FILM FILINGS 2.4.24

edited by Nathan Gilmore

JORDAN POSS: 2023 REVIEW IN FILM

Over at his blog, Jordan M. Poss offers his top pics of the preceding year, including Oppenheimer and the latest installment of the Mission Impossible franchise, and some lesser efforts, including the most recent Indiana Jones and Napoleon. He also lists an appetite-whetting selection of coming attractions, including Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu and the second part of Denis Villleneuve’s Dune trilogy, and a few classics Poss watched for the first time, including City Slickers and Pork Chop Hill.

CHRIS WITTY: MACARIO

Over at his FilmFolk.uk Instagram page, Chris Witty offers his thoughts on the 1960 Mexican supernatural thriller Macario, finding much to like in the film’s tragic story imbued with dark humor and symbolism. A poor woodcutter makes a bargain with Death that allows him to heal any ailment, as long as Death stands at the head of the deathbed, not the foot. Witty calls it a “tragic tale, beautifully told”. Here is his review in full:

Macario (dir. Roberto Galvadón, 1960). A Mexican film that tells the story of Macario, a poor wood-cutter and his wife, a laundress, who struggle to feed themselves and their five young children. When Macario vows to stop eating unless he is allowed to, for once, enjoy a whole turkey for himself, his wife steals a bird and sends him off into the forest to eat in private. There, he is tempted by the Devil, a Saint, and Death. He agrees to share half the turkey with Death after being fooled into thinking he is a peasant more starved than he. As a reward for his kindness, Death gives Macario a potion that has the power to cure any ailment, but there's a catch: if Death is seen standing at the foot of the person's bed, Macario can share the potion, but if Death is present at the head of the bed, Macario has to let them die.

Finding himself in demand as a healer, Macario becomes wealthy, but the question remains: as the power ultimately lies with Death, does Macario's existence ever really alter the pattern of life and death; are the sick whom Death chooses to spare any more worthy of life than the young and healthy whose turn it is to travel over into the afterlife? Why is an infirm and curmudgeonly old man allowed to live, while an infant is deprived of a second chance at life? The latter becomes the subject of a joke as Macario keeps turning the child's bed so that Death has to keep reappearing at the head. The humour that runs through the film is darkly comic, as performed by Ignacio Lopez Tarso as Macario, whose mannerisms veer between dismayed to joyful, shrewd to foolish, as he at first adapts (death has always been his bedfellow, just as he has always been hungry) then struggles to handle his new found responsibility.

Imbued with a magical realism that makes for great Spanish literature and steeped in the kind of symbolism you'd expect to read in an anthology of old folk tales, Macario is a tragic story beautifully told. Raúl Lavista's score lifts and dips as the scenes dictate, and there's a montage soundtracked by a mariachi band who narrate Macario's plight. Hard to fault, so why try. Pina Pellicer is a revelation as the patient and understanding wife.

SAM STEPHENS: THE BOY AND THE HERON

I was very late to the Miyazaki scene. After an initial try of Spirited Away when it came out, I watched Miyzaki's previous "last film" The Wind Rises in theaters and liked it very much. Since then I've come around, not through bullying or a decision that I must try to like his films, but a genuine rediscovery. For one thing, Miyazaki movies always have heart. Not sentiment, which can sometimes be a furtive and put-on thing, dipped into nostalgia, not those "feels" which can totally move one person but leave another dead cold. Miyazaki's heart can be seen in the semi-autobiographical struggles of his character in The Boy and the Heron, Mahito, who lives a sad and lonely existence after the death of his mother. Okay, that's one thing, and other films would reference this event to elicit sympathy for a lost life and the ensuing sadness, a mathematical reductionism only partially successfully hidden by other, worse formulations.

If Fantasy, in its best and most proper role, is a balm and refuge for the wounded, and a reinvigoration of the real world, and a reawakening of its real image, The Boy and the Heron is a film which wonderfully rediscovers these themes—and let it be said, these are not typical themes in film. Most films are content with telling us that life is hard.

Mahito's life is very hard at the beginning. His life devoid of those things which so enrich childhood, play and imagination. Unless it is the imagination, the reoccurrence in dreams, of his mother's horrific death, whose form he never physically witnesses perishing but nevertheless sees imaginatively, and which binds him in mental chains as he pursues yet more loneliness and more pain.

And so enter the Heron, the fantastical element that intrudes very rudely into Mahito's very staid animation (an extra slow, plodding, somewhat frumpy though charming style that hearkens Isao Takahata), into which bursts this ultra-vibrant animation of a blue heron, who not only pesters Mahito out of his languid depression, but his father's new wife and her servants and grandmothers, bringing the entire household into contact with the fantasy world, after which nothing will be the same.

