Did Jane Austen ever think of simply calling one of her novels Love and Money? Her fine calibrations about conviction, manners, and sensibility suffuse her work and the best interpretations of it on film, but the prospects of fortune, happiness with a lifelong companion and the reward of wealth, are very much the focus of her stories. Will girls, who need for their own sakes and that of their parents to make a good marriage, make a marriage with someone they love that also has money, despite being able to bring little themselves to the bond other than character and love? The new film of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet and Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy, with Rosamund Pike as Elizabeth’s sister, the delicate, good-hearted, and private Jane Bennet, the charming Simon Woods as Jane’s suitor, the bashful, love-struck Mr. Bingley, and Kelly Reilly as his rude-faced sister Caroline Bingley. As part of Elizabeth Bennet’s sometimes embarrassing family are Brenda Blethyn as an irrepressible mother too loudly planning her daughters’ advantageous marriages and Donald Sutherland as a wise father and Jena Malone as a silly and strangle-tempting girl who happily marries the wrong man (a dashing Rupert Friend as the wicked Mr. Wickham; the casting makes her mistake forgivable—he is what the better-known Orlando Bloom might one day become, with luck). I have reservations about the extremely pretty Keira Knightley, but she did nothing in this film to significantly corroborate them and she and the intense MacFadyen, who made Darcy’s moodiness and bewitchment with Elizabeth a fact, together form, at long last, a very charming pair. It’s pleasing to me that work that so vitally concerns us—the strictures of class and gender (the vulnerability of women, particularly those without inheritance), and the unlikely relation of love to many marriages—should be the subject of classic literature and the kind of film that’s seen to have much prestige. It’s an affirmation that important ideas can be presented in graceful ways, besides being a wonderful story that contains some truth about human nature.

Films are sometimes criticized for being like formulas, but some formulas give nutrition, pleasure, and can even save lives—and some can irritate our bellies or put us to sleep. It’s odd, but not unprecedented, to see a film and think that the only thing wrong with it are the people who made it possible, such as its stars. There are a good number of things I like about Ben Younger’s Prime—its realistic physical and social New York atmosphere, its casting of almost all the characters, its soundtrack—that includes John Coltrane, dance music, and hip hop, and its cinematography and set design; and the story it tells—about the intergenerational relationship of a young Jewish man and an older woman, a shiksa—is one that is serious without being dire. However, Uma Thurman as the woman in love, and Meryl Streep as the Jewish therapist mother of the boy she’s in love with, do not always fit in with everyone and everything else. Stars offer their emotions and their intelligence and their radiance, but what they cannot offer—what everyone else in the film seems to offer—is the sense that they have lived inside of their bodies and characters for decades. There is a worn quality—aged, bruised, casual, ordinary, tired—that most stars do not have, and which many people, including the other people in Prime, do have. That lack is especially true of Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep. I do not know what kind of acting training Uma Thurman had or has, although I’m aware that she left school to act when young and starred in Dangerous Liaisons when she was eighteen (she has learned by doing; and living). I have admired her in certain things—Les Miserables, and The Golden Bowl—and liked her in other things—The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Gattaca, The Avengers—and watching her in Prime I see again that sometimes her sensitivity is wonderfully transparent—curiosity, desire, judgment, and pain flood her face—and other times it is as if her face is simply a pretty mask (it is as if when her character is not thinking or feeling a particular thing, she gives the camera nothing). I came late to Meryl-worship—and I had seen The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Silkwood, and Out of Africa in the early 1980s and I wasn’t impressed. I found the simple vulgarity of 1992’s comedy Death Becomes Her refreshing, and when someone told me what a come down that was for Streep I didn’t mourn the loss of her dignity and I said that I thought actors should do a range of work. It was with her performances as a self-centered mother in Marvin’s Room in 1996 and as a self-sacrificing mother in One True Thing in 1998 that I began to like her: these seemed to be genuine people on the screen. With her performance in Prime, she seems to be embodying the complaints some critics have had about her: the Yale-trained actress uses an accent (Jewish), mannerisms (touching her face, rubbing her torso), and clothing to create a character—and that is what is on screen, a character (form, idea, technique, social type), not a person. Everyone else in the film—Bryan Greenberg, as Streep’s son and Thurman’s lover David; and the rest of the cast—Jon Abrahams, Zak Orth, Annie Parisse, Aubrey Dollar, Jerry Adler, Doris Belack, Ato Essandoh, Naomi Aborn, John Rothman, Gil Deeble, Lotte Mandel—seem authentic. The thing is, I enjoyed the movie—I laughed consistently; and I did not dislike Thurman or Streep, but I could feel the two, especially Streep, using up my goodwill without much replenishment. In the film, Lisa (Streep) is surprised to discover that the young man her therapy client Rafi (Thurman) is excited about is her son David (Greenberg), a situation ripe for comedy and drama; and while Thurman has some of her best moments—of shy excitement, doubt, happiness—in their therapy scenes, the possibility of extreme conflict (of disgust, of fear, of rage), between two women who want, in different ways, to possess the same man, is not really plumbed, and I think that is because of Streep’s choices as much as a result of the film being most positioned as a comedy. A very effective comedy can be rooted in the roil of human emotion—and as Rafi and David develop their relationship and see its limitations there are glimpses of that reality, but there might have been more.

