Shouts from a Third Act

Don’t let the title fool you. Merrily We Roll Along is not a carefree romp through life, even though the music is often fun and upbeat. It’s a storyline told in reverse. Three young people, just out of college, meet and become the best of friends. They haven’t any money, but they do have dreams. Twenty years later, when the story opens, their friendship is in tatters and only one of them is a big success, although not in the way he wanted. What happened? How did he get to this place?

It’s Hollywood in 1976, and Franklin Shepard is on top of the world. His latest movie is a big hit, and he’s throwing a party to celebrate. One of the guests is not in a celebratory mood, although she is drunk. Mary Flynn, a novelist-turned-theatre critic, thinks Frank’s movie is worse than terrible. What’s happened to Frank, the talented composer who wanted to continue composing Broadway musicals with their other great friend Charley Kringas? Charley, a talented lyricist and playwright, is still plugging away back in New York. He’s got his original wife and four kids. Franklin has a young son with his ex-wife, a soon-to-be second ex-wife, and a young girlfriend waiting to become #3.

As Frank reflects back on his life, the musical takes us through its key moments–all the way back to 1957 and an apartment building in New York City. Told in reverse, it’s the equivalent of a murder mystery where the story opens with a dead body. Who killed him and why? How did he die? In Frank’s case, he’s not dead–he’s a movie producer on top of the world. But not really. As for Mary and Charley, they’ve got their own problems. Mary wrote one successful novel, then stopped. She became a theatre critic and an alcoholic. Unrequited love for Frank had something to do with it. Charley is talented, but not quite as talented without Frank’s collaboration, and he struggles to support his large family.

Merrily We Roll Along is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. I got to see it by chance, after a last-minute opportunity to visit New York City just before Christmas. Given the high cost of a ticket, I expected to be blown away. I was not. The cast was great and the musical was very good, but it wasn’t Hamilton or the kind of musical that had me singing the lyrics for days afterwards. And yet. And yet. . .

I can’t stop thinking about the show! In terms of my own life. In terms of all the problems in the world. Hindsight is 20/20. If we knew then what we know now. The cliches are true, but they suggest we all make the mistakes we make because we can’t see into the future. That doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from hindsight. We can take stock of our lives at any point and change. As individuals, as citizens, as leaders. Frank doesn’t have to keep making lousy movies. He’s a gifted composer who loves creating music. Some of it may not connect with audiences, but that doesn’t mean he should stop. His next song might be a hit. His next song might be his personal favorite, even if most people think otherwise.

Merrily We Roll Along is a remake of a Stephen Sondheim musical that first appeared on Broadway in 1981. The previews were a disaster. Even with countless changes, the show ran for only 16 performances. Most critics panned it. Audiences found the storyline confusing. Sondheim, who was at the height of his career, briefly considered packing it in. He did not and went on to score two more big hits. In 2012, a Merrily with changes opened in London to much acclaim. That same London director brought the show to Off-Broadway and then onto Broadway last year. You see where this is going. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. It’s not over ’til it’s over. Both cliches, both true.

We live in a globally connected world where we’re bombarded daily by news of natural and man-made disasters. It would be easy to give up hope or to become numb to it all. Especially because many of us feel like life is moving so fast that there’s not enough time for everything. But because life is truly short, it’s important to stop every so often and look back. Is this where I want to be? Is this what I want my legacy to be? What kind of world do I want to leave to future generations?

This year we’ve got a President to elect. We’ve got a democracy and a climate to protect. We’ve got friends and neighbors who may need our help. It takes time to pause and reflect. Time that’s essential to our well-being. Otherwise, we merrily or not-so-merrily roll along, oblivious to what’s ahead.

When Martin Scorsese adapted the best-selling book KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I. into a screenplay, he preserved the basic truth of this true-crime horror story but told it from a different point of view.

Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from WWI to a bustling oil town in northern Oklahoma, where his uncle, William “King” Hale (Robert DeNiro) is a prominent cattle rancher. Prosperous though he is, King is not the richest man in town, not by a long shot. That distinction belongs to the men and women of the Osage Nation whose members originally settled there back in the late 1800s. King tells Ernest that the Osage people are “the finest, the wealthiest and the most beautiful people on God’s earth,” but it’s soon clear that what he admires most about them is their wealth. Wealth from the oil they discovered on land nobody else wanted, land that they bought with cash after being forced from their previous territory by white settlers and the U.S. government.

The movie centers around Ernest’s relationship with Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a rich young Osage woman. He starts out as her driver but ends up as her husband. While there’s definitely some chemistry between them, nobody could be happier or more encouraging about the marriage than King. That’s because of something called “headrights.” He explains to Ernest that the Osage Nation divided the oil royalties equally among their members, but these shares cannot be bought or sold, only inherited. Marriage is the best way in. The only other way in is to become a legal guardian–and steal. A federal law (in 1921) required Osage members to prove “competency” with money or else be assigned a financial guardian.

But what if marrying into money isn’t enough for these gold diggers? Mollie has three sisters and a mother, and one by one they all die. One sister and her mother from “a wasting illness;” one sister is found in a ravine, shot in the back of the head; another sister and her husband are killed when their house explodes. Then Mollie, who is diabetic, gets sick, and the insulin that’s supposed to help her only makes her sicker. And there are–and have been–suspicious deaths in many other families. The Osage Nation sends a delegation to Washington, D.C. to ask President Coolidge for help investigating the murders.

David Grann’s non-fiction book, in contrast, tells the story through the eyes of a Texas ranger turned F.B.I. agent, who is sent to investigate the murders. And it almost reads like a ‘who done it’. In the film, the F.B.I. arrives long after we know who’s behind the killings. The only surprise is how two-faced and despicable that man is willing to be and the extent of collusion by local officials. But that doesn’t detract from the ratcheting tension of the film.

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” Mark Twain observed, back in his day. “This is because fiction has to stick to possibilities; truth doesn’t.” Killers of the Flower Moon is that kind of story. It would be hard to imagine a novelist dreaming up this story from scratch, with all its haunting particulars. I think of Hitler and the extermination of six million Jews in that way, and even 9/11 still seems unimaginable–that young men would hijack commercial planes and fly them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

“Man’s inhumanity to man” seems too blithe a phrase in the presence of such evil. These are stories about men who don’t see a specific group of people as human beings, which causes these men to lose any sense of moral conscience. Most recently we can look to Israel, the attack by Hamas, and what has followed.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a long movie, a few minutes shy of 3-1/2 hours. It never bored me, but at a certain point towards the end, I felt its length. I still consider it a great fact-based historical film, one that will stand the test of time like others before it: Schindler’s List, Twelve Years a Slave, All the President’s Men, to name just a few. The three leads give stellar performances, and Lily Gladstone as Mollie has received heaps of praise, justifiably so. There’s a fascinating stillness to her character, and whenever she’s on screen, it’s hard to take your eyes off her. If the running time scares you off (or you’re waiting for the film to stream on Apple+), the book by David Grann is a compelling read at a relatively modest 338 pages. In addition to the murders, it tells the story of the fledgling FBI, which was formed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 but was largely ineffective–and unknown–until the Osage Murders.

Analysts have said Killers wouldn’t have been made without the stature of a filmmaker like Scorsese. Paramount initially signed on but brought in Apple to foot the bill when costs kept rising—to a final price tag of $200 million. The story is a dark chapter in American history that’s been left out of the history books but still haunts members of the Osage Nation, as Grann details in the final section of his book. Scorsese handles the end of his film in a different way, but it’s also based on the truth. Truth that’s stranger than fiction.