Miyazaki draws in a variety of styles for The Boy and the Heron, and this is not a choice borne of carelessness. If the animation begins slow and plodding (though charming), we are whisked into a world where richly-embroidered curtains are cast as vast and mountainous things, as detailed as a Rembrandt, while humorously-drawn human-sized Parakeets strut around, armed with fancy spears, their eyes filled with murderous intent.

I've heard several people now analogize The Boy and the Heron as an "acid trip", as if fantasy were the product of someone getting high in a dark corner, lost in an unreality. But that has never been a real method for achieving art, quite the opposite. It's true Miyazaki can make his animations melt like ice before a flame, as the brain of a user must in the throes of the drug, but animation takes skill and patience and years to achieve (ten years, in this case). Drugs can be about a lot of things, but skill and patience don't come to mind. As someone who writes and has never needed boosters for my imagination (nobody I know who writes does), I can at least sympathize with Miyazaki in the patterns of thought with which imagination is drawn, the fabric and weave of fantasy, even if I can never match his horsepower.

If the movie whisks us up too strongly in its gusts without laying out any internal rules, so be it. It is not a work where I missed those explanations too much, or at all (the one exception being a hard cut in the film after Mahito first speaks with Granduncle. We fade to black from that directly to Mahito imprisoned by the Parakeets. I sense a missing line of dialogue and edit in the film). The plot, such as it is, is questing and instinctual, not predicated on an "Ainulindale" or a "Concerning Hobbits" worldbuilding chapter, wonderful and genre-changing as those both are. Malick's films, my friend Alex suggests, which are dreamlike meditations, are a good parallel. Visually, The Boy and the Heron is among the greatest animated films I have ever seen. I have not seen every Miyazaki film, so I reserve labeling 'Heron' his best, but I do feel that it might be.

NATHAN GILMORE: THE BOY AND THE HERON

Is “Heron” Miyazaki’s swan song? From the opening frames of the film, and the initial notes of the wistful piano soundtrack, I have only a few other times been transported so instantaneously into a creator’s world. The first Miyazaki film I saw was “Spirited Away”, in high school film class, and that movie was quite the intro. A review at the time likened it to an acid trip.

“The Boy and the Heron” feels a little more like Ambien. The story is jammed full of the little details that are Miyazaki’s trademark. There are the kitchens bursting with fantastical feasts that steam and smoke, the smells practically reeking from the screen. There are the wonderfully weird creatures that populate these worlds, not only nothing ever seen on earth, but never even possibly conceived anywhere other than a Miyazaki movie.

For all that, the fundamental truths of a Miyazaki movie hold true in this one: children are brave, resourceful and heroic in the face of a grownup world that is always teetering on the edge of chaos. War is a moral and spiritual cataclysm. The world of imagination, of the soul and the mind, are just as real, if not more so, than the physical world. Yet that world hangs in a fragile balance, which “The Boy and the Heron” illustrates quite literally. The ending is one of the starkest anti-war statements that Studio Ghibli has made since “Grave of the Fireflies”.

This is where my lesser engagement with this movie is slightly baffling to me. It hits all the right notes, but they are mostly the same notes that we’ve heard before. There’s a slight paint-by-numbers quality to the movie, where I felt not so much of its effect, but rather remembered the effects of movies like “Grave of the Fireflies” and “Spirited Away”. The spirit world— and this is a subtle yet large difference— of “Spirited Away” is rich and strange and realized and fraught with dangers. The spirit world of “Heron” just seems weird.

The sad truth is that I’ve been spoiled. If this were the first Miyazaki film that I’d seen, it doubtless would have taken up the pride of place in my heart that “Spirited Away” did. I’ve seen that movie probably twenty times, and always fall headlong under its spell and into its world. “Grave of the Fireflies” I’ve seen about three times, because I can’t bear to watch it very often. “The Boy and the Heron” falls somewhere in the mildly disappointing middle for me. I’ll buy it, on principle, when it comes out. But it won’t take up the same sort of space in my head.

ALEX TAYLOR: THE BOY AND THE HERON — INTO THE PERILOUS REALM

I’ve been an ardent admirer of Hayao Miyazaki’s work for more than two decades now—in that time I’ve seen all of his films, and some of them a dozen or more times. I’ve only seen The Boy and the Heron once, but I’m already open to the possibility that it may be his crowning achievement. I’ll certainly need to see it a few more times to be sure of a judgement as bold as that, but since so much of the criticism I’ve seen of it thus far online has been so wilfully obtuse and philistinic, I come here to add my humble voice to its defence and praise.

I can’t possibly address all the uncharitable, impatient, and careless claims I’ve heard and read so far in so brief a space, so I’ll limit myself to two main points: First, the simple allegorising of the film’s titular boy into a stand-in for Miyazaki himself, as if that somehow explains everything (this claim is made mostly by people who know little of Miyazaki’s biography); and second, the tendency to dismiss the film as nonsense simply because parts of it are (comparatively) difficult to make sense of.

