Anna, Abe, and Liza

This week I was able to catch two most worthwhile movies and a revival of one of the greatest of musicals.  The premier movie was Speilberg's Lincoln, which deserves all the high praise it has received. The performers are excellent--including Daniel Day-Lewis, who ranks with the best and most genuine actors I've seen play the part.  Until now, my favorite had been Hal Holbrook, who starred in Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois onstage in New York quite a few years ago.  Day-Lewis's rendition was in a similar vein as he affected what was likely the real Sangamon County accent (or twang) in which Lincoln probably spoke.  Sure, you can't ignore Raymond Massey and Henry Fonda, but they remained themselves more than they were Lincoln, as wonderful as they were to watch.

Spielberg clearly tried to make his actors look and dress like their characters--Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, and all the others from Stanton to Grant to Welles, and even the secretaries who were the great popularizers of the Lincoln legend--John Nicolay and John Hay.  Tommy Lee Jones has been feted for his inhabiting the role of Thaddeus Stevens, and I'm prepared to support him for any award based on this performance and the one he turned in as the aging husband with Meryl Streep earlier this year.

The picture was wonderfully conceived and directed; it provided a fine account of the legislative arm-twisting that characterized the effort to push the 13th Amendment through the House. As we approach another Second Inaugural, it's not too much to hope for the current President's aiming toward the ever-bright standard Lincoln set with his--which ends the film.  

Anna Karenina is a whole different kind of picture.  The English director Joe Wright takes on this mighty Tolstoy novel, which has been filmed many times before, by inserting scenes within stage sets.  It's a device--neither better nor worse than others--but the film worked for me. Keira Knightley is both beautiful and believable; Jude Law, a handsome actor, appears totally plain as the almost-ministerial minister to whom she is married and unfaithful. Matthew Macfadyen was an absolutely delightful Stiva Oblonsky and Aaron Taylor-Johnson rendered Vronsky more inspid than I had ever recalled. Alicia Vikander was a delightful Kitty to see on screen.  It remains close to impossible to capture this massive Russian novel in any film but Wright deserves some credit for the effort.

And then there was the Arena Stage's revival of Lerner & Loewe's My Fair Lady, often regarded as the greatest American musical. Despite the somewhat mediocre notice by the Washington Post's reviewer, the Arena's production was excellent--good singers, good staging in the round, and an all-around enjoyable time was had.  It did of course make me recall all the greats who made the original Broadway production and the film so delightful, not omitting Rex Harrison, who was hardly a singer, and Julie Andrews, whose Broadway debut it was.  All the principals at Arena were excellent, as was the submerged orchestra.  

The one role which the Post critic got right in identifying a weak spot was Alfred P. Doolittle.  Until now, I thought this was almost an unbreakable part, but that likely had more to do with the memory of the great Stanley Holloway.  The critic didn't point out that the actor playing Zoltan Karpathy did lack the brio of the inimitable Theodore Bikel, who filled the role onscreen in a marvelous performance.  By the way, Bikel is still alive and kicking in his late 80s. 

Fritz Loewe's music, with its signature Viennese lilt, has always been the strongest aspect of this show for me.  We may disagree as to which song is the best, for this score resembles South Pacific in lacking even one clinker, but I will hold to my love for the one the performers have always favored, Show Me. Many years ago, in the 50s, when The Lambs feted Lerner & Loewe, and Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews were leading the tribute, that was the song, in my father's account, that everyone present clamored for.

The ur-American Holiday

Thanksgiving is the truly American holiday.  Forget the Pilgrims and the Indians--I'd rather recall the times in the 1930s when people were thankful first for their emergence from the Depression and then World War II. Those times were highlighted for the holiday with the 1936 Thanksgiving proclamation of Connecticut Governor Wilbur L. Cross (yes, I know you thought he was a parkway) and FDR's in 1944.

As for the day and the dinner, I opt for the traditional menu.  The wonderful smell of a turkey roasting filled the house and there were plain roasted sweets and garlic mashed along with root vegetables and my daughter's brussels sprouts concoction (there always has to be a brussels sprout concoction--but this one was good) and her cranberry-orange sauce, with our traditional add-on, a nice salad, followed of course by the pumpkin pie (mine) and the apple pie (Vanessa's) and the pumpkin cheesecake (courtesy of Judyt Mandel).

This year we have a lot for which to be thankful.  I could start with the election and then the happy chance that kept us on the edge of the Hurricane zone a few weeks ago, but most of all, Eileen was discharged from Hopkins Thursday morning so was here to enjoy the day with all of us. And she's recovering, day by day, with her usual perseverance.

American Non-Exceptionalism

Both the scandal of hugely-delayed vote counting in several states, especially in Florida and Arizona, and the efforts by Republicans in those and other states to suppress voting by groups they wish to disenfranchise have contributed to putting the U.S. in the category of countries who do a poor job of conducting elections. People here like to think Americans do everything so well, yet the rest of the world is fast catching up to us and this is one area where many countries are ahead of us.

First, even a country new to national voting such as Indonesia has run nation-wide elections across a huge archipelago with fewer problems than we had in 2000 and 2012. That country had been a dictatorship of first the left and then the right for many years; yet when they set about running an election, it went off with few hitches.

Second, most European countries vote on Sunday. This means that working people have no problem getting to the polls and the nonsense about giving people a very few hours to go home and back to vote can be forgotten. The percentage of voters turning out increases, too. 

Third, the excuse offered in Florida and Arizona--perhaps the two most evil GOP-administered states in terms of active effort to suppress voting--was that turnout was both higher than usual and unexpected. It turns out that it was neither. There were more people voting in 2008.

Think about how badly many states performed--and there were exceptions, the good-government states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, for example, and there were places like New York and New Jersey, where weather conditions made for problems far exceeding the usual incompetence--when you hear people like Romney continually calling for more responsibility to be shifted to the states.

Yes, We Won!!

Even though he kept a recession from becoming a depression, saved the auto companies (from themselves), at least began to try to rein in the Wall St. crowd that caused it all, and yes, got as good a health care law through that he could, Obama had to take on a guy who would say anything and change every position to win and then withstand ridiculous charges of being a Muslim or a Kenyan. Because he wasn’t totally captured by big-money funders, he was also mislabelled as a socialist.  Not only that, but although he did more for Israel than any other president but wouldn’t make nice with the corrupt and reactionary Bibi, some noisy fanatics went after him on that – heck, I wish Obama had really blasted the settlers.  Elizabeth Warren totally understands how our economic system works and how it needs to be reformed—as well as being the nation’s foremost expert on bankruptcy; wonderful that the voters realized she was hired because of that, not for her vague Native American background that most of Oklahoma shares.  We could almost call last night a real victory!