FILM: Wicked Little Letters

In 1920 in the quaint English seaside town of Littlehampton, a curious scandal erupted when scores of townspeople started receiving nasty handwritten letters full of profanity to make the Edwardian mind explode. Based on this strange-but-true story, Wicked Little Letters is a wicked little delight, thanks to memorable performances from Olivia Coleman as prim spinster Edith Swan living with her parents and Jessie Buckley as foul-mouthed Irish immigrant Rose Gooding living in the adjacent row house. A small constellation of other great characters and actors add color to the story as well. Rose is framed, but by whom and why? We find out halfway through, but the real question is whether the perpetrator can be caught, or whether the powers that be prefer a tidy solution even if it’s not true. Littlehampton’s first woman police officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) is on the case, but a lot of social structure and expectations stand in the way. A little social commentary is smuggled in, but under cover of an engaging procedural with a hefty dose of dark comedy. We loved it.

FILM: One Life

 

One Life presents the inspirational story of Nicholas Winton, a young Englishman who visits Prague in 1938 to help with a refugee organization, and is horrified to witness the plight of hundreds of Jewish families with young children fleeing from Hitler. Despite the seemingly impossible challenge of finding money and sponsors and moving the English immigration bureaucracy, he organizes the rescue of hundreds of children in the weeks and days before Hitler invades Czechoslovakia. After the war, his efforts were generally unknown, and he personally felt very burdened with the memory of all of the children that he was unable to save. The film cuts between showing the events of his heroic efforts just before the war, and then his life some four decades later. Anthony Hopkins gives a masterfully nuanced performance as the guilt-ridden Winton in his later years, in a role that could have been maudlin in lesser hands. Helena Bonham Carter is also pitch perfect as his mother in the 1938 scenes. While the film is inevitably compared to Schindler’s List, it is its own unique story, and a very timely one, in illustrating the plight of refugees in a war zone, and the genius of boldness to do what might seem impossible. The film’s title, One Life, alludes to the Jewish proverb that saving one life is to save the whole world, but it also shows what difference one life can make. You may walk out after this film wondering, as I did, what you could be doing with your one life.

Remembering Bev

My heart goes out to the Stern family upon hearing of the passing of Bev — wife, mother, and grandmother, and adoptive mother of countless lucky people. She was the mother of my friend and college roommate Hal, and I met her during parents’ weekend of our freshman year at Princeton. She was one of those people with a smile that lights the world, and a warmth that makes you feel like she’s your Mom too. Fittingly, she was a school nurse for many decades, and I’m certain there’s a whole generation of kids who grew up in Freehold, New Jersey who think she’s their “other mother” too. She was a fount of boundless encouragement, her children’s greatest cheerleader, propelling her family to be both happy and highly accomplished through force of will, power of love, and no shortage of her famous kugel(*). She lead not just by encouragement but by example, being a strong and accomplished woman herself. Hal was not the first Ivy Leaguer in his family; she had graduated from Penn. And by the end of her school nurse career, she was leading the nursing program for the district and establishing best practices that were adopted statewide. In her later years, she was organizing things at the assisted living community that she and Joel had moved to. She was also social media savvy and doing her best to make Facebook a more benevolent place with her uniformly positive messages. While wholeheartedly Jewish herself, she was open-hearted to good people of all faiths, and always made a point to send out good wishes for Christmas and Easter and other religious holidays for all who observe. One of the silver linings of the Covid pandemic for me was that I was able to join the Stern family seder via Zoom where I was welcomed like family. In a beautiful funeral service this morning (which I was also able to attend thanks to Zoom), it was so moving to hear her children and grandchildren all remember her so vividly and lovingly. I loved seeing just how much of Bev lives on in them — the way they speak, the way they laugh, the way they support and hold each other up. I hope they draw comfort in those moments when they recognize a glimpse of the parts of her living on in themselves and each other. May her memory be a blessing to them and to all of us who knew her.

(*) Hal reminded us this morning that his mother’s kugel recipe was one of the first things to go viral on the Internet, more than 30 years ago, long before Google, Facebook, or any of that. Try Googling “Mom Stern’s noodle kugel”. It still comes up, just one indicator of her lasting positive impact on this world.

FILM: Problemista

I thoroughly enjoyed Problemista, bringing cinematic magical realism to the story of a young Salvadoran man with big dreams navigating the Kafkaesque US immigration system chasing sponsorship in the New York City art world. The protagonist Alejandro (played by Julio Torres, who also wrote and directed), despite an endless barrage of obstacles, clings to the optimism instilled in him by his artist-architect mother, and never loses the literal bounce in his step. There are delightfully creative surreal touches, like the literal personifications of Craig’s List (fiendishly portrayed by Larry Owens) and Bank of America, and the imagery of Escher-like staircases, escalators, and office mazes, of hourglasses ticking down (Alejandro only has 1 month to find a new job when he unexpectedly gets laid off), and of other immigrants who just fade into thin air when the bureaucracy announces their time is up. And there are very real touches, like the claustrophobia of a Brooklyn apartment shared by too many roommates. And then there is Tilda Swinton playing a self-absorbed monster of an art critic who tantalizes Alejandro dangling the prospect of sponsorship if he can just do one more impossible thing. Every character is delightfully exaggerated, making light so that you can’t help but laugh, despite what is an unbearable situation. But Alejandro is an unsinkable rubber duck who will not be held down, propelled by force of will to an unexpectedly hopeful ending note. In the end, the film pulls of the trick of keeping heavy things light, keeping the viewer off-balance and delighted, but leaving you thinking about entitlement and privilege and wondering how we might make our system just a bit fairer for the people who have to engage with it.