7-15-10 Movie Reviews: Solitary Man and Mother and Child

Noncommercial movies are almost rampant over the next week with offerings, and only the two tonight conflict with each other. Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story, about the WPA’s Depression-decade effort to produce guidebooks to make up a self-portrait of the United States, with author and co-producer David A. Taylor to lead discussion, shows tonight at 7:00 in the lower level of Ablah Library at WSU; and tonight at 8:00, the Tallgrass Al Fresco series shows Billy Wilder’s superclassic Sunset Boulevard, with comeback roles of all time as a silent-screen actress who won’t face the ravages of time and slowly goes mad, opposite William Holden and Erich von Stroheim, at the Brickyard, 129 North Rock Island.

Then tomorrow, Friday, the Laurel and Hardy fan club shows Fra Diavolo, The Devil’s Brother, and selected comedy shorts at Calvary Methodist Church, 2525 North Rock Road, at 6:30pm. Two Metropolitan Operas are coming up, Puccini’s La Boheme at 2:30 Sunday and Puccini’s Turandot, with a stage setup you won’t believe, at 6:30 Wednesday, in Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway. And finally, the League of Women Voters presents Hilary Swank as Alice Paul and Frances O’Conner as Lucy Burns in Iron Jawed Angels, a true story of early fighters for women’s rights, at 6:30 Tuesday in the Downtown Senior Center, 200 South Walnut, one block south of Douglas and one block East of Seneca.

Which leaves us hardly time to discuss a couple of first-rate grownup commercial features, Solitary Man and Mother and Child. Both seem to represent what a recent article suggests is a new genre of movies that has sneaked up and established itself without our noticing what was happening. A good recent example was Please Give, and a slightly less clear one was City Island.

These movies have little of what most of us call a central plot, maybe not even a central character; they feature succession of little vignettes, too short to be developed into scenes, involving half a dozen loosely associated characters, with vignettes related by theme more than by story. There is widening and maybe deepening understanding of the characters and the general situation, but in the end, we are in much in the same situation we started out with, with the characters revealing themselves but not changing much. This is all supposedly in service of a new concept of realism, reflecting the fact that in real life there are not real beginnings and endings or even boundaries; things just keep rolling along, merging and diverging, shifting with circumstances, inconsistent and uncontrollable except for brief periods.

This kind of thing deprives us of so much that we look for that it demands extremely good writing and acting, both of which Solitary Man and Mother and Child provide. But Mother and Child throws in too much of mysteriously similar patterns of life between generations, like studies of Siamese twins who grow up apart, and is too unrealistic, I am told, about adoption, medicine, and law, to be accurate representation of life. Still, I’d give Solitary Man a 4, and the lady I talked to gave Mother and Child a 4, and I didn’t argue with it.