Much has been made, in the discourse surrounding this movie, of its ‘semi-autobiographical elements.’ What almost everyone seems to mean by this is simply that the circumstances and character of its young protagonist, Mahito, bear a certain resemblance to those of Hayao Miyazaki himself. And this is true, certainly!

But one element that bears much more thinking about, and attention in further viewings, is that—even according to Miyazaki and his closest friends and collaborators themselves—these semi-autobiographical elements are not limited to Mahito, and they don’t correspond in one-to-one terms with anything in reality. It’s not enough to merely acknowledge that Mahito = Miyazaki, and attempt to interpret the story through that one lens.

To start, both the Granduncle and Parakeet King (at least!) also capture aspects of Miyazaki’s personality. And while Mahito resembles Hayao Miyazaki in his boyhood, he also, in another sense, reminds us of that Miyazaki’s son Goro as an adult. The Granduncle is inspired by both the elder Miyazaki and by his own mentor and Studio Ghibli co-founder, Isao Takahata. These characters, and others in the film, are complicated reflections of their many inspirations, rather than pure allegories or analogues.

And although this semi-autobiographical aspect of The Boy and the Heron has attracted much attention, it’s far from the first time Miyazaki has drawn on his own experiences in this way. Back in 2008, the conclusion of Ponyo gave us an optimistic portrayal of a young boy being offered the opportunity to step up and carry on a great legacy. He agrees to marry a sea nymph, daughter of a powerful sea goddess, and unite the worlds of magic and mundanity. It ends on a high note. It’s hard not to see in this a glimmer of Miyazaki’s hope of passing on his own artistic legacy to his son Goro, whose directorial debut had come two years earlier, in 2006’s Tales from Earthsea. That film was not well received, and it strained the relationship of father and son.

Now, over a decade later, it’s even clearer that the younger Miyazaki will not be taking on his father’s mantle, even if he does carry on to direct a few more films. He’s not a once-in-a-century visionary genius workaholic, and that’s just how it goes.

So, back to The Boy and the Heron—when the Granduncle, obsessed with his fantasy world, tries to pass on its immense, hermetic burden of responsibility to his young would-be inheritor… the boy flatly rejects him and that whole world goes up in smoke. And—!—the boy is all right. Better, even. He moves on, presumably, to live a good and fulfilling life, doing something else entirely. Again, the movie ends hopefully, but this is an entirely different vision of hope—a  hope not founded on the marriage of magic and the mundane, but on a clear-eyed acceptance of loss and a willingness to learn and carry on.

To borrow language from C. S. Lewis’s brilliant little essay ‘Talking About Bicycles,’ Ponyo shows a vision of childhood enchantment, pure and simple. Its protagonists are themselves very small children, and their story gives us the invasion and investment of the real world with brilliant, exuberant fantasy of a kind only they can properly navigate and conquer. It’s a Chestertonian delight.

Heron, on the other hand, deals with re-enchantment. Mahito has lost the natural enchantment of youth too early through the loss of his mother and the war that devastated his homeland. He begins the movie painfully, starkly disenchanted. His adventures re-enchant him, and arms and emboldens him to carry on and become a man.

I could say much more about The Boy and the Heron—and much more deserves to be said, surely—but I will close by frankly acknowledging that it is, certainly, the least accessible of Miyazaki’s films to date. That doesn’t mean it’s incoherent, nor that its maker is senile, as some of its laziest and cruellest critics are suggesting—rather, its coherence is subtler and more complex than that of Miyazaki’s earlier work, and results from the wisdom, not the witlessness, of old age.

The Boy and the Heron is a languid, restless, uneasily searching film. Its action is not as focused or linear as that of The Wind Rises or Princess Mononoke, but in another sense, it is intensely focused—on ideas, characters, images, and experiences. Perhaps of all the other stories I might compare it to, it is most like George MacDonald’s Lilith. If you’ve ever read that strange and wonderful book, you’ll know just what I mean. If you haven’t, and yet enjoyed The Boy and the Heron, I encourage you to read it now.

Both are fairy tales, both are rich and redolent with layers of symbolic meaning that can only be explored and grasped and savoured with long patience born of love, and both are set in and around the Perilous Realm of Faërie. As J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote of that land—

‘The land of fairy-story is wide and deep and high, and is filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both sorrow and joy as sharp as swords. In that land a man may (perhaps) count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very riches and strangeness make dumb the traveller who would report it. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates shut and the keys be lost. The fairy gold too often turns to withered leaves when it is brought away.’

‘All I can ask,’ Tolkien carries on—and we might very well imagine that Miyazaki now echoes his words—‘is that you, knowing these things, will receive my withered leaves, as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold.’