Private, which was shown at the Toronto International film festival last year and only released in New York near the end of the year, is a film about the occupation of a Palestinian home by Israeli soldiers, who find a family’s second floor a good outpost from which to monitor warfare from the Israeli and Palestinian territories, between which the house sits. The digital video film, based on a true story, was directed by Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo, and it is entirely believable, featuring performances that seem naked—sad, worried, angry, proud, vengeful, resigned—though Private’s production values are sometimes imperfect: the film has the compelling realism of video, with sometimes imprecise imagery. In Private, a literature professor, his wife, and their five kids refuse to leave their home when the Israeli army breaks in one night and confines them to their living room. The father doesn’t want them to become refugees; and he thinks that if he leaves, one day his children will not forgive him. The Israeli commander tells them that they are not to enter the second floor during the night, when the army is there, nor during the day when the army is often, though not always, gone. Otherwise, during the day, the family can use the rest of the house. Most of the family members keep to this rule, but the eldest daughter quietly goes up to the second floor and hides in a closet from which she spies on the soldiers (there are two daughters, one a young adult, and one a little girl, who becomes withdrawn after being separated from her family during one night after she has gone into the bathroom; and there are three boys); and near the end of the movie the eldest daughter is almost caught—a soldier who sees her encourages his comrade away from the closet and into the room he’s been staying in. The moments of human curiosity and sympathy in the film offer small elements of hope. When the youngest boy sees his sister go up—he at first cries at the threat that embodies, and after she falsely reassures him he tries to follow her up (her lie has put her brother in danger). One of the sons, the middle son, finds a grenade and tries to engineer a trap for the soldiers, while the oldest son, who says he’s not a fighter, wants to leave the house and when his father forbids that, the oldest son spends his time watching television. The mother weeps when alone—something that made the man sitting two seats away from me cry. Seeing the diverse responses of the family is very important (it’s a fundamental affirmation of Palestinian humanity; and we have not received enough images of Palestinians for this to be an unimportant thing). The film ends with the family’s hopes for independence, for privacy, still frustrated, and with the possibility of an explosion. That the film is allegorical is a strength: we can see the capture of Palestine by Jews who claimed it for themselves in the family’s story. (How many Arab Palestinians are part of the Israeli government? How many Israeli government ministers are not Jews?) The film is very intelligent, and that alone relieves its being grim. There were two times when I laughed—first, when an Israeli soldier repeatedly asks a friend of the mother why she is visiting (I laughed at his stupid force, at the assertion of violent authority: he was asking questions and not paying attention to the answers; but it was chilling when he told the woman it would be better for her if she never visited again, but before the friend leaves she quietly tells the mother that it is good the family is staying to fight for their house). Then, there’s a dinner scene in which the father is the only one talking—he’s asking questions and making comments as if everything were normal and the rest of his family is too disturbed by circumstances to answer. No one else in the small mid-evening audience at the Angelika theater laughed; and the audience seemed hesitant to leave when the film was over. Of the films released near the end of year 2005—including The Cape of Good Hope, The Dying Gaul, Jarhead, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Nine Lives, Pride & Prejudice, and Prime—I think that Paradise Now and Private are among the most significant and strongest.

The American Civil war began in April 1861, and ended in April 1865; and with its end, came the passage of the thirteenth amendment, which ended slavery, the fourteenth that recognized the civil rights of blacks, and the fifteenth, which gave all men the vote. Reconstruction (1866-1877) followed the American civil war, and was principally the federal government’s attempt to rebuild and unify the country; and with the freeing of the slaves—and the amendments to the Constitution, and civil rights act of 1866—blacks began to participate in politics as well as vote, seek paid employment, own land, and use the public facilities and transport systems available to others.

