In Which We Receive Perfect Kindness And Courage

Where The Sidewalk Ends

by JULIA CLARKE

Cinderella
dir. Kenneth Branagh
105 minutes

There was an episode of ABC's The Bachelor where, in a cross-promotional opportunity with Cinderella that was rather shameless, even for Disney, former Playboy centerfold Jade Roper went on a princess date with Chris. Jade received a new dress and, as a mode of pre-gaming, was permitted to watch an “exclusive clip” from the movie on an iPad. It’s possibly the least exciting moment of the season, but I did note that Lady Rose (Lily James) from Downton Abbey was to be Cinderella. What I didn’t realize until I settled into my seat at the theater, right on time for the 2 p.m. showing, was that Downton Abbey's sous chef Daisy (Sophie McShera) was in it as well. She plays a stepsister. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The other night, happily strolling the streets of Manhattan, I saw a rat crawling cautiously in the middle of the sidewalk. In New York rats are ubiquitous, but only in the subways, so you can imagine my fear/curiosity. A nearby child also noted the animal and was eager to investigate, but his mother pulled him away saying, “It’s probably sick.” I mean, it had to be sick, right, to venture above ground, away from the roaring express trains, relentless mysterious puddles, and expired metro cards peppering gum-speckled platforms? I took at least two showers when I got back to my apartment and still felt like I had caught some sort of rat disease, or that it had followed me inside my building, or that it now resided in my hair.

In Cinderella, the notion of rodents doesn’t repel — in fact, the rodents are named and revered, not unlike Micky Mouse himself. Cinderella speaks to them more than she speaks to anyone else in the film, and the narrator (who is actually the fairy godmother, obviously played by Helena Bonham Carter) notes, unnecessarily, that they’re her bffs.

When Cinderella is a child (back then she’s just known as Ella), her mother assures her that animals speak, listen, and understand humans, but it’s implied you have to be blonde, clad in blue, and somewhat earthy for that to work. In Disney’s 1950 animated version of Cinderella, Gus Gus the mouse is adorable, partially because he is pristinely animated, wears a cute t-shirt, talks, is fully capable of preparing his own meals, helps Cinderella with chores, and is just an adorable, nonthreatening human in mouse form. In this live action version, Gus is played by that rat I saw on the sidewalk.

A big take-away from the film is animal rights, or, as they say in academia, animal studies. As a vegetarian, an addict of breeching whale videos on youtube, and someone who enjoys having my feet warmed by soft golden retrievers, I like to smugly profess my love and respect for animals. Unfortunately, it was hard to get past the filthy mice that were permitted and in fact invited inside Cinderella’s home, which can only be described as the interior of your corner Anthropologie (you could practically smell the $24 Santiago huckleberry candles, and they let rats in that haven of shabby chic?).

When Cinderella first meets the prince, they are in the woods. She is galloping away from the cruelty of Daisy, Cate Blanchett, and the other stepsister (Holliday Grainger) and finds herself in the midst of a royal hunt. The gentlemen on horseback are after a CGI stag. “Run away,” Cinderella whispers to the deer in much the same way she communicates with the mice. Shortly thereafter, the prince gallops up and mansplains that hunting is “what’s done,” to which Cinderella replies, “just because it’s done doesn’t mean it’s right,” or something, and he is visibly moved.

During this meet-cute, their horses are circling each other dizzyingly, but they stop suddenly after she tells him of her acquaintance with the stag. The camera focuses deeply on his soulless blue eyes, and we see that their entire romance hinges on her defense of the animal, which she tells the prince “has a lot more life to live.” We never see Cinderella eat meat.

The other thing is that the stepsisters and stepmother (Cate Blanchett) are incredibly coiffed, their nails painted, lips vibrantly red, and yet they are the most ‘animal.’ They laugh like hyenas at Cinderella’s soot-covered face and try their hardest to eradicate her sense of self. They rename her and tell her she’s worthless because of their thinly veiled jealousy. The irony is perhaps a bit too heavy-handed, but the joy of clear irony is that nobody misses it, and in politics, you can never be too clear.

