The Dying Gaul is a film directed by Craig Lucas, based on his own play, and in it a white gay male writer is paid a million dollars for a script about a love affair between two men, in which one of the lovers dies of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS); and as part of his payment, it’s understood that he will change the story from focusing on two men to being about a man and a woman. He’s induced to betray his play and the real life love on which it’s based by a producer who is bisexual and married to a former screenwriter. It’s interesting that in the published play, the producer’s wife knows that her husband is bisexual and has affairs with men, so he is not sexually immoral, but in the film she’s surprised by his affair with the writer (that sophisticated aspect of the play is dumped for cinematic and social cliché). In the film, the bisexual is aesthetically amoral, professionally dishonest, and sexually predatory; and the woman is deceptively kind and emotionally manipulative (she takes on the persona of the writer’s dead lover on the internet when she engages the writer in a chat room) and she is finally cruel; and the white gay man, though not forced to do anything he doesn’t want to do (he chooses to sell his script; to have an affair with a married man, the producer; and to engage in a strange internet dialog with someone claiming to be his dead lover), he’s presented as a victim; and the life of the bisexual man is destroyed and the woman is killed, leaving the white gay male writer alive with a million dollars to spend. Peter Sarsgaard as the writer, Campbell Scott as the producer, and Patricia Clarkson as the wife give performances that are etched with believable emotion—whether concern, desire, grief, or anger; and the people in the film seem civilized in manner—articulate, intelligent, informed by culture, while acting in duplicitous ways; and this is a uniquely vicious film—indicating a dishonest, immature, malicious, and narcissistic sensibility.

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) is the paradigmatic African-American composer; and he wrote ballads and dance songs and film scores and orchestral pieces and some of his work was inspired by eastern music. He wrote music charts often inspired by the musical personalities of his musicians, and he allowed for improvisation. Clarinetist Don Byron has said that “the early Ellington stuff, that’s my favorite period of Ellington, always will be. It’s the most interesting period. It’s just completely explosive, and he’s inventing what he’s doing from tune to tune, sometimes based on some girl’s shakin’ her ass or whatever. Whyever he wrote the piece, these pieces are completely revolutionary and often quite different from each other. Even some of the harmonic moves he makes, there’s no precedent for a lot of them” (“Visionaries and Eclectics,” Growing Up with Jazz, by W. Royal Stokes, Oxford, 2005; 139). I have heard some early Ellington music—it was marketed as jungle music, and while it did have heat and speed (and I won’t say it was music anyone could have made, as Ellington was the one to make it), it did not have the wholeness I feel or hear in his later music. I also have reservations about the preference for the early stages of a man’s or a culture’s history—the inclination to see those early stages as more innocent or authentic: even a master develops. Edward Kennedy Ellington, known to all as Duke Ellington, was born in 1899 Washington, District of Columbia, to a wonderfully bourgeois family; and Ellington attended Armstrong Manual Training School for art study, while also listening to ragtime musicians—and he was tutored by the musicians Harvey Brooks, Oliver Perry, and Louis Brown. Ellington formed a music group in 1917, and soon he bought his own home, and was booking elegant shows for his group in Washington and Virginia, before moving to New York in 1923, and there performed on radio to his increased popularity, leading to his recording and publishing contracts and international tours and legendary collaborations with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. Ellington’s work has depth, mastery, and range.

Invisible Man, the novel, and the two essay collections, Shadow and Act, and Going to the Territory, three books, were of a quality to give Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) a great, and deserved, reputation as a writer while he lived. Invisible Man is a picaresque novel, with political and spiritual dimensions, featuring a well-intentioned young man whose inadequate grasp of real motives and consequences leads to his own exploitation and his nearly endless frustration. (There are so many characters in the book that I, like many other students, failed a two-part essay exam in college when I did not recognize an important character’s name.) Subsequent titles, Flying Home and Other Stories, and the novel Juneteenth, gratified the admirers who always wanted more from Ellison. The book Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius by Lawrence Jackson situates his work in his life….