Last month I visited a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. It wasn’t the main purpose of my trip, nor was the one-day safari which concluded my time in Kenya, but both gave me a visceral sense of why Karen Blixen fell in love with her adopted homeland, a place where the people, the land, and the animals are inextricably linked. Her memoir Out of Africa was published in 1937, six years after she left British East Africa for good and returned to her native Denmark, but her legend lives on.  

What makes a legend? By the time Karen left Africa, her coffee plantation had failed, her marriage to Baron von Blixen was long over, and her great love affair with the much admired safari leader Denys Finch-Hatton had ended not long before she was to return to Denmark. She was lucky, in a way, and by extension so are we. Had she gone flying with him, as she often did, on the day his small plane crashed while he was tracking a herd of elephants, she would have died too. Out of Africa, published under her pen name Isak Dinesen, would not exist, nor would the 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which won an Oscar for Best Picture and is still considered one of the most romantic films of all time. Today the house where Karen once lived still stands as a testament to her life there, open to tourists and book-and-movie lovers like me. Today, however, the area around her former coffee plantation is designated the “Karen” suburb of Nairobi. And the name Karen is everywhere—on schools and a hospital, on upscale neighborhoods, on café’s and shops and hotels.

It would be easy for some to dismiss Karen’s legacy as that of a privileged white woman living an exotic life thanks to British colonialism. But while that was true, her legacy is more than that, and, in part, that’s because Africa changed her.

Karen and Bror Blixen set off for British East Africa (now Kenya) to make their fortune raising cattle. The Brits had claimed the area as a Protectorate in 1895 (making it an official colony in 1920), and when Karen and Bror married there in 1913, there were only about 5,000 European white settlers living in a country that bordered the Indian Ocean in the east and stretched to Uganda in the west. Husband and wife were second cousins from different countries, and their families provided the investment money. Bror arrived first and decided that growing coffee beans might be more profitable. By 1918, he and Karen owned 6,000 acres about twelve miles from Nairobi. The morning air was cool and fresh, the views were stunning, but the elevation—almost 6,000 feet above sea level—proved less than ideal for growing coffee. Bror soon tired of life on the farm and left Karen to manage the plantation while he pursued his greater interests—big game hunting and womanizing.

Karen persevered alone. While the Oscar-winning movie focuses on her love affair with Finch-Hatton, the focus of her memoir is her life on the farm and her interactions with the Africans who worked for her—in her house and on the plantation. She taught herself to tend to their medical needs, seeing patients on an almost daily basis or taking them to hospital. She was often asked to help settle disputes that arose, a sometimes complicated affair because her workers belonged to different tribes with different customs.

On the plantation, Karen battled drought, fire, and wildlife. Locusts and grasshoppers and much larger species. One day Karen’s manager told her a pair of lions had killed two of their oxen and dragged them into the coffee fields. If nothing was done, the lions would be a threat to other livestock. “I am no coward,” the manager told her, but he was a married man with no wish to risk his life unnecessarily. It happened that Finch-Hatton was staying with her at the time, and she said to Denys, “Let us risk our lives unnecessarily.” The lions would most likely return that night to finish feeding on the oxen. With Karen holding a lantern, they made their way through the coffee fields, found the lions, and Denys shot them. A great crowd gathered in awed excitement: laborers, house servants, and school children. “Three shots. Two lions,” they sang.

This story and others became part of Karen’s legend. When the coffee plantation failed and she was forced to sell, she gave away everything in her house. And to her servants, she gave her cows. To her “squatters”, she gave an incomparable gift–a new settlement of their own. The buyer of Karen’s plantation planned to sub-divide the land, and her squatters–members of the Kikuyu tribe–were given notice they had to leave. Their land comprised several acres per family, which totaled about 1,000 acres for their community. This they’d been allowed to use in return for 180 days of work on the coffee plantation each year. But Karen realized how unfair this all was.

