s armor and corpse, and an amazing amount of ancient trashtalk. It’s brutal and thrilling and tragic and represents Homer at the height of his art. We discuss all this—and more—in this episode.

I had a great time recording this conversation and hope you enjoy listening to it, too. You can listen in via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps, or via the Stitcher player embedded in this post. You can read the shownotes, including which translations we’re consulting as we read and talk, here. Thanks for listening!

The Shining on Book of Nature Podcast

Current mood

I’m excited to participate in the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s Halloween crossover event again this year. Last year, we did a series of episodes on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and I was a guest on the Christian Humanist Podcast to talk about The 39 Steps. This year, the network is focusing on the novels of Stephen King.

I was honored to be a guest on the Book of Nature Podcast along with Jay Eldred and regular host Charles Hackney, and together we discuss The Shining, one of King’s great early works and a classic of the horror genre. Along the way we talk about Stephen King’s personal history, the inspirations for the story (all hail Edgar Allan Poe!), the novel’s dramatization of the psychology of alcoholism and abuse, the real hero of the novel, and the relative merits of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, including Jack Nicholson’s evil face.

If you’d like to catch the other episodes of the crossover, last week The Christian Feminist Podcast talked about Carrie, Monday my old haunt The City of Man Podcast dropped an episode on Revival, yesterday the flagship show talked about Misery, and tomorrow, Halloween proper, Danny Anderson’s Sectarian Review will talk about Pet Sematary.

Tune in and enjoy! You can listen in on the embedded Stitcher player above or via iTunes or other fine podcasting apps. And as always, thanks for listening! I’m blessed and honored to be involved with a network of such fun and intelligent people. Hope y’all enjoy listening as much as I did participating.

Cicero on bad leaders

Detail from Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari, 1888

From Cicero’s philosophical dialogue De Legibus (On the Laws), Book III, XIV:

“Corrupt leaders are all the more pernicious to the republic because not only do they harbor their own vices but they spread them among the citizenry; they do harm not only because they are themselves corrupt but because they corrupt others—and they do more harm by the example they set than by their own transgressions.”

Let the reader understand.

I expand on thoughts like these in fictional form in The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, which I wrote in the summer of 2016 and has only grown more starkly relevant since. But be forewarned—my vision in that book is neither a partisan one (whoever you think I’m thinking about as I write this post, it’s not them) nor a hopeful one.

Chesterton on chronological snobbery

A short line from Chesterton that I hadn’t run across before, as quoted in this piece from the Imaginative Conservative by GKC biographer Joseph Pearce:

“[M]an should be a prince looking from the pinnacle of a tower built by his fathers, and not a contemptuous cad, perpetually kicking down the ladders by which he climbed.”

Chesterton is writing in praise of the historian Christopher Dawson, whose work “has given the first tolerably clear and convincing account of the real stages of what his less lucid predecessors loved to call the Evolution of Religion.” This was a topic of especial concern for Chesterton, and meditations on that topic form a large early part of his own book The Everlasting Man.

But his primary concern in this line is with a problem that CS Lewis and Owen Barfield, both drawing from Chesterton, would later term “chronological snobbery.” Lewis: chronological snobbery is “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”

This is the air we breathe, now. It’s the water we swim in without even knowing it. In his essay, Pearce imagines a scenario in which a resurrected Plato is first treated as a curiosity, then as a nuisance, and finally as a subject of scorn. I don’t have to imagine this—I’ve seen it. I have to take great pains to teach my Western Civ students anything of value about—to follow this example—the Greek philosophers. Virtually all their textbooks offer about Plato and Aristotle is that they were sexists who made excuses for slavery. Inadequate.

Chesterton’s solution to chronological snobbery was tradition. From Orthodoxy: “Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Key to embracing and maintaining is tradition is a certain pietas or respect for the past. This is the minimum buy-in. Without respect—a respect that should blossom into a filial love—the tradition breaks down and you are left with nothing but yourself. A paltry and limited thing and, to kick this back to Lewis one more time, a prison:

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough.

That’s from An Experiment in Criticism, which Lewis published in 1961. Chesterton’s earlier essay argues almost exactly the same thing, expanding the scope from wide reading to a wide and deep understanding of the past and, especially, our debts to it. To expand the line I quoted earlier with a bit more of its full context, Chesterton is summarizing Dawson’s scheme of “four stages in the spiritual story of humanity.” He concludes the summary—and the essay—by saying that

I will not complete the four phases here, because the last deals with the more controversial question of the Christian system. I merely use them as a convenient classification to illustrate a neglected truth: that a complete human being ought to have all these things stratified in him, so long as they are in the right order of importance, and that man should be a prince looking from the pinnacle of a tower built by his fathers, and not a contemptuous cad, perpetually kicking down the ladders by which he climbed.