“I forgive you,” Cinderella finally says to her stepmother after her foot fits inside the glass slipper, and we recognize the power of good over evil and the freedom of forgiveness, those hopeful ideas that fairy tales so beautifully deliver to even the most cynical audiences. The message is solid, and it goes against criticism that Cinderella, or at least the 2015 imagining, is sexist. In this version, the protagonist is not a pushover who needs a prince to validate her.

The fact of the matter is that yes, Cinderella is treated like a servant and takes forever to finally speak up, but she’s unbreakable in a dazzling Kimmy Schmidt sense. It’s pretty clear she likes the prince for political reasons — by marrying him, we can expect a ban on ruthless hunts for blameless deer and, hopefully, vegetarianism for all of the kingdom. She listens to her mother, who on her deathbed makes her promise to “have courage and be kind." She’s a regular liberal, and she achieves her goals subtly, by leaning the fuck in.

In one scene, Cinderella's twice-widowed stepmother explains the tragedy of her first two marriages. Can we blame her for being pissed that her new husband really only cares about his spawn from his first wife, who died in a gloriously Victorian way — suddenly and gracefully, after a single faint followed by foreboding, indistinct murmurings from a country doctor? If it weren’t for her cruelty and monetary greediness, we would nearly pity Cinderella's stepmother, and plus it’s Cate Blanchett, who is lovely. We get perfect kindness and courage from Lady Rose, obvi, and perhaps most intriguingly a real outside-of-the-box Daisy, who prances around in a hoop skirt like she’s never worked dinner at Downton in her life.

Like Downton Abbey’s obsession with the changing times (I swear, if I hear Carson lament bygone days one more time, I’m giving up on everything, including knowing whether or not Thomas finds love), this is a Cinderella about a changing society — about a commoner shockingly marrying royalty, about a kingdom transformed by a woman’s insistence on being kind to animals, even rats, and about a man being open with his foot fetish.

Julia Clarke is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan.

"How Can I" - Laura Marling (mp3)

"Divine" - Laura Marling (mp3)

In Which She Receives Frequent Kindness On The PCT

Up and Down

by JULIA CLARKE

Wild
dir. Jean-Marc Vallée
115 minutes

As a heterosexual woman who grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s, I watched a lot of Brad Pitt movies--Legends of the Fall, A River Runs Through It, Meet Joe Black - and every time I popped one in the VCR, my dad would eyeroll, “If it has Brad Pitt in it, it’s going to be the same story: he’s going off to find himself.”  Finding oneself - in that mounting a horse and ruggedly galloping away from Julia Ormond kind of way - is the shining theme of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir-turned-film, Wild.

Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon) is walking the Pacific Crest Trail (or PCT) until she gets over her divorce, or until she forgives herself for dabbling with heroin, or until she comes to terms with her mother’s untimely death, or, in her own words, until she can “be the woman my mother raised.”

Wild, which is adapted from the memoir by novelist Nick Hornby, opens with Cheryl grimacing at her bloody and blistered feet and then, whispering a Paul Simon lyric about living without fear (“I’d rather be a hammer than a nail”), ripping off a couple of loose toenails. “It was me against the PCT when it came to my toenails,” Strayed writes in the memoir, and the book is punctuated by score updates. By the end, she is left with only four toenails, so the PCT takes the win. 

As a self-proclaimed inexperienced hiker, she buys too-tiny boots that result in several toenails hanging by a thread, a likely fate after walking hundreds of miles. This predicament left the theater audience audibly sighing at her lack of preparedness. To be fair, though, Cheryl does pack care packages for herself at checkpoints on the trail, so it isn’t like she went into this dumb as a brick. She ensures herself food for the duration of her hike. We learn the reasons for her painful journey as the film unfolds, almost as though the film is, as Reese Witherspoon said in an interview, “a mystery” rather than an adaptation of a memoir.

Much of Wild features Cheryl pausing to observe the beauty of the PCT--her profile frames an impressive mountain overlook; a wide shot features her walking beside several small joshua trees that pepper the Mojave desert; she desperately stumbles after a fox in the snow. Her hike is enriched with flashbacks of her “real” life, which boasts her unraveled marriage, her drug habit, her abusive father, her abortion, her college education, her therapy, her promiscuity, and most heartbreakingly, her bad and beautiful moments with her mother, who died suddenly of cancer before the age of 50.

