At the risk of sounding callous, Hollywood has always clamored for sagas about mental illness, especially when they’ve been books first. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Girl Interrupted,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Sybil,” “Ordinary People,” “I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can”: The list goes on and on. It’s not that all these movies are great (though I’m certainly fond of them). It’s that they possess all the key elements of a classic Hollywood weepie: Hero faces dark night of the soul; hero lives to tell the tale. But what of the hero who doesn’t live to tell the tale? Very few movies to date have told those stories, no doubt because they don’t offer the inspirational endings that fill multiplex seats. Continue Reading →
Archive | Essays
What We Owe to Mike Nichols
When Mike Nichols died in 2014, the news was met by such an enormous outpouring of grief that it’s surprising that, in the eighteen months since his passing, the director’s cinematic legacy mostly has been overlooked. As is the case with the late, great Robert Altman, it’s as if no one knows how to approach Nichols’s immensely varied – some might go so far as to say uneven – body of work. Continue Reading →
I came back to NYC today with a tiny hole in my heart. It was a great three days out of time in Cape Cod, especially since so far this year I know more about what’s not working–what has ended, what needs to end–than what I can safely count on, even in myself. I needed to step out of the flow of life and focus on the elements- sand, sun, salt–and that is what we did.