Macbeth’s Two Ghosts

Of all Shakespeare’s ghosts, perhaps the most terrifying is the “horrible shadow” of the murdered Banquo, invisible to all but the tyrant who arranged his killing, a bloodstained reproach, a dreadful warning — the incarnation of a guilt which, like the victim himself, will not fade away. Its appearance is the astoundingly choreographed centerpiece of a remarkable newMacbeth that transferred from the U.K. to New York earlier this year (it has now moved from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Broadway’s Lyceum Theater). This Macbeth,(directed by Rupert Goold and with Patrick Stewart in the starring role) is an enthralling, hectic, cacophonous triumph, a vivid portrait of a collapsing natural, moral, and political order that manages both to honor Shakespeare’s hideous hurlyburly of power, psychosis, and evil while overlaying it with allusions to a fouler tyrant from a later even more terrible time. And, no, this is not yet another crass “modernization” of a play that needs none: our understanding of both Macbeth and the despot to come is refreshed, deepened, and jolted.

A first-rate cast does all that it can to assist. So, for example, the austerely attractive Kate Fleetwood is unbearably, irresistibly watchable as an unnerving and ultimately unnerved Lady Macbeth, the fourth of the four women who lure, in one way or another, the Thane of Cawdor to his doom; while Christopher Patrick Nolan as Seyton, a leering thug with a stink of sulfur about him (the sound of his name is all too fitting) becomes the embodiment of how low Macbeth will sink in order to hang on to his ill-gotten crown. That’s never lower than when Macbeth orders the murder of his rival Macduff’s family, a slaughter that reduces Macduff to a level of misery that would be unthinkable if Michael Feast didn’t make it so real:

All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What! All my pretty chickens and their dam

At one fell swoop?

Above all, this is a drama that revolves around an extraordinary performance by Stewart, a light year or two away from the Starship Enterprise, but still very much in command. From the moment that we first see him, he dominates the stage, sometimes obviously, as a military man reveling in victory, sometimes subtly as he steels himself for regicide or, finally, despairingly, as he yields to defeat.

The most distinctive thing about this Macbeth may be the way that it is haunted not by one ghost, but two. We never see the second. It is glimpsed only in hint, in gesture, in the laughter that accompanies a savage joke, in flickering newsreel of past parades and, mostly, in our own memories of the cruelties of all our day-before-yesterdays, cruelties which Shakespeare never lived long enough to see — except, perhaps, in his imagination — but which we will not, should not, live long enough to forget.

The first traces of this malign presence can be detected in the appearance of the soldiers in the opening scenes: leather coats, leather boots, flat caps, uniforms more usually associated with Kursk than Cawdor, with cattle trucks rather than cavalry. It’s evoked again by the basement, moral and physical, within which the action unfolds, a miserable space that does duty as hospital, kitchen, torture chamber, bar, palace, banqueting hall and (underlining the way that this play never escapes the lower depths — even when the drama supposedly moves outside) the moors, forests, and battlefields of Macbeth’s much contested kingdom. Huis Clos. No exit. This bunker, this arena is a bleak, clinical, claustrophobic place, its white-tiled walls efficient in a cheerless mid-century way, easy to swab down after who knows what. It’s best reached by an old-fashioned concertina-gated elevator, a mechanized entrance to some sort of hell, to the Lubyanka of our nightmares.

But it’s when we arrive at the play’s core, with Macbeth ascendant and regnant, the former king dead, and the search for traitors well underway, that this second ghost, that of Joseph Stalin, comes closest into view. Beyond a moustache, Stewart never really attempts impersonation; The rest is just suggestion, the sometimes uncanny resonance of the play’s own lines, and the adroit use that Goold makes of the gaps left between them. Thus we see Macbeth making his plans in the wake of what has clearly been a good day out at the hunt. He is pleasant, cheery, his hat pushed back at the casual angle that Stalin (a man who could pantomime relaxation) sometimes favored when out in the field. He is holding a shotgun, and as he talks, he jovially swings the weapon out towards the audience, pointing here, pointing there, randomly, precisely, playfully, maliciously, aiming at you, at me, at Banquo, at Duncan, at Bukharin, at Trotsky, at tens, at thousands, at millions.

And when Macbeth orders Banquo killed he does so in a light, conversational tone, apparently as preoccupied with the making of a sandwich as the planning of an assassination. As for Stalin, well, he could sign death lists condemning thousands and then take in a movie, something light, a comedy perhaps, to round off an undemanding day. When Banquo is eventually butchered, he is murdered in plain sight, cut down in a crowded railroad car. His executioners know that in Macbeth’s police state no-one will dare intervene. They don’t. As Khrushchev once asked in a not so different context, would you?

Banquo returns, of course, as ghost to feast, but until that moment, it is Macbeth who is in charge that evening, expansive, welcoming, a “humble host,” but still taking care to remind his guests that they owe their seats at the table to him. It’s a point brilliantly underlined by the way that Stewart takes the time, leisurely, elaborately, and sadistically, to take a cigarette from the mouth of one of his guests (Lennox) and then crumble its contents over the man’s motionless head. Lennox (Mark Rawlings) may be a thane, a noble, but under the new regime, he is, to borrow Khrushchev’s phrase for members of Stalin’s entourage, just another “temporary person.” The thane sits rigid, a deer caught in the headlights with darkness, maybe, just ahead.

It’s an interlude that owes nothing to Shakespeare and, I imagine, everything to Stalin, whose soirées, if that’s the word, were master classes in the uses of humiliation. In Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore explains how they went:

Sometimes Stalin himself “got so drunk he took such liberties,” said Khrushchev. “He’d throw a tomato at you.” [Secret police chief] Beria was the master of practical jokes along with Poskrebyshev. The two most dignified guests, Molotov and Mikoyan, became the victims as Stalin’s distrust of them became more malicious. Beria targeted the sartorial splendor of the ‘dashing’ Mikoyan. . . . [H]e slipped old tomatoes into Mikoyan’s suits and then ‘pressed him against the wall’ so they exploded in his pocket. . . . Beria once wrote “PRICK” on a piece of paper and stuck it on Khrushchev’s back. When Khrushchev did not notice, everyone guffawed. Khrushchev never forgot the humiliation.”