“I bore in mind that not very long ago, at a time that could still be remembered, the Natives of the country had held their land undisputed, and had never heard of the white men and their laws. Within the general insecurity of their existence, the land to them was still steadfast.” Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

For months, Karen appealed to the British governor on their behalf. Finally she got word that he had agreed to give them a piece of the Dagoretti Forest Reserve. Their new settlement would not be far from their old one, and they could still, Karen wrote, “preserve their faces and their names, as a community.”

Karen returned to her mother’s estate in Denmark, where she lived to the end of her life. She died in 1962 at seventy-seven, long outliving both Finch-Hatton and her ex-husband, who died in a car crash in his native Sweden in 1946. Until the outbreak of WWII, she sent a small amount of money to Nairobi at Christmastime to distribute to her former staff. In return, she asked them for news of themselves. This they did by hiring the local professional letter writer, as most of them could not read or write.

Meanwhile, Karen began to write stories. At her home In Africa, she’d entertained her dinner guests with stories she made up. She finished her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, in 1933, and she wrote in English, thinking she might find more readers for the collection. The book became a bestseller in the U.S. Out of Africa, her second book, became a worldwide bestseller. During WWII, she allowed her home to be used as part of an underground railroad for Jews looking to escape to Sweden and freedom. And she wrote a darker collection of stories, Winter’s Tales, while Denmark was under Nazi occupation and German soldiers camped in her backyard.

Karen suffered from chronic illness, but she continued to write story collections, novels, and–shortly before her death–another memoir of Africa. Over the years, her farmhouse in Africa had changed hands several times, but the Danish government purchased it in 1964 to give to the Kenyan government as an Independence gift. The property was used as a College of Nutrition until 1986, when the huge success of the film Out of Africa led to the creation of the Karen Blixen Museum, which is one of the most visited museums in the country. Karen had known fame in her lifetime but not quite on this scale.

Her legend lives on.

Beyond great is a subjective term, although there’s no denying that Michael Jordan remains one of the greatest professional basketball players of all time, if not the greatest player. What’s beyond great about this feature film is watching how MJ and Nike got together—against all the odds. It’s the story of a young athlete’s exceptional but nascent talent, the business of sports, people taking chances, a mother’s vision, and the power of a sneaker design.

In 1984, when the film opens, Nike has been a public company for four years. Founder Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) started it back in 1964 with his former track coach at the University of Oregon, and Phil is still running the show. Going public has made Phil a rich man (net worth north of $100 million) but now he has a different set of headaches.

Nike is best known for its running shoes; the basketball division is much smaller and not particularly profitable. Most NBA teams wear Converse sneakers. Adidas, too, has a big share of the market, with Nike clocking in at a distant third. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a salesman in the basketball division. The NBA draft has just ended, and Sonny’s job—along with the other salesmen—is to sign one of these athletes to an endorsement deal. They don’t have a big budget, and Sonny’s boss Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) wants to divvy it up among three athletes. Sonny decides he wants to sign Michael Jordan, the former UNC player who won a national championship his freshman year. Pretty much everyone at Nike thinks Sonny is out of his mind:

1. MJ is almost certainly going to sign with Adidas. He loves and wears their sneakers. His UNC team wore Converse, but he always practiced in Adidas.
2. Michael was a third-round draft pick (not a first or even a second) who’s jut signed with the Chicago Bulls; some people at Nike make the point MJ didn’t even make his high school varisty team as a sophomore, and they can point to a whole list of college stars whose stars didn’t burn bright as NBA players.
3. MJ’s agent tells Sonny that MJ has NO interest in even talking to Nike. He doesn’t like their shoes, and he’s got meetings set up with Adidas and Converse, the only two companies he’s considering. Plus Nike can’t afford Michael. It would take their entire budget to sign him to an endorsement deal. But Sonny won’t give up. He’s willing to risk his job to go for it. Phil isn’t on board, and Sonny hasn’t even figured out a way to talk to Michael. Until Nike colleague and former basketball player Howard White (Chris Tucker) tells him, “The Mamas run things in black families,” and Sonny travels to Wilmington, N.C., to talk to MJ’s parents in person. There he meets Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis, absolutely superb), who is clearly a force in MJ’s life and believes in his talent. She agrees to give Nike a chance–provided she isn’t completely sold on what Converse and Adidas have to say.