Wild is self-consciously dealing with a woman in her twenties hiking the PCT alone. In one particularly tense scene, a couple of camo-clad, buzzed hunters look her up and down and lick their lips, threatening rape. They eventually leave--it’s getting dark and they need to get back to their truck--but the scene proves, interestingly, to be one of Cheryl’s more dangerous moments on the PCT, despite bears and mountain lions lurking in the dense forest. One of the hunters lifts his beer can and toasts “to a young girl all alone in the woods,” and as soon as they leave, Cheryl packs up her things and runs. 

In another scene, she meets a female hiker called Stacey (Catherine de Prume) and is ecstatic, solely because the hiker is a woman. In the memoir, Strayed confesses that Stacey isn’t someone she would be friends with in real life, that they only connected because of their mutual female PCT hiker status. And a group of three men Cheryl meets on the trail — she calls them the Three Young Bucks — point out her femininity, saying her trail name should be “Queen of the PCT” because as a woman, she always has help along the way. “I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another,” Strayed writes in her memoir. “Aside from the creepy experience [of the hunter]...I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn.” 

At its most cynical, Strayed’s book suggests that hacking it alone on the PCT is feasible if you’re pretty and blonde and twenty-something, and writing a mediocre memoir about the experience will grant you a bestseller. The film — notably and perhaps despairingly adapted by a man — picks up what the text leaves out: the expansive scenery, rattlesnakes suddenly appearing on the trail, icy rivers, what it means to be out in the wilderness by yourself, what it feels like to be inside your own terrifying thoughts, the gaping hole that is losing your mother unexpectedly. 

The book has more than one instance of Cheryl staring at and detailing her naked body in a hotel room or a public shower, of her limitless crushes on fellow male hikers, of sex with a stranger she meets during a break in her hike. She is more motivated by a black bra she packs than she is by the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. “It is always disheartening for me when a woman protagonist has zero self-respect,” a friend of mine familiar with the narrative told me.

At the end of the day, though, we have the story of a woman who let go of her drug habit and finally grieved her mother and, more importantly, accepted her mother’s love. In one particularly moving scene, Cheryl falls to her knees on the trail and looks toward the sky, tears streaming down her face: “I miss you. God I miss you.” That’s what was absent in the book and what came through in the film — strategically placed flashbacks, poignant moments of reflection, and exquisite, National Geographic-worthy shots of the PCT, a major character in the film that barely got any airtime in the novel. 

My mom and I read the book together before seeing the film, and at one point, after reading aloud the series of meaningless sentences that present themselves as voiceover in the adaptation — “What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course” — my mom said, “This is only successful because she’s blonde.”

Julia Clarke is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about Chef. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Summer Love" - Yseult (mp3)

In Which We Struggle To Leave A Voicemail

Hand-Squeezed

by JULIA CLARKE

Chef
dir. Jon Favreau
114 minutes

The last film I saw alone was American Hustle, and I'm still recovering from that requisite tsunami of depression. I saw Chef because I doubted it would have the same effect, and also Swingers has forever given me a soft spot for Jon Favreau. A friend once described him as "the moldy inside of a ripe English muffin," but that friend doesn't understand how a lady feels when a man wearing a tank top struggles to leave a voicemail. I maintain he's adorbs. 

Contrary to what the trailers suggest, Chef is less a "the higher they rise, the harder they fall" story so much as a tale about someone who makes hand-squeezed, chili-infused artisan lemonade out of lemons, with the  coaxing of his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara). That coaxing was relentless and weirdly good-hearted, considering their divorce.

Chef Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) is head chef at an upscale Los Angeles restaurant where randomly Scarlett Johanasson is the hostess. She plays a hipster named Molly who sort of has a thing for him, although after sharing a joint they say "we told each other we wouldn't do this," and just like that, their relationship is drier than the cornstarch Carl and his son pour on their male parts on a particularly humid evening.