No he didn’t. He organized Beria’s execution within months of Stalin’s death. It’s not too long either before Lennox is plotting against Macbeth. The indignities inflicted by Stalin upon his clique are historical fact, the shift in Lennox’s loyalty is Shakespeare, but the way the two narratives, one real, one not, are woven together by Goold brings the former to life, and an extra dimension to the latter. It’s a rare example of the director monkeying with Macbeth’s original storyline, and it’s notable that it only affects a relatively minor player. For the most part Goold is simply content to add subtext, ornamentation, a touch of gimmickry (the moment the Weird Sisters decide to start rapping their way through their incantations is not a success), and some interpretation. The play’s dark heart is left largely untouched. Shakespeare is allowed to be Shakespeare. The Soviet theme is there for those who want to make something of it, but it’s an enrichment, not an intrusion. It’s a device to illuminate, not distort.

Thus the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, butchered not “for their own demerits” but for his, is shocking as theater, and monstrous as a prelude of what history had in store. The killing of the kin of the enemies (real or presumed) of the Soviet state might still have been shocking, but it certainly wasn’t rare. And then there is this, a description of Scotland under Macbeth’s brutal rule:

Alas! Poor country;

Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot

Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing,

But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;

Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air

Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems

A modern ecstasy.

Stalin’s gargoyle utopia could be described no better.

But this is still Shakespeare’s Macbeth, not Solzhenitsyn’s. The differences between Scottish king and Soviet dictator are, in a way, almost as haunting as the similarities. In the early scenes of the play, Macbeth is, famously, a hesitant killer, whose sense of guilt then never — quite — disappears. In this production, his final moments are freighted with an exhausted hopelessness that goes further than anything in the original play. Stalin, by contrast, got where he did by doing what it took, unprompted, remorselessly, and with no signs of a conscience. In a sense he was his own Lady Macbeth. He died raging, unrepentant, and in charge, a figure so dangerous that, once stricken, it was hours before anyone even dared enter his room. He got away with his crimes, but now, at least, we have a Shakespeare to remind us what they were.

See it while you can.

Cops Gone Wild

Street Kings

The New York Sun, April, 11, 2008 

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night," George Orwell once wrote, "only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

That society sanctions the use of force to protect itself is neither surprising nor controversial. What we debate instead is how rough those men can be and how, exactly, they can be controlled. We live, so the story goes, in a nation of laws, but we also seem to accept, if quietly, that some laws will occasionally have to be broken if others — the laws we really care about — are to be enforced. When that rough Dirty Harry went a little too far, nobody, other than unlucky punks, persnickety lawyers, and senior policemen, seemed to mind too much. Nor, over the course of five movies, did his audience.

Sometimes, of course, a rogue cop is just a rogue cop. The difficulty of distinguishing between good policemen and bad is, I suppose, the theme trying to survive the splattering gore, rampaging clichés, and flying bullets that otherwise define the noisy, nasty, but sporadically watchable "Street Kings," by the sophomore director David Ayer (who made his debut in 2005 with the oppressive and pretentious "Harsh Times").

Mr. Ayer has explored the world of the police before, but he did so as a screenwriter on the excellent "Training Day," the appalling "Dark Blue," and the idiotic "S.W.A.T." On this occasion, the screenwriting credits are divided among, encouragingly, the author James Ellroy (who also wrote the original story), ominously, Kurt Wimmer (a writer-director best known for two pieces of dreary sci-fi sludge, "Ultraviolet" and "Equilibrium"), and, mysteriously, Jamie Moss (who is, apparently, now slated to work on an upcoming manga epic).

Whatever the hopes and fears stirred by the thought of Messrs. Ellroy, Wimmer, and Moss, "Street Kings" remains a distinctive Ayer production, starting with its location. As he seemingly rarely misses an opportunity to mention, Mr. Ayer spent part of his teens in South Central Los Angeles, and it is becoming to him what the Upper East Side has been to Woody Allen — trademark, canvas, and, if he's not careful, dead end. "Street Kings" features the usual menacing streetscapes of a gang-ruled Los Angeles, the usual elite unit-turned-rancid, the usual stash of concealed dollars, the usual banality masquerading as profundity, and the usual pantomime machismo. The film is too one-dimensional to be noir: Any ambiguities are illusory, all conundrums easy to decipher, and the view taken of the police is too predictably jaundiced to be of any real interest.

That said, "Street Kings" is partly redeemed by the performances of those few members of the cast allowed to develop their roles beyond stereotype, notably Forest Whitaker as the manipulative, clever captain in charge of Ad Vice, this particular film's rogue unit. His Captain Wander is an officer who appears to barely remember why he joined the force in the first place. He may still cling to some notions of frontier justice or, at least, frontier rationalizations ("At the end of the day it's order that counts. Why sweat the details? Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet"), but for the most part, Wander's preoccupations are power and control; even the money he has accumulated is just a means to those ends.

Cool, self-possessed, and restrained, his lazy eye only serving to emphasize his vigilant, calculating authority, Mr. Whitaker is all too believable as a leader able to forge a fierce loyalty among his men — a loyalty that has transformed them into something between a cult and a tribe, a brotherhood that sets its own rules.

As weary viewers of Mr. Ayer's early films will know, male bonding is part of the shtick, along with sporadic suggestions that the police themselves are, in a sense, just another gang (something in this case also implied by the title). In this movie, though, these ideas are handled more subtly than usual, and from time to time, they even persuade. Thus we note that there's nothing distinctively LAPD about Ad Vice's style. Neatly groomed and smartly dressed, they look like the ambitious middle management (check out Jay Mohr's performance) of a successful corporation, albeit one that's gone feral. The winning's the thing. The group's the thing.

But it's a group that's under suspicion. Internal Affairs, in the form of Hugh Laurie's insinuating, tricky, and nicely observed Captain Biggs, is circling. Biggs realizes that a shooting witnessed by Ad Vice's Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) may present an opportunity to break the unit open. The embattled Ludlow may be the roughest of the rough ("the tip of the f---ing spear"), but he is crumbling. His wife is dead, he's drinking too much, he may be the target of a frame-up, and, most discouraging of all, he's played by Mr. Reeves, the king of coma. Referred to at one point as a "guided missile," Mr. Reeves's Ludlow is better described as a piece of wood. The movie is meant to revolve around Ludlow's struggle to do the right thing (he's basically one of the good guys), but with a near-catatonic Keanu in the role, it's difficult either to care or, indeed, to notice.

