In praise of amateurs

LiveJournal is channeling Michael Chabon all of a sudden:

Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner — through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational riffing and Talmudic debate — the world of the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the best senses of the word: a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it — to explore the imaginary world — oneself. And if we must accept the inevitable connotation of hopeless ineptitude that amateur carries, then at least let us stipulate that we shall be hopeless and inept like Max Fischer, the hero of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore: in the most passionate, heedless, and whole-hearted way.

-- quoted from his essay "The Amateur Family" at Tor.com

Via supergee.

Frida (2002)

Finally caught up with Julie Taymor's second movie, Frida, which is a biopic about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, starring Salma Hayek in the title role. I had an intense, uneven reaction to this movie. From the very first shot, I was arguing with it. We see a Mexican courtyard with a peacock. The peacock's tail is an unnatural shade of green. Okay, I tell myself, this is supposed to look like a painting, but it actually looks like film of a peacock with fake-looking tail feathers. Hmph. Ten minutes later I was bawling my eyes out. And so it went throughout the whole movie. I kept arguing with Taymor's choices, and I kept bursting into tears every ten minutes or so as I got swept up in the story.

Now, this doesn't tell you much about the movie, and I'm not sure how much I'm capable of telling you about the movie, given my response to it. One of the things it famously does is incorporate some of Kahlo's paintings into the flow of imagery, so that a painting will come alive and become a scene in the movie, or a scene in the movie will transform into one of the paintings. I found myself wishing the whole movie had been based on her paintings, that the film had just been narrative fragments linking the paintings. I also felt that as much as we do see of her artwork, the movie is strangely silent on her creative process and her career as an artist. When Sharee and I were in London in 2005, we want to an exhibition of Kahlo's paintings at the Tate, so I know that she did a lot of portraits for hire. Why is this not mentioned in the movie? We see more of Diego Rivera's career than of Kahlo's. We never get the sense that she made any money off of her work or that she had any reputation in her lifetime.

I remember that one review of the movie I read back in 2002 complained that it was too much about her relationship with Rivera and not enough about her. It's a legitimate complaint, I think. It feels at times less a movie about her than a movie about them. At the same time, however, I have to admit that one of the things I respond to most powerfully in Taymor's movies (at least this one and Across the Universe) is her treatment of romantic relationships. I'm not sure I can articulate it, but she has a knack for showing both the beauty and the sorrow of relationships at the same time, like two sides of the same coin. Love and loss go hand in hand, and it goes both ways. Love becomes loss becomes love becomes loss becomes love. That's how Frida and Diego's relationship is portrayed in this movie, and it just kept hitting me in waves of emotion. I mean, I can relate, you know?

But back to the things I argued with: the depiction of Kahlo's fling with Trotsky didn't work for me. This was one of the few times where the film seemed to suffer from typical biopic problems, where something is included not from any narrative need but because it's historically interesting or important. To be fair, there is an attempt to fit it into the narrative: Frida has a fling with Trotsky as a way of punishing Diego. But because Trotsky is such a grand historical figure himself, I kept looking for a deeper meaning that wasn't there. I dunno. Maybe this is something that will make more sense on a second viewing, when I don't have my own expectations distorting things.

The award-winning score by Eliot Goldenthal really is great, and I'll be buying it. It made me yearn for more Latin music. I have so little, just a collection of songs from Pedro Almodovar movies and an album by Concha Buika. I need more, more!

I guess I will end by saying that the movie was a cathartic experience, much like the exhibition of Kahlo's paintings was. I really didn't know that much about her artwork before I went through that exhibition. By the end of it I was emotionally exhausted. The amount of pain expressed in her work was overwhelming. The movie doesn't dwell on the pain (caused by a horrific accident that shattered her body), although it does keep coming back to it. Yet it still probes enormous, overpowering, transformative feelings, just as Kahlo's paintings do. It's more than can be absorbed in a single viewing, for sure. I'll be watching this one again.