Percival Everett is a writer, and his oeuvre includes Suder, Cutting Lisa, Zulus, God’s Country, Big Picture, Watershed, Frenzy, Glyph, Erasure, American Desert, and Wounded; and I think he’s a greatly inventive—and simply great—writer. Sometimes the simple facts in a biographical narrative may go further in establishing the legend of an artist than his actual work, especially if those facts confirm generally held beliefs. If a writer’s life and work do not conform, his significance may be harder to read—and that may be the case of Percival Everett, a genius. Everett tells stories with unusual imagination and wit and excellent language craft, but he lives on a farm with horses and teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and he, an African-American, is as familiar with literary theory and experimental writing as he is with horse feed: and he fits no received stereotype. To put it too simply: Cutting Lisa is about a doctor-father who realizes his son’s wife is carrying another man’s child, which provokes the doctor to do the unthinkable. Everett captures the son’s good nature and the father’s evolving understanding of how his son has been deceived and the resulting, if understandable, horror: the father wants to protect his son’s innocence; and we can see—as Baldwin, and Morrison used to say—the kind of compromised morality that results from that. God’s Country, a comic western, is about a little-good white farmer whose close acquaintances become a black man and a girl disguised as a boy. Watershed involves a black hydrologist, Native Americans, and land disputes, and it is a personal narrative, a murder mystery, and a political drama. Frenzy is about possession by the god Dionysos and presented compelling articulations of consciousness and feeling. Percival Everett is not inclined to repeat himself.

The Far Side of the Moon, a film by the Canadian director Robert Lepage, was apparently made in 2003 but only opened in New York in December 2005. Manohla Dargis in The New York Times (December 2, 2005) called the work an “alternately rewarding and frustrating drama” about modern alienation, whereas The Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Rechtshaffen (November 5, 2004) had described it previously after a festival screening as “a wondrously inventive and often quite amusing story.” The moving picture, reportedly shot on high-definition digital video, is about two brothers in Quebec: one, Andre, a successful weatherman, a liar, gay, with a lover, and the other, Philippe, an original but eccentric graduate student who works as a phone salesman, honest, heterosexual, and lonely, though he’s had at least one girlfriend and until recently was taking care of his mother, now deceased. Lepage plays both; and as the scientist son, the caregiver, he has a physical quality—soft face, thick body—that seems both body-negligent straight boy and mother-involved son. The weatherman son seems slimmer, more professional. The brothers do talk but they’re not close. The scenes we see of the remembered mother show her as something of an archetype—feminine, nurturing, self-conscious. The film has several themes—obviously family (sibling contentions, mother-love, and grief), but also space exploration, and what leads to imaginative leaps: narcissism, competition, imitation. Philippe is central, and we see him through the window of a laundromat washing machine, which suddenly becomes the window on a ship out in space, and we are told about the Russian and American quests to be the first to put a man in space, and then to put a man on the moon. The film moves between flashbacks and contemporary forward narrative (and I suspect it’s easy to mistake its chronology without notes, which I did not take). We see a childhood scene of Andre as a younger brother during his older brother Phillippe’s absence—Andre puts on Philippe’s music headphones, lights up a marijuana cigarette, spreads out and kisses a girlie magazine layout. Philippe walks up a snowy plane, and looks down into a valley and sees moon-walking astronauts. He returns home, taller than the family’s apartment building. He finds his little brother asleep in his room, and carries him out and into another room and dumps him into a washing machine, as if to cleanse him of experience or personality. Philippe has trouble at work, when he is caught using the phone for personal rather than business reasons—and when he leaves work early one day we see the name of director Robert Lepage on the staff list. (Lepage, a director of traditional and experimental stage and concert works, whose previous films include The Confessional and The Polygraph, lost his own mother to kidney failure in 1999, inspiring this film.) Philippe gets the opportunity to visit Russia for a conference, and he asks Andre to take care of their mother’s goldfish, which Philippe calls the last living thing she had. Philippe learns shortly before his trip that his mother’s death was probably suicide, that after an illness that involved amputations, she did not want to live. He is so distracted by this that in Russia he does not adjust his watch, and he misses the conference. He does have a conversation with one of the organizers, who tells him that he disagrees with Philippe’s thesis about the importance of narcissism—instead, the organizer thinks that space travel facilitates the possibility of self-awareness and communication. Meanwhile, due to a power outage, Philippe’s apartment is cold and the mother’s goldfish has frozen. Andre is inclined to lie about it, but after his lover criticizes that strategy, Andre tells Philippe the truth, and they agree to have dinner, at Andre’s expense, upon Philippe’s return. Philippe in the airport, waiting for the plane home, begins to break free of the pull of gravity and float in the air.