Yes, "Street Kings" has its moments, but on the whole, it's better to move along: There's nothing (much) to see here.

Spies Like Us

Joseph Weisberg:  An Ordinary Spy

The New York Sun, January 16, 2008

Mark Ruttenberg, the hero of "An Ordinary Spy" (Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $23.95), Joseph Weisberg's deft, sour, and clever new novel of espionage, bureaucracy, and disenchantment, is — it is true — a spy. But he's no James Bond.

Just read what happens, or doesn't, when he shows up for a celebration at the Russian embassy in the country to which, as a novice CIA agent, he has recently been posted. The poor fellow fails to make any real progress with the general who is the most important target in the room, he gets "tipsy" on two shots of vodka, and when, finally, he runs into a girl he has been trying to recruit, he is not only snubbed, but also floundering:

I had an impulse to rush after her, grab her arm, and spin her back around. But I didn't know what I'd do after that. Did I want to kiss her? I'd always found Daisy attractive … [b]ut I'd wanted to recruit her, not sleep with her.

Good God, man, get a grip! In cloak-and-dagger Valhalla, 007 is, undoubtedly, shaking his head (as well as that third martini). The contrast between his stumblebum spy and Ian Fleming's swashbuckling psychopath is, however, one that evidently amuses Mr. Weisberg. As fans of his debut novel, the lovely and beguiling "10th Grade" (2002), will recall, Mr. Weisberg is a sly, dryly funny writer, and even in the far more downbeat surroundings of his new book, he sporadically allows himself to unleash the occasional fleeting and stealthy joke at the expense of the luckless Ruttenberg and the frustrating, dull, drab routines that make his a life far removed from the spy game's glittering, legendary, and deceptive glamour.

But the disillusion, and not only Ruttenberg's, that permeates this book is generally closer to the "quiet desperation" of old Thoreau's loopy ravings than any profound ideological crisis; there is no hint of the majestic decay and mythic exhaustion that run through le Carré's best, possibly because Mr. Weisberg is describing an agent at the beginning of his career — an agent working, what's more, for a nation that, unlike George Smiley's Great Britain, is unwilling to accept eclipse, humiliation, and relegation to the second tier.

Nevertheless, there are moments when readers of "An Ordinary Spy" may worry that its portrait of the CIA as a cesspit of careerism, groupthink, and deadening conventionality may be a warning that the United States is poised to follow its transatlantic cousin into decline. The fact that the book's author formerly worked for the agency (he was employed there for three years and, by the time he quit, was in training to become a "case officer" much like Ruttenberg) only adds to the concern: Even if he never advanced very far in the intelligence service, Mr. Weisberg must have learned enough to offer up an accurate description of its workings. Whether that is, in fact, what he has done is a different question (I've no idea one way or another), but his writing feels authentic, an impression he tries to reinforce by displaying his text in a "redacted" format that is simultaneously bogus and real. As a former CIA man, he was indeed required to submit his manuscript to Langley's Publications Review Board, but ahead of doing so, he anticipated what the board might ban. Both the board's deletions and his own pre-emptive strikings-out are evidenced by the thick black lines that are the censor's impenetrable spoor, with no way to distinguish between them.

It's a device that sometimes irritates, but it helps transport outsiders into the secret world, at least as they might imagine it, a world made all the more mysterious, all the more opaque, and all the more disturbing by the fact that Mr. Weisberg's readers aren't actually informed where within it they have ended up: The country where the greater part of the drama unfolds is never disclosed. If I had to guess, it's located somewhere in Central Asia, the Middle East, or North Africa, but we're never told for sure.

And maybe that's the most effective device of all. The United States now finds itself enmeshed in a probably endless, possibly apocalyptic struggle against an adversary that knows no limits, no rules, and no borders, a conflict where every diplomatic outpost, but particularly those in countries of the type that Mr. Weisberg doesn't name, is a listening station, a sentry box, and perhaps more. In one form or another, such outposts have existed whenever there have been nations with interests to protect. They have been manned by guards, by observers, and by spies; patriots often, ideologues occasionally, but for the most part, ordinary men doing a job that is rarely extraordinary, and changes history even less.

And it is the story of two of these ordinary men, these ordinary spies, that Mr. Weisberg sets out so skillfully. There's no great message that underpins this novel, no intimations of coming American collapse: just a tale well told of lives that were meant to be spent watching, probing, plotting, guessing, and double-guessing, lives that, it turns out, go somewhat awry, lives that are illuminating only in their insignificance, and yet they are lives on which yours, and mine, may depend.

Fighting for a Lonely Planet

I am Legend

The New York Sun, December 13, 2007

Hell may not, whatever Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, be "other people," but other people, or what's left of them, certainly conspire to mess up the second half of "I Am Legend," a movie that was, until then, developing into one of the finest science fiction movies of recent years.

In his retelling of Richard Matheson's harsh, hallucinatory novel from 1954, director Francis Lawrence is brilliantly successful in re-creating the book's post-apocalyptic vision of a survivor hanging on to life, and the remnants of civilization, in a city that is intact — but not — and where he is alone — but not. It's an extraordinarily compelling idea, and given the relish with which Homo sapiens, that most narcissistic of species, savors the spectacle of its own destruction, it's no great surprise that this is the third movie, after "The Last Man on Earth" (1964) and "The Omega Man" (1971), based on Mr. Matheson's story. However, in the bleak grandeur of its images at least, this latest version is easily the best.

The Brooklyn Bridge is a ruin. Times Square more unkempt even than in the days before Mayor Giuliani. Deer roam through Midtown. We see Manhattan, both Eden and Pompeii, slowly, remorselessly, and with only the occasional cliché (the errant lion last seen in "Twelve Monkeys" makes an appearance) revert to wilderness. But, however beautifully crafted (and in this movie they are), tracking shots of a verdant, abandoned city are not, in themselves, enough to convey the true sense of catastrophe. For that you need a witness: Charlton Heston, say, raging at the sight of the Statue of Liberty toppled, broken, and half-buried in the sands of a planet that now belongs to the apes.