Reds, written by Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths and directed by Beatty, is one of the films that shows radicals as not only well-intentioned but also beautiful and sexy. Beatty stars as journalist John Reed with Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant and a brooding Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill in this 1981 film. Reed covers the 1917 Russian revolution. Beatty answered President Carter’s analysis of the country’s mood (malaise) and President Reagan’s proposed cure—advanced capitalism, narcissism, scapegoating, and war—with Reds.

Winold Reiss (1886-1953) may be no more than an illustrator to some people, but in his images of African Americans, I see a mastery of character and technique that are uncommon. Winold Reiss’s father was an artist, landscape painter Fritz Reiss, and Winold Reiss studied in Munich at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and Reiss move from Germany to the United States in 1913. Reiss had read about Native Americans in novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May when he was in Germany; and interested in many cultures, Winold Reiss in America studied and painted Native Americans and African Americans. Reiss was virtually adopted by the Blackfeet natives, and his depictions of Native Americans were often used for calendars and cards. The works of his I know best are his portraits of African Americans, who have never looked better in art.

Rent, the Jonathan Larsen musical made into a film with a screenplay Steve Chbosky, directed by film director Chris Columbus, is a movie about bohemia. I always thought of “making it” as being free, as being able to do what you wanted to do—so that bohemia, rather than a state of lack could be a state of plenty, if it was what you wanted. If you wanted to be a student, a writer, a singer, a painter, and were practicing that purpose, you had made it: and in creative or spiritual terms, I may have been right, but in the material terms of the world in which we live, I was absolutely, exactly, and profoundly wrong. Rent affirms a sense of community and a way of life that only creative work and periodic infusions of money—not attitudes, cool clothes, or good intentions—can sustain. The difficulty of paying the rent on their living spaces, and the threat of eviction, are the circumstances in which the film’s characters live; and I do not know why the characters in Rent do what they do. Why does Roger want to write songs, or Mark want to make films? Why is Angel a transvestite—except that a young homosexual is often expected to be? I don’t know why Collins is a philosopher or Joanne a lawyer, but I’m glad that these two African-Americans are, though these counter-cliché professions are not significantly explored. The film is less about art, thought, friendship, love, and various forms of sickness and death than it is about clichés about these things; the film confuses clichés with truths. There were only two or three songs I liked—“Seasons of Love,” “Today for You (Tomorrow for Me),” and “La Vie Boheme.” The musical arrangements are sturdy, better than I anticipated, but I don’t think that most of this is good music—it’s some kind of Broadway/rock hybrid and it—like the broad sentimentality of the story—is more inclined to irritate than give pleasure. Roger is a former addict grieving over a dead girlfriend while sharing an apartment with Mark, who has been abandoned by Maureen for Joanne. Collins upon returning from MIT to NYU, with plans to stay in the apartment, is mugged and soon meets a young man, who tends him before spending most of the rest of the film in female attire. The scenes between Collins and Angel are well-handled in terms of dialog, gestures, and song (and for those counting, the two kiss twice and otherwise comfort each other with hugs). Collins is played by Jesse L. Martin, and though tears welled up in his eyes three or four times more than was necessary or effective, he wasn’t bad, and Wilson Jermaine Heredia plays Angel but Heredia’s speaking and singing voices hit a few shrill notes—which may or may not have been intentional, a gesture toward natural tones, the awkwardness of the everyday. Heredia, who seems relatively ageless in comparison to most of the other original cast members, may have enough charisma to create illusions: he seemed good-looking as both a boy and a girl. Collins and Angel manage to suggest a story—the unexpected birth of love and its short life thanks to AIDS—that is truer than anything else in the movie, though Roger and Mimi’s story, less effectively, has something of a parallel. Roger very reluctantly becomes involved with Mimi, who has a drug problem. Several characters have tested positive for the virus thought to engender the immunity-destroying syndrome. I wish we knew why Roger and Mimi had been attracted to drugs—pleasure, despair, just something to do? We do see that when things aren’t going well for Mimi she takes refuge in drugs, a renewal of an already established habit. Rosario Dawson as Mimi and Traci Thoms as Joanne are the new cast members complementing those who had been in the Broadway show, and they are the genuinely fresh—alive, feeling, sensuous—faces in the film. Rosario Dawson’s presence is huge, mesmerizing, sexy, and Traci Thoms is a convincing actress and has the best voice in the cast—big, warm, soulful. The self-contained Taye Diggs as Benny was okay, and I had very mixed feelings about Idina Menzel as Maureen, though Maureen’s performance art piece in its busy ambition—inventive, aesthetically repellent, topically relevant, and impressive, all at the same time—was one thing that did seem authentic in terms of the characters’ creative lives. Adam Pascal as Roger and Anthony Rapp as Mark do not seem young as much as freeze-dried, juiceless, though Rapp tries to give a vigorous performance, while Pascal’s acting work seems stage-stuck. Pascal’s voice is good, reminding me of David Bowie. What we see on the screen are social types and social problems—such as homelessness and crime—and these are mostly symptoms of a life rather than life itself. The musical and film seem obviously intended to be emblems of a generation—but they say to me that it’s not easy to self-consciously and successfully speak to and for a generation.