The Fast Runner is a film of family and clan, love and competition, myth and survival; and it makes cold nature seem a treacherous but lovely world. Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (2001), directed by Zacharias Kunuk, is based on a tribal tale. The film was released in American theaters in early summer 2002. Frederic Brussat, writing alone for Spirituality and Health, began his comment on the film with, “The word myth derives from the Greek mythos which means ‘to murmur with closed lips, to mutter, to moan.’ The Inuit of Canada have a salutary tradition of oral storytelling that stretches back thousands of years. The people who first muttered these tales were nomadic hunter-gatherers trying to feed their families on the Arctic tundra, the top of the world. They found in these sagas intimations of their yearnings. They learned the dangers of breaking taboos and yielding to those passions, especially if it threatened the solidarity of the group.” He went on to call the film a masterpiece that speaks to our primal emotions, and noted that it gives “an engaging overview of Inuit culture and lifestyle in the old days with its portrait of hunting practices, food distribution, animal pelt clothing, oil lamps, water preservation, dog teams, sunglasses, and much more.” The Hollywood Reporter’s David Hunter wrote that, “Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) and his brother Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innukshuk) are both the hope of the small Inuit tribe they belong to and marked for tragedy because of a shaman’s evildoing years earlier. While the film leisurely revels in the characters’ lifestyle—from dog sledding to building igloos—the story hinges on the love of Atanarjuat for Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu) and how this causes jealous Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq), her betrothed, to seek vengeance.” In his June 7, 2002 review, Hunter concluded that, “The acting, costumes, music, cinematography and sound are all astounding given the production’s austere locales.”

Images, through light exposure, are created on an emulsion-coated film negative, and that until now has been one of the necessities for creating films. There are people—technicians, and even critics—who are experts about such details and who are given to discussing the movement of the camera from one face to another in conversation (shot/reverse shot), images combined by theme or mood (montage), unbroken takes, experimental treatment of celluloid to produce unusual effects, and quotations of angles in past films, as well as subversive subtext, but when most people think about film, what they want to know is, who is in it and what is it about, how did it look, and was it any good?

Finland, long a flat low land of forests and farms, much of it between Sweden and Russia, was once a province of Sweden, then of Russia, and it became independent in 1917, and has since become a modern country thought by many to be the best place to live on earth—in terms of its economy and environment. Norway and Sweden have also been rated best, regarding factors such as literacy, research access, and gender and sexual rights, and all-around human development. Such facts are clarifying if one lives in America, the land of self-congratulations.