In the end, the Nike basketball sneaker—christened Air Jordan—is key. So is the speech Sonny gives to MJ and his parents about talent and destiny and allowing everyday people who buy Air Jordans to participate in the dream. As impassioned as the speech is, Deloris wants more. She thinks her son deserves a percentage of each Air Jordan sold.
Not only was this a good deal for Michael, it ended up being a boon to Nike’s business. In 1985, first-year sales of the Air Jordan were $126 million—Nike was expecting no more than $3 million. Today the Air Jordan line does about $4 billion in sales annually. It’s believed that MJ’s passive annual income from the deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nike and Phil Knight, who continued to hold a major stake in the public company, became much richer. It enabled Phil, who retired from Nike in 2016, to donate $2 billion to various charities and worthy causes. Michael Jordan has inspired countless boys and girls and other athletes. And who’s to say that his percentage deal with Nike didn’t help inspire him to become beyond great.

Not only is AIR a good sports story, it’s a good business story. Maybe a beyond great story.

If you liked or loved this year’s Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, the novel Interior Chinatown is its own kind of wonderful. It won a National Book Award back in 2021 and predates the movie, but reading it now made me appreciate the film—and rejoice at its many awards—all the more. Whereas Evelyn Wang (Everything…) is an overworked middle-aged wife and mother running a laundry business being audited by the I.R.S., Willis Wu (Interior Chinatown) is a young bit-part actor in a police procedural, working his way up from “Generic Asian Man” to what he believes is the ultimate role for somebody like him—“Kung Fu Guy.” The two plots are very different, particularly given Evelyn’s discovery that she can experience different lives simultaneously in a multiverse threatened by her estranged daughter. But what the movie and novel have in common is the Asian immigrant experience. It isn’t pretty, but it’s not without hope.

Interior Chinatown doesn’t read like other novels. It reads like a screenplay for a TV show, with added commentary by Willis Wu. Willis is the younger son of immigrant parents who both grew up poor in Taiwan and dreamed of better lives in the U.S. (Older son, with all the potential, is missing in action, but turns up as a future plot point.)

The main setting for the cop show “Black and White” is The Golden Palace restaurant, in Chinatown. The show stars a hunky black detective, Mike Turner, and his pretty white partner, Sarah Green. When we first meet Willis, he’s acting the role of “Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy.” At night he retires to his SRO (Single Room Only) above the restaurant, which is where the restaurant workers who often double as bit-part actors also live. Willis routinely checks on his parents, who live on the second floor, before climbing up to his own room on eight. His father’s acting path included parts like “Guy in a Soiled T-Shirt” and “Egg Roll Cook,” but he briefly rose to the role of “Sifu, the Mysterious Kung Fu Master” before his inevitable downfall to “Old Asian Man.” His beautiful mother now plays “Old Asian Woman,” but she was once “Restaurant Hostess” and “Girl with the Almond Eyes.” Willis has fond memories of the time spent with his mom when he was a kid. His mantra was “Someday I’m going to be Bruce Lee.” One day, after he accidentally injures his mother practicing his moves, she doesn’t get angry. She says, “Don’t be Kung Fu Guy. Be more.”

And somehow, he does it. He flubs a line, forgets to speak with a Chinese accent, and suddenly he’s “Special Guest Star,” and then he’s ad-libbing lines and driving the plot of the show in a new direction. He meets a beautiful young actress on the show, who looks white but is one-quarter Taiwanese. He can’t believe it, but she seems to like him. Everywhere she goes, “people think I’m one of them,” she tells him. “They want to claim me for their tribe. . .I can be objectified by men of all races.” They marry, then she gets her own show and moves to the suburbs with their daughter, but he stays behind—temporarily he says, believing he’s so very close to landing the part of “Kung Fu Guy.”