Condi Rice, or Dr. Condoleezza Rice, as her White House biography insists, is a genuine mystery, and admirable, fascinating, and scary at once. There’s a web site devoted to her called Condi Rice is Angry, and it features a lot of photographs of her looking contemptuous, disgusted, irritated, and outraged! In February 2005, the Washington Post commented on her commanding clothes, particularly during one event when she wore a long black coat, short black dress, and shiny knee-high boots, deciding that the coat and boots exemplified sex and power. Rice became national secretary of state in late January 2005, after being a national security advisor since 2001. Rice had been provost at Stanford University for six years, and before that a longtime Stanford political science professor, specializing in issues involving the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Arguably, her field of specialization—the basis of her intellectual authority—has crumbled, or has changed from being political science to being history. When in December 2005 the United States was reported to use planes to take people to foreign lands where torture could be conducted, she denied that is being done, without addressing whether it had been done in the past—and the best thing I could say for her was that she sounded uncomfortable: which means she either has a conscience, is aware of a lie, or, at the very least, registers the seriousness of the charge.

The Duino Elegies of Rainer Rilke for many years were what I thought of when I thought of poetry.

Bayard Rustin is one of those people who could not be planned for or predicted; and yet his presence was absolutely necessary. Two books of Rustin’s—Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Quadrangle Books, 1971) and Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest (Columbia University Press, 1976)—attest to the fact that he was a first-rate thinker and social organizer. Jervis Anderson’s biography of Rustin Troubles I’ve Seen (HarperCollins, 1997) gives an account of Rustin’s entire life. While so much of the works of the 1960s and early 1970s read like a satire of fake seriousness, or like expressions of the insane, Rustin’s commentary is still respectable, still useful. C. Vann Woodward introduces Down the Line with a brief biographical account of Rustin: Pennsylvania-born, Rustin as a young man was a sportsman and a singer and a communist. He became a race relations secretary with the Quakers’ Fellowship of Reconciliation, and a youth organizer with A. Philip Randolph’s march on Washington (possibly a prophetic experience for his work later with Martin Luther King Jr.). Rustin did political work in India, West Africa, England, and Ethiopia. He assisted King with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and became the director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. In one of his Down the Line essays, “From Protest to Politics,” Bayard Rustin says that the Negro’s struggle for equality is revolutionary and has democratized America, stimulating political debate, and a war on poverty. He talks about the importance of allies, of coalitions—to create an “effective political majority” (119). In “The Premise of the Stereotype,” Rustin wrote, “The resort to stereotype is the first refuge and chief strategy of the bigot” (171), and he counseled blacks and Jews against using stereotypes against each other, noting that “the real oppressor is white American immorality and indifference” (172).

To find a serial killer who captures and kills women, FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), visits the imprisoned killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) for advice in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991), a film that is a psychological thriller, and foregrounds issues of class, gender, and sexuality. The film was based on a novel by Thomas Harris. It is also the contestation of two forms of intellection, and two forms of morality.