Hearing Aretha Franklin sing at Rosa Park’s funeral in a radio broadcast reminded me of Franklin’s ability to personify love, respect, sadness, wisdom, and faith. At her best, Aretha Franklin’s voice is formidable (combining the strengths of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Mahalia Jackson), her song selection thoughtful and varied, and her performances satisfying the requirements of art, truth, and imagination. I heard music producer Arif Mardin in an interview recently talk about the inventive musical ideas she brought to her work, noting the dreamy beginning and piano intro to “Daydreaming” and that song’s Stravinsky-like time signatures for the chorus. I have no objection to Aretha Franklin, a singer, songwriter, and pianist, being described as a genius; however, I have thought that in the last fifteen years or so the power of her early reputation has allowed and encouraged people to forgive and forget the low points of some of her recent performances—the gravelly, whispery, even ruinous voice, the technical embellishments and emotional exaggerations of her interpretations, that seem willful pandering to her audiences expectations of drama. Aretha Franklin is one of those people who seems to embody cultural heritage and social temperament—like Jesse Jackson, Amiri Baraka, and Spike Lee—and if prevailing standards for excellence aren’t met, that’s okay, as she represents more than individual being: she represents the soul of a people. If her singing speaks for truth but is falsely accomplished; if Jesse Jackson, despite consistently naming issues of critical importance, doesn’t actually produce solutions to African-American problems that effect change in black lives in forty years of leadership; if Amiri Baraka, after early work of the greatest promise, confuses hate with passion and bad grammar and vulgarity with linguistic innovation; if Spike Lee’s film technique is florid but crude and he offers political posturing rather than political insight, though he’s had every opportunity to learn better, well, none of that is as bad as if one of them had articulated a genuine idea supported by evidence and logic that went against community prejudices. What if the soul of a people is fat with old pride and new self-indulgences? Applaud. Loudly enough that you cannot hear yourself think. I suppose that most achieved meaning cannot be permanent, interpretation and value being subject to time, knowledge, and use; and that makes a work’s ability to speak to more than one generation a precious fact, and a man or woman’s being a hero in an age other than his or her own nearly awesome. Most of us cannot embody meaning—our lives and our motives are too contradictory, even incoherent, our potential unfulfilled. For most of the work represented by Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man, Spirit in the Dark, Young Gifted and Black, Amazing Grace, Let Me In Your Life, Almighty Fire, Love All the Hurt Away, and Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, Aretha Franklin is a great artist.

Black Literature and Literary Theory, an anthology, and the literary studies Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self and The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism were my introduction to Henry Louis Gates Jr., someone who interested me for his historical, intertextual, and theoretical consideration of African-American literature. As time did what time does (stand still, while we move?), Gates had been or became involved with many works, some of them extraordinary markers of history and culture—slave narratives, essays, reference works, interviews, travelogues, and more. Gates helped to produce the long-dreamed of Africana: The Encyclopedia (Perseus Books, 1999) and also the Oxford Companion to African American Literature (Oxford, 1997).

In a speech that he gave in Michigan in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, took the opportunity to talk about the possibility of the United States evolving into a great society, and the speech has since been referred to as his Great Society speech. He said, “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.” I imagine these words were especially welcome during the movement for civil rights and the cultural revolution that was taking place in America, when people, especially the young, were asking questions about how American values were actually practiced. Johnson said, “The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It is strange today to read a speech that actually has something to do with one’s own beliefs and hopes and frustrations, a mark of how far contemporary leadership has moved from long-held ideals: “It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today,” said Johnson. Lyndon Johnson also said, “The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.” If someone said that today, he might be accused of treason, or of being some kind of radical ideologist, but that is what free thought sounds like—critical, far-seeing, hopeful; and that is what the president of the Unites States seemed to want for all: “Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.” What did Lyndon Johnson plan to do? “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.” Do we have a great society? What did Johnson actually accomplish? Johnson increased federal funding to primary and secondary schools, created more youth employment programs, and expanded unemployment benefits and the food stamp program; and created health insurance for the elderly, Medicare; and eliminated literacy tests for voting as part of a Voting Rights Act. He also created federal departments focused on housing and urban development, and transportation. But the war in Vietnam undermined his mission.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, directed by Mike Newell, follows last year’s intense and dreamy Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), directed by Alfonso Cuaron, about the escape of prisoner Sirius Black, who was believed to be involved in the murder of Harry’s parents and after Harry. Ghostly soul-stealing Dementors are used for school security in Prisoner of Azkaban. Are beings whose appointed mission is good also dangerous, and is it possible that a condemned man can intend good? Gestures and acts and what they mean, and the past and whether or not atonement or justice is possible, are all part of the texture of the film. Betrayal among intimates is a theme. Prisoner of Azkaban is like an intelligent nightmare, and it is easy to feel for the endangered and gifted young characters, Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), the first film in the series, is about the death of Harry’s parents, killed by Voldemort, and Harry’s neglectful upbringing by an aunt and uncle who disapproved of his parents use of magic and never told Harry about this inheritance, though he learns of his own gifts when he receives a letter to attend a school for wizards, where he becomes friends with Ron and Hermione. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) is about trouble at school, Hogwarts, and the threat it poses to certain students, including Harry’s friend Hermione. Harry finds the diary of Tom Riddle, a former student who will grow up to be Voldemort. (Chris Columbus directed the first two Potter films.) It is a very engaging film series, one I had not expected to like. Magic is a secret wish of many of us, and the series gives us that—along with all kinds of conflicts and complexities with some genuine relationship to life. The books by J.K Rowling the films are based on continue to be a popular phenomenon (the film scripts have been by Steven Kloves). The new film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is very much an installment of the series—it offers less background information than the other films, but like them it’s most appealing aspects are the relationships among Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson). Friends since early childhood and now adolescents, the friendship between Harry and Ron experiences the stress of competition and unshared secrets, and Ron and Hermione cause each other pain because their friendship confuses and masks their growing romantic affection for each other. In Goblet of Fire, a prophetic and threatening dream about the return of Voldemort to Harry’s life and a dangerous sports event involving several schools drive the narrative. The film, like others in the series, is full of wondrous imagery; and if anything Hogwarts seems more impressive—more spacious and strange—than ever before. There are opportunities for Harry to choose between individual success and fellowship and he, though tempted otherwise, chooses fellowship. There is an unexpected death, and Voldemort comes to power—Ralph Fiennes plays him, and dressed in flowing black robes, Voldemort has nothing childlike about him, nothing joyful, and his intent is to dominate and destroy (he represents the worst kind of maturity: he’s a death force).

Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington as the boxer Rubin Hurricane Carter, and directed by Norman Jewison, may include the most forceful and most truthful performance Washington has ever given. (Deborah Kara Unger, Liev Schreiber, John Hannah, Debbi Morgan, and David Paymer also star.) Hurricane Carter was known as a strong man with a political conscience, something that no doubt riled various observers who prefer black men either docile or invisible, if that’s not redundant. Convicted with an alleged accomplice of several restaurant murders, despite not fitting the description of an assailant, Hurricane Carter was sentenced to life in prison (actually sentenced to three lifetimes in prison). Bob Dylan and others tried to draw attention to his case, but it was not until a black boy (played by Vicellous R. Shannon) in Canada reads Carter’s book on his life and his case, and gets his Canadian friends to become involved in Hurricane Carter’s case, that Carter is freed. (Maybe some Canadians are as nice as their reputations suggest—at one point in the film, the black boy talks about how much they like being out in nature. It is a moment of humor in the film, arising out of perceived cultural difference; it is also an opportunity of unexplored arrangements: the Canadians lived in a commune, about which there has been offscreen talk of unusual sexual relationships; and later Hurricane Carter married one of the Canadians and lived in the commune.) The film may present an idealized picture of Carter—who, reportedly, had police encounters before the murders for which he was convicted—but it allows Washington to be noble, persecuted, and to suggest experiences with great existential and political meaning.

On Thanksgiving night 2005, after thinking about the mistreatment of native Americans and accepting an acquaintance’s invitation to share a roast and stuffing dinner, I wanted to see a film with recognizable American values, and I saw The Ice Harvest. It’s a funny film about stealing from the mob, untrustworthy friends, dysfunctional family, and a little murder and mayhem. The IceHarvest, directed by Harold Ramis, has a chilly look of cool steel gray, dangerous night, and white snow and ice. It has intelligent dialog by Richard Russo and Robert Benton and a low-key jaded humor, as it presents a lawyer, a porn distributor, and strip club manager and their machinations. John Cusack, as the lawyer, has rapport with both Billy Bob Thornton as the porn guy, and Connie Nielsen as the strip club manager.