In "The Omega Man," the tireless Mr. Heston, harbinger of global doom, was again that witness. But neither his performance, nor that of the no less grandiloquent Vincent Price as the Last Man on Earth before him, can compare with what Will Smith brings to "I Am Legend" as Robert Neville, Mr. Matheson's bereft and resourceful hero. By definition, this is for long stretches a solo role, and thus not easy to do, but with little more than his dog for support, Mr. Smith skillfully conveys the loneliness, determination, and increasing mental strain of life as a Robinson Crusoe marooned on the island that was once his home, but is now, well, something else.

In part, Neville has adapted by turning Manhattan into his private playground (taking golf swings from the deck of the USS Intrepid, gunning a muscle car down empty avenues), but it's a playground where the pleasures are as transient as they are solitary. What really keeps him going are the routines — obsessive, meticulous, and tough — of the work he carries out while hunkered down in a bunkered-up brownstone on Washington Square. Neville is a military virologist (the novel's Neville is, by contrast, an everyman, which makes his plight as the last man all the more affecting), and he is still, even now, trying to find a cure for the man-made plague that took his world away.

He has to, because the virus didn't finish off everyone else. In Mr. Matheson's book, a number of those infected are transformed into vampires. In Mr. Lawrence's take, these lethal unfortunates are reduced to "dark seekers," feral, albino, debased ex-men who look as if they have escaped from the set of 2005's "The Descent," but behave with the hyperkinetic ferocity of the zombies in "28 Days Later" (a fair enough exchange, one might think: The latter film owed a considerable, and insufficiently acknowledged, debt to Mr. Matheson's tale).

That makes for some undeniably exciting scenes of chase and combat, roaring and head butting, but the decision to dumb the infected down drains much of the intelligence and the horror from the original concept. Once we understand the nature of the threat that the dark seekers represent, the distinctiveness of this movie begins to evaporate. It's still highly entertaining ("I Am Legend will, I reckon, be a massive hit, and deservedly so), but its early promise is frittered away.

The tumble gathers pace after the arrival of two other (healthy) survivors — a young woman (Alice Braga) and a child (Charlie Tahan). Helpfully enough, they extricate Neville from a tricky encounter with some dark seekers, but their key function is to drag the film even further away from the pitiless premise underpinning the novel that inspired it. Indeed, they are used to inject a spiritual, even religious, dimension into a narrative that, as first conceived, had none, and needed none.

If it's not absurd to suggest this about a work involving vampires, Mr. Matheson's book is best seen as a classic of mid-20th-century realism, unflinching in its acceptance of impermanence, chance, and an uncaring universe. We live now in dreamier, less clear-eyed times, and Mr. Lawrence has tailored his movie accordingly. You'll have to see for yourself how it ends, but I will say that it recounts a legend that bears little resemblance to that of Mr. Matheson's original Neville, the man whose destiny was to become a legend of a far darker kind, "a new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever." To understand how, and why, read the book. Oh yes, see the movie too. It's good, but it should have been — could have been — great.

Don't Worry, You Can Take the Family

The Golden Compass

The New York Sun, December 7, 2007

It is a measure of the genius of the British novelist Philip Pullman that when, less than 30 pages into his book "The Golden Compass," 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua angrily objects to the refusal of her (supposed) uncle Asriel to take her to the frozen, fabled northlands, most readers will understand and agree with her. "I want," protests Lyra, "to see the Northern Lights and bears and icebergs and everything." And so, you just know, do you. Disappointingly, despite some excellent special effects (the bears, a race of gigantic, heavily armored ursine warriors, have to be seen to be believed) and a remarkably assured performance by the no less remarkably named Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra, the new film by Chris Weitz based on Mr. Pullman's novel never manages to generate, or satisfy, that same sense of anticipation.

In part, this was inevitable. When it comes to conjuring another world, the very literalness of computer-generated imagery can conspire against it, especially when it has to compete with author-generated imagery such as this:

…The main interest of the picture lay in the sky. Streams and veils of light hung like curtains, looped and festooned on invisible hooks hundreds of miles high or blowing out sideways in the stream of some unimaginable wind…

When Mr. Pullman is good, he is very good. The film, by contrast, is just okay.

Mr. Pullman also doesn't patronize. He doesn't think of himself as a "children's writer," with all the title can sometimes imply. His portrait of that other, parallel world, is a fascinating, glittering, mixed-up what-might-have-been of ancient and modern, of Charles Dickens, of H.G. Wells, of the brothers Grimm, of the "Edda," and of who knows what else. It is heavily layered, marvelously complex, and described throughout with a madcap erudition that adds to its magic. The movie, however, is far simpler, dumbed-down, even.

This, too, was probably inevitable, both for reasons of pacing (only so much detail can be packed into two hours) and, more critically, commerce. "The Golden Compass" is being marketed as a holiday movie appealing to all youngsters, not just the early-to-mid teenagers who were the original novel's natural readership. It also has to be, to use the dread euphemism, family friendly. Thus, for example, the book's references to castration have been, well, cut, and, in recognition of the fact that butchered tykes haven't been Christmas fare since Herod, so have (more or less) its dead children. Overall, the film is more upbeat than the novel, and its characters less morally ambiguous.

This may relieve some parents, but it doesn't excuse the performances turned in by some key cast members, notably Nicole Kidman, a peculiarly stiff and dismayingly unconvincing principal villain, and the unforgivably hokey Sam Elliott. As aeronaut Lee Scoresby, Mr. Elliott is meant to be this movie's Han Solo, but he comes across as Colonel Sanders with a six-shooter. Then there's Daniel Craig, an oddly bland Asriel, but the blame for that lies with the script, not 007.

Fortunately, these weaknesses are offset by Ms. Richards's Lyra, who is sly, determined, awkward, and brave, a character with just the right hint about her of the first, and finest, of such heroines: the little girl who tumbled down a rabbit hole one-and-a-half centuries and one dazzling imagination ago. And Ms. Richards is not alone. In particular, she is ably assisted, both in her mission (like many works of fantasy, "The Golden Compass," which is the first installment in a trilogy, revolves around a quest) and in helping the movie along by Jim Carter, who is impressive and imposing as John Faa, Lord of the Gyptians.