Don’t be a snob. Have a suitable respect for the past and you will inevitably learn from it and enrich yourself.

Pearce’s entire essay is worthwhile—you can read it here. You can read the entirety of Chesterton’s essay, collected in Avowals and Denials in 1934, here. And I’ve previously written about pietas, which I’m more and more convinced is the most important of our neglected virtues, here.

Jefferson on ignorance and freedom

This morning I happened across this quotation from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Charles Yancey, a Virginia state legislator, in January 1816, seven years after leaving office as president to return to private life back home in Virginia:

“if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.”

— Thomas Jefferson, January 6, 1816

The whole letter is quite remarkable, a blend of commentary on mundane Albemarle County infrastructure projects (a dam project that could wreck property values and the navigability of a river); his fervent hopes that an acquaintance named Captain Miller will be able to open a brewery nearby (both for his own enjoyment and for humanitarian purposes: “I wish to see this beverage become common instead of the whiskey which kills one third of our citizens and ruins their families”); and some quite pointed—and still relevant—observations about the early 19th century mania for banking:

Like a dropsical man calling out for water, water, our deluded citizens are clamoring for more banks, more banks. the American mind is now in that state of fever which the world has so often seen in the history of other nations. . . . we are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. it is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce but nothing: that it is an idle dream to believe in a philosopher’s stone which is to turn every thing into gold, and to redeem man from the original sentence of his maker that ‘in the sweat of his brow shall he eat his bread.’

But the most striking portions of the letter come near the end, when Jefferson reflects on the prospects of funding improvements not just in roads and canals (the big infrastructure craze before railroads), but in education. He theorizes about a minor tax that could help fund education at every level, including a projected college which would later become the University of Virginia, and criticizes the fanaticism bred in students after they leave to study in New England universities. (The more things change…) Jefferson:

if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be. the functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. there is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

I am less sanguine than Jefferson—a hopeless Enlightenment rationalist who did not believe in original sin or any of the doctrines that traditionally imparted a salutary dose of reality to ambitious moral improvers—about the power of the press and of education, and have a hard time knowing which it would be more foolish to place much hope in. But Jefferson is exactly right that in a system such as ours, it’s up to the citizenry to defend themselves against abuse of the powers they have granted to their government. Republics run on such tensions.

I don’t think I have to argue that we’ve failed. By Jefferson’s lights, we are now and have for a long time been asking the impossible.

And education does have a role to play, especially if we hope to recover some of the republican virtues and liberties the Founders assumed were necessary to maintaining freedom. (See Jefferson’s friend John Adams on this point here.) After all, the purpose of liberal education is to train free people—citizens. It’s precisely that vision informing Jefferson’s comments above.

You can read this quotation with a bit more context here or the letter in its entirety here. You can even peruse Jefferson’s original, with a helpful transcription, here. The portion I’ve quoted has sometimes been shared with a spurious additional line or two about citizens being informed. I think this probably began as a gloss on Jefferson’s original and got lumped in with his actual words, as is the wont of internet quotation. You can read about that at Monticello’s page on spurious, corrupted, or misattributed Jefferson quotations here.

Downton Abbey

Over the weekend my wife and I got to see Downton Abbey, the film continuation of the great British TV series.

I'll start off by saying that it was a perfect date movie—definitely so if you've watched the entirety of the show and especially so if you love it. My wife and I had a great time. But I'm honestly not sure how much someone with no familiarity with the show would get out of it. One of the things I liked about the movie was that it wasted almost no time bothering to introduce characters fans will already know. That means fans get a lot of bang for their buck but I imagine newbies may well be lost.

The film takes place over a few days at Downton Abbey, the estate of Lord Grantham and his family. A letter from Buckingham Palace that informs the family of an impending visit from the king and queen sets the house in motion and the plot follows the family, the household staff, and the guests through the labyrinthine progress of a royal visit.

The Grantham family faces the myriad pressures of properly accommodating the royal family—including everything from clean and comfortable rooms to a well-executed military parade—and the household staff find themselves sidelined by specialists brought in from London to prepare the house according to arcane royal protocols, which they find insulting. Taking especial offense are Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) and Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), the cook and housekeeper, who bristle at the condescending intrusions of the outsiders.