66 Seasons (2003) is a Slovakian, humorous documentary film focused on a local swimming pool but drawing connections to facts of love, community, history, and war, a film I saw in a free screening, with delicious refreshments, at the Anthology Film Archives in early December 2005. Slovakia became a country in 1993 with the breakup of Czeckoslovakia into the Czeck Republic and Slovakia; Czeckoslovakia had been formed in 1918. The film was introduced by Martin Ciel, a film critic who flew in from Bratislava in the Slovak Republic. In notes edited from a translation of a published essay, “The Age of Documentary Film,” he spoke about the value of documentaries and the particulars of the film, 66 Seasons. He said that cinematography arose with the documentary film, and the documentary film remains an aristocrat in the cinema world, “a Greek among barbarians. It is a laboratory of new ways and potentiality in reflecting reality.” He himself is impressed with three Slovak documentaries: Marek Skop’s Romany House, Robert Kirchhoff’s Hey You, Slovak, and the film under review, Peter Kerekes’ 66 Seasons, but, as he has written, “a few snowflakes do not make winter” and these three works are part of a greater trend observable in Central Europe. Regarding 66 Seasons, which discusses the time period of 1936 through 2002 and was filmed during the summers of 2000 to 2002, Martin Ciel specified that Peter Kerekes used “direct documentary recordings of the characters’ statements, reenacted scenes, and archive footage. With music and songs serving as commentary.” Before the film Martin Ciel identified certain of the film’s considerations, such as that of the relation of the center to the periphery and the majority to the minority and the matter of boundaries and frontiers. I enjoyed the film, and was surprised by its tone. The director interviews family members and local people, often giving them prompts and suggestions from behind the camera, some of which they follow and some of which they resist or handle with a twist. The film begins with slides of the sea, and a dedication to the filmmaker’s grandfather, whom the grandmother says wanted to move near to the sea for his health but never made it there, though the grandfather and the family took to the water in the local (Kosice) swimming pool, a place of refuge where many different languages were spoken. We see model boats in the swimming pool and girls with monitors in their hands, moving the boats this way and that. His grandmother admits to being only a few years younger than the Czeckoslovakian constitution. She mentions that as a girl she fell out of a window but was caught, saved. She says that if she hadn’t survived there would be no filmmaker and no film. As the stories unfolded, I heard the eager laughter of the audience. One old man in the film recalls being young and handsome, and when he is filmed on a rooftop near bathing beauties and they ask what the film is about, the old man says it’s about the way people used to live, live now, and should live. (There are a lot of bathing beauties in the film, a casually funny lechery.) An old man watches an old film of the pool and says he feels young again; and the filmmaker’s grandmother and other elderly ladies in swim suits talk about time, aging, death—and they affirm their beauty. One says, We used to be young and beautiful, and now we’re just beautiful. They admit that when they were young they didn’t think about aging or death, didn’t think about death until the second world war began. One old woman identifies a young woman she thinks looked as she did when she was young, and it is the past and future meeting—and the young woman begins to speak as if she were the old woman when young. Everything wants to merge, like the two sexes, says the grandmother. Another woman walks around the pool, trying to identify someone who looks like the young man who had briefly been her husband before he went missing in action during the war, but doesn’t see anyone, until she says the roguish eyes of the cameraman remind her of her husband. Some of the director’s questions I found a little too blunt—and I could be only grateful for the patience of the interviewees. Some of his manipulations are overt and funny. At one point he asks a man to throw his hat off the roof, and the man only pretends to do so—he doesn’t want to lose his hat—but after he’s assured that someone they know is on the ground to retrieve it, the man does so. Such things remind one of the usual manipulations that go on off camera, the things we take for granted. Speaking with Martin Ciel after the film, he mentioned to me the practicality of some of the filmmaker’s choices—it’s less expensive to work the way he does. The most poignant aspect of the film for me involved the Jewish holocaust. One woman remembers being in a concentration camp’s hospital ward, sick with measles, and a census was taken of those fit to work. Someone, a political prisoner, aware of what was likely to happen walked in and discharged the girl, but her mother, wanting to be with her daughter, asked to be included in the sick unit: and mother and daughter were separated—and the mother was killed and the daughter lived, with guilt, to tell the story. The story contains the perverse strangeness of human experience, and this film, surprisingly, has found a new voice in which to tell that story.

The socialist believes in a society in which people who work receive fair reward for that work and collaborate in shaping society, so that neither the governing nor work aspects of the society are controlled by a few: and consequently work, the generation of goods and services of value through organized effort, has an empowering rather than an exhausting effect; and society is organized so that the needs of all—such as education, health, and housing—are an important aspect of government planning. Several questions often occur: are we good enough to be socialists? How can a transition to socialism be achieved? What are the examples of socialism already present in the world, in England and Europe and Latin America and even here in the United States? Would Americans be less afraid of socialism if someone pointed out that Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs can be seen as socialist projects?

The emphasis on shock and surprise in art replaces the significance of the why and how of a story in film and fiction, though often to discuss the meaning of a work one has to disclose the consequences of acts, the connections, leading to an increase in advance and often inelegant notice of forthcoming details, spoiler alerts. Is the focus on surprise a result of our knowing more or less than in the past?