The Gyptians are a half-tolerated, half-outlawed people who have managed to retain a degree of independence in the constricted, caste-hobbled, and authoritarian England of Pullman's vision. That's no mean feat: The country, and much of the world, is dominated by the sinister Magisterium, an organization determined to enforce its own brand of ideological conformity. Revealingly, Christopher Lee, saturnine and urbane, is its First High Councilor. Sadly, we don't see that much of him. For a fuller idea of the Magisterium's nature, we have to look to Simon McBurney, who is painfully watchable as the insinuating and shifty Fra Pavel. Pavel is a sort-of-priest with more than a suggestion of the Inquisition about him. He's also a reminder of why Mr. Pullman has so enraged such dime-store Savonarolas as the Catholic League (boycott the movie!), Focus on the Family (boycott the movie!), and the Halton (Ontario) Catholic District School Board, which has pulled Mr. Pullman's books from its library shelves for "review."

This is absurd, but predictable. Mr. Pullman is a dogmatic, rather insistent, and very public nonbeliever, and, like most preachers, when it comes to the topic of the big man upstairs, he's a bit of a bore. Mercifully, there's little of this in the first novel (and almost nothing in the film), but the trilogy as a whole does end badly, not only for God, but for the reader, its literary merits overwhelmed by its author's lunatic-on-the-subway determination to get his atheistic message across again and again and again. For this reason, the filmmakers' decision to make the Magisterium much less of a representation (or caricature, take your pick) of the Catholic Church bodes well for the sequels to come.

To be sure, Mr. Weitz's Magisterium still has a whiff of cloister and incense about it, but that's beside the point. It is principally attacked not for what it believes, but for how it believes, for its insistence that it has sole access to the truth, and for its intolerance of dissent. Its scheme to, quite literally, reduce most of mankind to the level of children — pliable, credulous, and incapable of self-determination — makes good sense both as drama and, yes, as warning. We live, after all, in an era when religious fundamentalism is on the march in our world as well as in Lyra's.

We Happy Two

Nicholas Wapshott: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage

The New York Sun, November 5, 2007

One of the more poignant features of the current competition among Republican presidential hopefuls, fiercely fighting for a chance to lose to Senator Clinton in 2008, has been a series of missions to Maggie. Mitt Romney saw Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, late last year in Washington, D.C., while Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani were at pains to include meetings with the Iron Lady in the course of their recent trips to London. The political consequences of such encounters will, I'd guess, be minimal, but the briskly written, perceptive, and, ultimately, moving "Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage" (Sentinel, 336 pages, $25.95), by The New York Sun's Nicholas Wapshott, helps explain why, nearly two decades after she was driven from office, a frail, elderly Englishwoman still merits visits from American politicians looking to win the most powerful job in the world.

As its title would suggest, the focus of this volume is the personal alliance of Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, a combination that represented the most productive and historically significant incarnation of the Special Relationship between England and America since that astonishingly effective blend of Anglo-American genes better known as Sir Winston Churchill (whose mother was, of course, from Brooklyn). Well-buttressed by skillfully chosen quotations from letters and telephone records (some previously unpublished), the central story of "Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher" is of a relationship between two politicians of conviction whose friendship, shared goals, and remarkable ability to reinforce and support each other through some very difficult times were key features of international politics in the 1980s — and, so it was to turn out, critical factors in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Given his subject matter, it's to be expected that Mr. Wapshott has somewhat less to say about the domestic scene on either side of the Atlantic. Yet, American readers may also find that this book makes an excellent, if brief, introduction to Mrs. Thatcher's career as a whole.

There is, however, one aspect of this account that may come as a surprise. These two leaders are often seen as a matching pair, but the tones of their respective biographies differ in some profound ways. To be sure, both came from hardscrabble backgrounds —Mrs. Thatcher's far less so than Reagan's — which they later romanticized, but there was always something sunnier about Reagan and the arc of his rise, something that owed a great deal to the difference in the two leaders' personalities, but also something to the myth and the reality of opportunity in the country in which the Gipper was, as he always knew, lucky enough to be born.

The latter is something Mrs. Thatcher, a lifelong admirer of America, would be presumably quick to admit. Yet, despite her fondness for America — and despite the usual claims from the usual suspects that she was "America's poodle" — this most patriotic of women always put Britain, and its national interests, first. At times, this led to disagreement with Reagan, and, as Mr. Wapshott shows, the conflict could become quite sharp. In the course of one spat, we read how Secretary of State Haig was quick to send Washington an ominous, and urgent, weather advisory: Mrs. Thatcher, he warned, had spoken to him with "unusual" vehemence, a terrifying image, given the intensity of even her usual vehemence. She would, Mr. Haig warned the president, be writing with "her concerns." Yikes.

On that particular occasion, the prime minister had been frustrated by the Reagan administration's attempt to extend the extraterritorial reach of American law. There was more serious trouble between this generally harmonious duo over equivocation within the White House in the run-up to the Falklands War, and, tellingly, horror and bewilderment in Downing Street at Reagan's repeatedly stated belief that it was possible to rid the planet of nuclear weapons. Mrs. Thatcher, correctly and characteristically, thought that this was hopelessly, dreamily, and dangerously "unrealistic." She could not, she explained, foresee a nuke-free future "because there have always been evil people in the world."

Fortunately, shrewd, easygoing "Ron" was usually prepared to listen to his shrewd, hectoring "Margaret." So much so, in fact, that in Mr. Wapshott's not unreasonable view, "Reagan's readiness to take Thatcher's advice ensured that her interventions in American policy [meant that] … she acted as an unofficial, unappointed, but wholly effective additional cabinet member." Under the circumstances, to argue, as Mr. Wapshott does, that Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher had entered into a "political marriage" is no exaggeration. What's more, this was not just any marriage: It was a good one. In a good marriage, the partners are able to disagree, and they continue to pay attention to each other, even when they are at odds. They never forget that, in the end, they are on the same side; the prime minister and the president never did. As Denis Thatcher — an often underrated figure, who is, refreshingly, given his due in this book — was early to recognize, his wife and Nancy's husband shared a vision, a close ideological bond made all the stronger by the fact that both had spent long years as representatives of a minority viewpoint not only within their own countries, but within their own parties.