You’d be forgiven for thinking so based on this poster, but Downton Abbey is not a horror movie

In Downton Abbey fashion, some characters misstep in trying to make things easier and further complicate matters. Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) asks her old favorite Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) to come out of retirement (a last minute development in the finale of the series) to act as butler just for the royal visit, an insult to Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), who is clearly proud of his new position as butler and, apparently, handling himself well. Furthermore, interpersonal drama looms as the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) learns that an estranged cousin (Imelda Staunton) whom she believes is scheming to cheat the Grantham family out of an estate rightfully theirs will be returning as one of the queen’s ladies in waiting.

And there’s much, much more, including subplots about a handsome young plumber who flirts a smidge too much with Daisy (Sophie McShera), provoking jealousy in her intended, Andy (Michael Fox); the prying and questioning of a mysterious army officer (Stephen Campbell Moore); and the embarassing eagerness of Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) to return to staff just long enough to wait on the king and queen; and of course the inevitable secrets that every character refuses to divulge until things have gotten very complicated indeed.

It’s a lot of fun, and while a few of the subplots show off a little too clearly the soap opera that’s always been a part of Downton Abbey’s DNA—for instance, one involving the identity of a mysterious lady’s maid who also immediately turns into a love interest—some of the subplots are very funny. Perennial sad sack Mr. Molesely gets some especially British cringe humor at one crucial moment of the film.

The entire cast is excellent, especially considering that with well over thirty speaking roles in multiple intersecting plotlines and only two hours to work with, each performer had to make an impression with a very small amount of screentime. In fact I find it hard to say who the star of the film is, but the meatiest parts belong to Tom Branson (Allen Leech), erstwhile Irish socialist chauffeur, for whom the film seems to be trying to find a love interest, and to the great Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess, who invests her small slice of the plot with a sense of long history and hurt and, in the end, enormous pathos.

The film left a number of its many subplots underdeveloped or too little explored. An Irish Republican plot against the king doesn't get quite enough time to breath, and neither do a few following incidents involving Tom Branson, though they do have a nice payoff at the end. Similarly, an very important subplot involving the Dowager Countess only plays out secondhand, like events happening offstage in a Greek drama. By contrast, the most noteworthy and time consuming subplot involves Thomas Barrow taking a first trip into the gay underbelly of York, a subplot that reminds us how Barrow's issues have usually served as the vehicle for the show's most anachronistic and pandering messages. A little less time on this and a little more to set up—to choose one thing—the Dowager Countess's big revelation at the end of the film would have been a better use of screentime and felt a little less cloying.

But those are minor complaints. What needs to work works. The rivalry between Downton Abbey's staff and the royal staff is fun and has some delightful moments and all of the plot threads are nicely woven together and intertwined. Almost everyone has a moment or two. A favorite of mine: After Barrow has angrily stormed out of an interview with Lord Grantham, Lady Mary, and Mr. Carson in which he learns he’s being temporarily replaced, Lord Grantham chooses to ignore his insubordination with: “I never thought of him as a man of principle before.” And of course the Dowager Countess gets a heaping share of zingers, including “I never argue. I explain.” My wife noted that the film couldn't have been more carefully calculated to satisfy lovers of the show. I think she's right.

I thought a few times that the film could have used a little more substance. I had just recently watched Gosford Park, screenwriter Julian Fellowes’s first foray into this kind of storytelling (Downton Abbey was apparently originally intended as a spinoff) and marveled at the dramatic potential in a story with that many plots and side stories and such a huge cast. Compared with Gosford Park, Downton Abbey didn’t seem especially weighty.

But I realized that one of the things I most liked about Downton Abbey the film was its relatively low stakes. Royalty and status aside, the plot boils down to We’re having guests over for dinner. And after almost twenty years of the whole world threatened by rings of power or Decepticons or Sith lords or—especially—Infinity Stones, this was a refreshingly human-sized story. This has been the strength of Downton Abbey all along—its human proportions have allowed for delicate interplays of deference, respect, courtesy, and decency that remind us of what it means to live among others and connected to others. In a movie like this, not hurting the grocer’s feelings offers more personal meaning than any number of sci-fi MacGuffins and CGI battle scenes. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that change of pace.

So definitely check out Downton Abbey, especially if you are at least passingly familiar with the show or simply want to a pay a visit in which your relationships with other people matter.