Images of Blacks: Billy Dee Williams, who starred with Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany, and also appeared in the theatrical and television films The Last Angry Man, Brian’s Song, Bingo Long Traveling All Stars & Motor Kings, Scott Joplin, The Empire Strikes Back, Batman, The Jacksons: An American Dream, The Visit, and Undercover Brother, was interviewed by Michael St. John of Canyon News, a California community newspaper serving Bel Air, Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon, and nearby towns, for an article posted online November 6, 2005. About his work with Ross, Williams said, “We were concerned about creating characters with dignity, ones that universally would be understood and connect with all people.” What does he look for in a script? “When I read a script, I look for dimension, character levels, a complete human being that the average ticket buyer might have some sensitivity towards. Whether the character is bad or good, I’d like the audience to feel something positive for him or her,…” Williams lamented the imagery of blacks currently available on television and in film: “I’m outraged with some of the sitcom shows that depict black men as total fools and stupid talking characters; they are usually connected or married to just as stupid, circus type black women with the cartoon type attitude that has always been characterized in books, plays and in the general creative media. Without a doubt, we have allowed, because of our lack of options as actors, to be pushed in the back of the bus again. Worse yet, black people, because of their need or hunger to be represented, sit back and generally accept these shows as genuine entertainment. The young people have no idea what they are resetting in place and it saddens me.” Williams also said, “Some of the worst writing is being bought up by many production companies. Scripts written by blacks who can only associate with street life and the lowest element of the black community at large. The characters are gangster-types, ignorant and stupid, the type of people you would do anything to keep from your neighborhoods. Watching something like this, why in hell would you want to live next door to this kind of influence? It’s threatening to the best of us, no matter what color, but this kind of film or television show seems to easily be produced. This is seriously disturbing!”

Henry James, as thinker and writer, created an art that he could not be sure anyone else wanted—its characters, themes, situations, moral questions, and subtle but powerful reverberations were what he required…

Jarhead, a film based on the war memoir of Anthony Swofford and directed by Sam Mendes, is a portrait of self-annihilating, soldier-constructing marine training, and it details the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The war—undertaken after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait and refused to leave (Kuwait had oil fields valuable to many)—lasted only about four days, but more than twenty-five thousand Iraqis were killed in that time. If it wasn’t the execution of a scorched earth policy, it seems to have been a scorched people policy. The film contains little politics—in terms of ideology, debate, motivation, or effects; and is mostly concerned with the specifics of a brief war-time experience. One observes how marines are forced to respect the bluntest authority and also how they are rid of their fear of being shot (they crawl on the ground below barbed wire while live rounds are aimed in the space above that wire and their heads). The men spend down time mocking each other, watching war films, speculating about what their wives and girlfriends back home are doing, and also masturbating. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swofford, Peter Sarsgaard is his friend, Chris Cooper a wildly enthusiastic commanding officer, Jamie Foxx is a staff sergeant, and Dennis Haysbert another officer. Gyllenhaal is seen reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger—which makes one wonder, If he’s smart enough to have good taste in literature, why did he go into the armed forces? At one point, Swofford says he was dumb enough to sign a military contract and at another he says he got lost on his way to college. Of course, if intelligence were all, more than a few of us would be doing something else with our time. Swofford and his comrades are frustrated as they do not get to use their shooting skills during the war, as more is quickly accomplished by air bombing. Gyllenhaal is fine in the part, and has several expressive scenes—when Swofford masochistically wants to watch another soldier’s wife’s adultery tape to have a sense of what betrayal feels like; when he’s insanely angry with a comrade who was supposed to take his watch, but whose cooking started a fire and caused Swofford trouble; and when Swofford sees the burnt remains of a convoy of fleeing Iraqis, and later when he stops a soldier from abusing an Iraqi corpse. Sarsgaard’s performance seemed uneven to me: he was sometimes an ordinary masculine male, sometimes a leader, sometimes a misfit, sometimes a sensitive mess. I was taken aback when Sarsgaard’s battle-ready recruit takes a phone out of Haysbert’s hand: it seemed disrespect of authority and the denial of the black man’s presence (and I found it hard to imagine the same thing would have been done if a white officer had been involved: every once in a while something like this occurs in a film—when the authority of a black male is entirely undermined). Before this, Haysbert has compelling moments as an officer—punishing Swofford for dereliction of guard duty, then insisting on using the outhouse before Swofford tends it (it’s Haysbert’s manner that’s compelling, striding forth as if he owns the land and the men on it). I wouldn’t say that Jamie Foxx is bad in Jarhead, nor that he was bad in Stealth: only that these characters do not allow him the careful performance he gave in the biographical film Ray; and in Jarhead he’s a dedicated military man—committed, forceful, and loud, but decent. Jarhead, which has a documentary style with the narrative continuity of a short story, delivers what feels like a complete experience.