But the vision thing was not, by itself, enough. The relationship between Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher was political, yes, but it was reinforced and strengthened by ever deepening personal affection. This is visible in much of the material chosen by Mr. Wapshott, and in particular in the charming anecdote with which he concludes his introduction:

One day an insistent call from Thatcher interrupted a meeting in the White House. Reagan mouthed to the assembled company that it was Thatcher, and they waited patiently as the president listened in silence to the force of nature on the other end of the line. Eventually, he placed his hand over the mouthpiece and gushed to everyone in the room, with a broad smile, "Isn't she wonderful."

She is. He was. They were.

False Dawn

Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935

The New  York Sun, November, 1, 2007

The disparate, jostling artistic movements grouped together and loosely labeled as "modernist" may have been gathering pace before 1914, but it was the moral, spiritual, and physical devastation left by four years of war that allowed them to play such a prominent role within the cultural avant-garde of what remained of Europe.

"Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935" is a fascinating, striking, and intellectually ambitious exhibition now showing at the New York Public Library. It attempts to demonstrate that the agenda and the aesthetics of modernism had a key part to play in the identity that the nascent states (from Estonia in the north to the future Yugoslavia in the south) that had emerged from the wreckage of the empires destroyed by the war were both trying to create for themselves and, no less critically, project to the outside world. It's an interesting argument, and it gives the library an ideal opportunity to showcase art — in this case, a selection of illustrations and other design work, primarily drawn from periodicals, pamphlets, and other published material — that fully deserves a wider audience.

But while it may be an interesting argument, it's based on a questionable premise. If there was one thing these new countries did not lack, it was a sense of identity. Theirs was frequently focused on a supposed reconnection with their dominant ethnicities' sometimes distant, usually suppressed, and often concocted, past. Its roots lay in the romanticism of the national "revivals" that spread across Europe in the 19th century. Insofar as it found artistic expression in the 1920s and, particularly, the 1930s, it was predominantly backward-looking, a matter more of flaxen-haired peasants and völkisch fantasy than modernist innovation. This is hinted at in only a few pieces, and then only indirectly. These include the pastiche medievalism of a poster produced for a trade fair in Lwów, and two beautifully stylized Bulgarian landscapes by Sirak Skitnik and Dechko Uzunov, who each attempt to reconcile more modern artistic ideas with folk tradition and the imagery of the homeland — attempts typical of this time and these regions.

This ought not come as a surprise, but may. These countries were less of a backwater than half a century of Cold War isolation would later suggest. Modernity did not pass its artists by, but it normally owed more to the playful geometries of Art Deco than to the hectoring Constructivist/Suprematist abstraction that essentially defines this show. Deco was a style with closer links to Hollywood than to Moscow, to commerce than to nation, but it's better representative of this epoch than a modernism more focused on leftist (or, if you prefer, "progressive") ideology. That may explain why, with exceptions (most notably, and most delectably, a sly, characteristically erotic nude by Latvia's Sigismunds Vidbergs), there are so few allusions to Art Deco in this show.

Rather than trying to endow the works on display with a wider political significance than they may actually deserve given the historical realities of their era, it's better to consider them on their own terms, and in all their intriguing artistic (if not ideological) variety. Modernism was a Bauhaus with many mansions. Thus we see outstanding expressionist pyrotechnics, especially two covers, frenetic and fine, designed for the Polish periodical Zdrój, trickster Dadaist typography from Slovenia, some leaden surrealist clichés from Czechoslovakia, and much, much more.

Predictably enough, given the emphasis on Constructivism, El Lissitzky makes several appearances (for some of this period he managed to live a comfortable distance away from the Soviet experiment he was so enthusiastically touting). These include the most directly propagandist item on show, a volume produced for visitors to the USSR's pavilion at the 1928 International Press Exhibition, complete with hammer, sickle, and a willingness to wrap mass murder in the slickest of packages. In other pieces on display, Lissitzky's politics are less overtly signaled, but these works remain what they were always intended to be: undeniably brilliant advertising for an allegedly radiant future.

A similar philosophical subtext — one less concerned with shaping a sense of nationality than in finding new ways to destroy it — can be detected in a good number of the other pieces on view. As it happened, however, old ways of doing this still worked all too well. Within a decade or so, almost all these new nations again found themselves devastated, but in a very traditional manner. They fell prey to rampaging armies, invading from the east, west, or both. Their borders were reduced to abstractions as complete as anything you will see at this show. The consequences were anything but. Until January 27 (42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, 212-593-7730).

The Godfather, Part I: Stalin as a Boy

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Young Stalin

The New York Sun, October 24, 2007

Young Stalin

When Josef Stalin finally succumbed to the stroke he so richly deserved, a distraught Pablo Neruda mourned the death of this "giant. ... the noon, the maturity of man and the peoples." Such attitudes are, mercifully, now rare. Once known genially as "Uncle Joe," Stalin is now regularly reviled as a monster and a despot to be ranked with history's worst.

Despite this, it continues to be the case that, in the popular imagination, the name Stalin fails to deliver anything like the sense of horror conjured up by Hitler. The reasons include the persistence of leftist ideology, the fact of cultural distance, and the recollection of wartime alliance. There's something else, however, that should not be overlooked: Stalin the man is barely known, and what is thought to be known is that he was something of a plodder, a bureaucrat, the embodiment of Soviet drab: in other words, a bore. That's not a quality humanity expects from its enduring villains: Just ask Shakespeare, just ask Milton.

In our memory, Hitler is not only the incarnation of evil but also its most vivid caricature. By contrast, in public Stalin was managerial rather than charismatic, cleverly distanced from the cult of personality that enveloped him. He went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that little of substance was disclosed about his private life. His biography was transformed into pious myth, systematically drained of real interest. Those few people who knew the truth, or part of the truth, managed to survive only if they kept it to themselves.

While this culture of secrecy began to change during the Khrushchev era, the twists, turns and imperatives of Kremlin politics conspired to keep the real Stalin hidden from the historical record. After 1991 this was no longer so, but while the details of Stalin's crimes are now widely available, the individual who inspired them has remained a strangely elusive figure, still scarcely more than the "gray blur" of ancient Menshevik libel. If any historian can bring an end to this relative indifference it is Simon Sebag Montefiore. His bestselling "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" (2003) was a masterful, magnificently readable, and immaculately researched account of the Soviet leader's long rule. As a portrait of ascendant malignance, it has rarely been equaled.