Once an inventive, passionate craftsman, Carl is now a cook forced by restaurant owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman) to put out what the regular crowd expects: some sort of caviar thing in an eggshell, a blah Italian entree, and a chocolate lava cake. 

On the day of a big critique from renowned critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), Carl struts into the kitchen with heirloom tomatoes, an enormous pig carcass, and purple carrots. But Riva demands that he "play the hits" and stick to the usual menu, which, of course, makes Ramsey Michel roll his eyes and write a heinous review. He pans Carl's boring cooking, but perhaps more cuttingly, he says that Carl's weight gain is decidedly due to obligatory eating of what guests send back to the kitchen. 

Carl is outraged and has an in-restaurant meltdown captured by another patron's iPhone and quickly posted to YouTube. Even though there is no such thing as bad press, Carl's services are no longer needed, and after a brief battle with pride, he does what his ex-wife suggests: opens a food truck in Miami.

With nothing else to lose (people don't want to hire him after his YouTube performance), he follows her advice, and brings along his cute son Percy (Emjay Anthony), who proves amazingly adept at social media outreach. A former coworker Martin (John Leguizamo) joins in at the last second, and the three of them drive from Florida to LA, stopping in cool cities like Austin and NOLA to serve up Cuban sandwiches and whatever other variations on that theme Carl feels like because now he's finally cooking what he loves.

The film has, given its food-centric nature, the expected shots of melty grilled cheese, pureed peppers, simmering green onions, tender pork. In one scene, Carl makes ScarJo some pasta instead of hooking up with her because they told each other they wouldn't. The camera closes in on some onions and spices sauteeing in a wok, and then Carl transfers the most glistening pasta in the world – did he use a gallon of oil? it's so shiny I think he can see his face reflected in it! – into the wok concoction. He twists it together artistically before plating it and handing it to her. When she takes her first bite, her eyes roll back in a way that reminded me of Paula Deen's expression when she bites into a stick of butter. 

In a scene in Texas, Carl, Martin and Percy stop at a hole-in-the wall BBQ place and cut into a piece of meat that has been slowly cooking overnight. It looks almost charred, but when the knife slices through it, the inside is visibly perfect, even to my vegetarian eyes. Someone in the theater audibly groaned in what can only be described as a sexual way. 

As a kale lover, most of the featured food did nothing for me. Most strange, though, was that the food Carl made wasn't nearly as innovative as the film implied he is. Carl's reputation before becoming head chef at the restaurant is that he's against the grain, menu-wise. As someone who has watched at least four episodes of Top Chef, a Cuban sandwich isn't wildly unique. Where you might expect some sort of foamy lecithin concoction atop seared scallops with a sprig of, I don't know, arugula, Carl presents basic Cuban sandwiches and fried plantains. That was actually what was to some heartfelt and others cheesy about it - he begins cooking not only what he wants to cook, but what reminds him of his romance with Inez, and in the process, he rebuilds his relationship with his son. "I get to touch people's lives with what I do," he says meaningfully to Percy. "And I love it. And I want to share this with you."

Performances were mediocre at best and racist at worst (isn't Sofia Vergara Colombian? Why was she parading as Cuban?), although Carl's son Percy was earnest in a believable and childlike way. Tweets appeared on the screen in the same way texts do in House of Cards, rendering social media a character in itself. It was also possibly too long, but maybe that's because there are only so many extreme close-ups of meat slabs I can stomach.

There were also some unanswered questions. I don't know why Inez needed a publicist, for instance, or why her house was so enormous, and she also had another ex-husband (Robert Downey Jr.!?) whose personality – erratic, enigmatic, eccentric – held little appeal. It seemed that her relationship with him was only a ploy for romcom friction between Carl and Inez, the two you're supposed to want to re-couple. I found myself wanting to hate watch a movie about how Robert Downey Jr. and Sofia Vergara's relationship got going and perhaps more interestingly, how it dissolved.

But all of that is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of it. What matters is that a man realizes simplicity and staying true to himself and his ideals will feed millions and bring broken families back together.

Julia Clarke is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She last wrote in these pages about a type.

"The White Tundra" - Black Prairie (mp3)

"Fortune" - Black Prairie (mp3)