Mr. Sebag Montefiore's new book adds more depth to this picture. "Young Stalin" (Knopf, 460 pages, $30) is a kind of prequel to the earlier volume. It tells the story of the dictator's earlier years, from Georgian boyhood to his (often underrated) role as one of the key organizers of the Bolsheviks' Petrograd coup. Even told badly, this would be fascinating, but the ever-fluent Mr. Sebag Montefiore recounts it with brio, insight, and quite remarkable amounts of additional, never-before published information: I read it in one sitting. In some ways "Young Stalin" comes across as a picaresque, if grim, adventure, a bawdy chronicle of seminary school rebellion, banditry, bank robbery, revolutionary intrigue, jail, piracy, extortion, love, murder, romance, exile, scandal, and, even, hunting trips with the tribesmen of the remote arctic taiga. It doesn't hurt either that Mr. Sebag Montefiore's considerable literary gifts allow him to bring life back to the lost, exotic realm within which his saga unfolds, the brutal mass of contradictions that made up the Romanovs' ramshackle, doomed empire.

The fact that, for most of his youth, Stalin was a fairly marginal figure enables Mr. Sebag Montefiore to focus even more closely on the character of his subject. Young Stalin comes across, like so many psychopaths, as charming, manipulative, and highly intelligent. Musically gifted, an accomplished poet, and a relentless autodidact, he was no less of an intellectual than the revolutionaries he so liked to disdain. But, crucially, he was also what he was proud to call a praktik, a tough guy capable of doing the "black work" of revolution. Stalin was only in his early 20s when he moved to the oil port of Batumi. 'Within three months, the Rothschilds' refinery had mysteriously caught fire ... the town was flooded with Marxist pamphlets; informers were being murdered ... factory managers shot.'

There was, of course, far, far worse to come. For reasons we can only guess at, Stalin not only excelled at black work; he relished it. Part of the blame for this must lie with a dirt-poor childhood spent in a town notorious for its hard-edged and thuggish ethos, a childhood scarred also by violence that extended into the home itself: His father was an abusive drunk. Nobody could be trusted, not even family. Throw in Stalin's psychopathy, his egomania, his seminary-sharpened ability to detect heretics, and his experience of the way the tsarist secret police managed to suborn so many supposedly loyal comrades and we can detect the outlines of the nightmare to come. Vladimir Lenin certainly could, and he was thrilled. "That chef," he commented, "will cook up some spicy dishes." So he did. And with them he poisoned a culture, a nation, and a world.

Saturday Morning Classic Literature

Beowulf

The New  York Sun, November 16, 2007

Mighty Beowulf fought for glory, honor, and immortal renown. If, however, the hero of that ancient Anglo-Saxon epic had been unlucky enough to see three recent movies inspired by his exploits, he would, I reckon, have opted instead for obscurity.

The first, Graham Baker's "Beowulf" (1999), was an incoherent fiasco starring Christopher "Highlander" Lambert, and set in a dank, dismal techno-medieval future. Next came Sturla Gunnarsson's "Beowulf & Grendel" (2005), a movie of such numbing sanctimony (trolls as oppressed minority, or something like that) that not even the beauties of Iceland and Sarah Polley were able to redeem it. And now, well, let's just say that Robert Zemeckis has done to "Beowulf" what Grendel never could.

In discussing a film this bad, it is, as with a particularly unappetizing meal, difficult to know where to start. A good place might be its most distinctive feature: the way it looks. This owes a great deal to the technique, known as "performance capture," first used by Mr. Zemeckis in "The Polar Express." Sensors attached to the actors' faces and bodies enable their movements, gestures, and mannerisms to be stored digitally for later use. With this method at his disposal, Mr. Zemeckis could, quite literally, do what he wanted with his cast. Eat your heart out, Mr. DeMille. He altered their appearance, he dressed or, oh yes, undressed them at will, and then inserted them into the computer-generated backdrop against which the film lurches along its blowsy, hectic, and heedless way.

Sometimes the results are striking: Ray Winstone, an actor of average height, middling age, and respectable stoutness, is turned into six and a half feet of ripped Viking hunk. But usually they are just clumsy: John Malkovich's Unferth resembles one of those annoying Geico cavemen, Anthony Hopkins's King Hrothgar becomes a pudgy Pillsbury satyr, and the lovely Robin Wright Penn (Wealthow) is given the bland prettiness of a lesser Disney princess. It is telling that the most successful transformation is that of Angelina Jolie (Grendel's unsettlingly yummy mummy), an actress whose most distinctive features may already owe a little something to science.

Worse, even if we ignore the obstacle posed by a laughably inept script, these added layers of technological artifice appear to have prevented a talented cast from breathing needed life into their characters. The makers of "Beowulf" might like to claim otherwise, but their actors have largely been reduced to cartoons. This need not have been fatal. Done well, the otherness of animation can be used to spirit audiences away to a parallel world of myth, magic, and the strange. But doing it well is more than a matter of megabytes. The imagery must awe, disturb, and beguile. Here and there, "Beowulf" does. The scenes in Grendel's lair are beautifully done — eerie, majestic, and resonant, the stuff, as they should be, of legend. As for Grendel's gorgeous mom, a nerd-core idol if ever one existed, the dangerous temptation she represents to Hrothgar and Beowulf is easy to understand. She is, insists Hrothgar, "no hag." Indeed she's not.

But these are exceptions, not the rule. Even viewed in their occasionally spectacular (and, in such a doggedly one-dimensional film, decidedly ironic) 3-D format, the visuals in "Beowulf" are, for the most part, shockingly banal. Nowhere is this more the case than in the depiction of Grendel (Crispin Glover), the "grimma gæst" (grim demon), whose repeated murderous onslaughts on Hrothgar's great hall summon Beowulf across the seas, to the rescue, and into the high school English curriculum. In the original text, Grendel is, to borrow descriptions from Seamus Heaney's grand and clever translation, "a shadow-stalker, stealthy and swift … [a] huge marauder … warped in the shape of a man." In this movie, he's little more than a jittery, whiny comic-book grotesque.

Similarly, the source of the fury that drives Grendel's lethal rampage has been dumbed down and jazzed up. It's no longer enough for him to be enraged by his sense of exclusion from God's good graces. Now he has family issues: Dad's the real problem, not God. In some respects, the writers of this film have turned a saga into soap opera, complete with warring spouses, infidelity, jealousy, and an examination of the wreckage left behind by unsuitable couplings. They attempt to justify this by claiming that it's a way to fill in gaps in the original narrative. We'll leave scholars to debate the extent of any such gaps, but it's difficult to avoid the suspicion that the screenwriters' real motive was to sidestep the core themes running through that bleak Anglo-Saxon verse: The implacability of fate and the impermanence of existence don't exactly make for the most promising box-office material.

To the tough-minded pagans of Beowulf's time, the most intelligent response to the inevitability and permanence of death was to try to live on in memory. Back then, the best chance for that was through heroic feats of arms, a concept that the screenwriters clearly understand, but which, I suspect, leaves them uneasy. It's true that some of their dialogue mourns the death of the age of heroes, but those passages seem primarily designed to take a swipe at the impact of newly arrived Christianity (something that does a disservice to the original poem's subtle blend of Norse and biblical mythology). This film's Beowulf is a brute, a liar, and a boor. He's also brave, and he is prepared to sacrifice himself for others. But if he is a hero, he's a hero diminished, if not debunked.

This, then, is not a very heroic film. It's not even a heroic failure.

In Search of the Inner Shaman

Khadak

The New York Sun, October 12, 2007

There once was a glorious, splendid, self-confident epoch, back in the reign of the blessed Eisenhower, when a director from the West could shoot a film about remote, mysterious Mongolia with minimal authenticity, fearless inaccuracy, and cultural crassness so epic that it could feature John Wayne as the young Genghis, Susan Hayward as Bortai, a haughty Tatar princess, and the irradiated Utah desert as the land of the khans. "The Conqueror" (produced, appropriately enough, by remote, mysterious Howard Hughes) may have been a critical and box office disaster in 1955, but there is something about its trashy exuberance, ludicrous script, and unashamed sexism that make it a wild, if naughty, treat. Who could forget those seductive, sinuous dancing girls and the touch of Vegas they brought to that distant, turbulent steppe? Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth, the directors of "Khadak," that's who.

If "The Conqueror" is like one of those alluring, amazing, artificial, Technicolor desserts that used to bring a chemical grace to the dinner tables of Ike's America, so "Khadak," which arrives at Cinema Village today, is fat-free and eat-your-greens — appropriate fare for our grimly sensitive and relentlessly sanctimonious era. Be warned that it is, ominously and accurately, also billed as a "magical-realist fable," a description so reliably predictive of imminent tedium that both the Khan and the Duke would have trembled at the thought of the horrors to come.

The movie's confused and fragmentary narrative revolves around Bagi (Batzul Khayankhyarvaa), a young nomad herdsman. Glum, taciturn, and subject to fits, poor Bagi gradually discovers that his seizures are triggered neither by epilepsy nor irritation at this film's stumbling screenplay. Rather, they signify that he is a shaman. In "The Conqueror," that would have earned him a weird clown hat and a prominent role at court. As, however, this particular shaman has found himself trapped in "Khadak," he has to make do with time travel, the companionship of the beautiful Zolzaya (Tsetsegee Byamba), and the opportunity to uncover a possible government conspiracy to trick his fellow nomads into abandoning their traditional lifestyle in favor of jobs with a mining company.

If the storyline in "Khadak" is unconvincing, much of its cinematography is anything but. For all its faults, this is undoubtedly a visually striking movie, at times astonishingly so. Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth (both of whom have backgrounds in documentary film) have been working in Mongolia for a number of years and it shows. The stark, vivid, and contradictory imagery of the Mongolia portrayed in "Khadak" bears little resemblance to the kitschy, made-for-export spectacle presented by the country's best-known director, Byambasuren Davaa. Ms. Davaa's movies ("The Story of the Weeping Camel," "The Cave of the Yellow Dog") may be wonderful to look at, but their underlying aesthetic, picture book prettiness, and superficial samplings of third-world exotica owe more to "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" than the realities of life in Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator) or, for that matter, the Gobi.

The beauties of "Khadak" are something more subtle, complex, and disturbing. To be sure, there are the inevitably lovely shots of windswept wilderness and lonely ger, but these are complemented by evocative footage of industrial machinery and the haunting remnants of an old Soviet settlement. Taken together, they make a compelling backdrop both to this movie and, frustratingly, the far better film it might have become.

Something similar could be said of the cast in "Khadak." For the most part, they do their best with the little they've been given (we'll draw a veil over the histrionics of Tserendarizav Dashnyam, an actress who puts the ham in shaman), but, in the end, there's just not enough material for them to work with. It's hard to avoid the impression that Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth viewed their ac tors as little more than additional backdrop, puppets to be manipulated and posed rather than fully realized characters with inner lives all their own.

One reason for this may be these filmmakers' inexperience with fiction, but a more likely explanation is that they were more concerned with the content of their message than its delivery. And that message is routine environmentalist agitprop overlaid with the multiculturalist piety that is, in reality, a form of profoundly insulting condescension. Mongolia is a hideously poor country trying to escape both ancient backwardness and the cruel pastiche of modernization that was communist rule. To deny that this process is difficult, occasionally brutal, and often exploitative would be absurd. Even so, to suggest, as this film appears to, that the solution can be found with the help of eco-babble, ancestral superstition, and premodern agriculture is even worse. It's a point of view that reveals more about the self-loathing of certain sections of the Western intelligentsia than any real understanding of the needs and aspirations of the Mongolian people.

"Khadak" is therefore best seen as an example of an updated form of cultural imperialism, one made all the more egregious by its pretense to be just the opposite. Under the circumstances, why not stick with the honest dishonesty of the original? In Mongolia's case, I'll opt for "The Conqueror" and the pleasures of Susan Hayward's high camp Bortai, an alabaster-skinned, red-haired daughter of Tatary born in Brooklyn, filmed in Utah, and financed by Howard Hughes, that fantasist, fabulist, and jet-age shaman.