By the end of the novel—or screenplay—the author Charles Yu has pulled off what seemed impossible at the outset. With an economy of words, he’s given us a story that’s fun as well as moving, scathing, informative and hopeful.

In her acceptance speech for Best Actress, Michelle Yeong, the star of Everything Everywhere All at Once, said, “For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities.” Ms. Yeong, now 60, grew up in Malaysia and rose to fame doing action parts in Hong Kong films in the 1990s. She did her own stunts as the Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies and in the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She was 26 when she arrived in Hollywood, and she’s said people were surprised she could speak English. “You’re a minority,” she kept hearing, which surprised her. She’d grown up in Malaysia, a multi-racial society.

Charles Yu wrote a novel about someone who’s marginalized who makes his own story. The two Oscar-winning directors who also wrote the script for Everything, Daniel Kwan (Chinese) and Daniel Scheinert (American Caucasian), wrote the kind of story they wanted to tell. They initially wanted Jackie Chan for the lead, but he turned them down. Michelle Yeong was their next choice. No doubt this hard-working actress is feeling even better about her own story right now. And we, the grateful audience, get to sit back, enjoy, and applaud.

THE LIBRARY BOOK by Susan Orlean would have been a great read when it was first published back in 2018, but possibly it’s an even better read today. This feel-good true story is about books and libraries—one in particular, the Los Angeles Central Library. It’s about a tragic fire and an unsolved mystery, but it’s also the story of Americans from all walks of life uniting around a common cause to restore something precious that was lost.

Susan Orlean was living in New York City when the Los Angeles Central Library caught fire on April, 29, 1986. Burning for 7 hours 38 minutes, it was the single biggest library fire in the history of the U.S., destroying or damaging more than one million books. When Ms. Orlean relocated to L.A. in 2011 and learned of the famous fire, she wondered how she could have missed such big news. She was and is a writer of magazine articles and books, and her specialty is long stories about interesting subjects. But on that day in April 1986 and the days that followed, the front page of The New York Times was dominated by news of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. The library fire was reported the following day on page A14.

The Los Angeles Central Library opened its doors in 1926, back when downtown Los Angeles was still a mismatch of hills, orange groves, and some office buildings. The famous architect who designed the library, Bertram Goodhue, dropped dead of a heart attack before construction began, but his long-time associate finished the job. The new public library was a grand structure, a mix of modern and classic and ancient styles. Outside, people gazed at its tiled pyramid tower or wandered through its classical garden. Four concrete silos stored the majority of its books. Inside, a rotunda showcased a massive chandelier depicting earth and the solar system, and sculptures, inscriptions, and murals decorated rooms throughout. Not bad for a library that began in 1844 as a reading room inside a dance hall and had never before inhabited its own building.

Over the decades that followed, the Central Library became a major hub for residents of Los Angeles. When the stock market crashed in 1929, just three years after the library opened, book circulation increased 60 percent and the number of patrons almost doubled. During WWII, the library and its branches offered first-aid classes and sold war bonds. At the time, the head of Central Library took a four-month leave of absence to run the Victory Book Campaign, a nationwide drive that amassed six million+ books that were sent to troops, army reading rooms, military hospitals, and training camps. For many years, movie studios ‘borrowed’ books for research. Instead of checking them out, which would involve a due date, they’d sometimes dispatch two assistants, one who pitched the books out the window to the other one standing outside.  Eventually the library got wise to this trick and regularly sent an employee to the studios to get the books back. New departments were added to address the public’s needs, such as a free Career Online High School, a Reference Dept. to answer all sorts of questions (six million annually), and a Teen Dept., separate from the Children’s Dept., that had its own books and hosted its own events and programs.

When the library fire in 1986 was finally extinguished, the residents of L.A. rallied. Insurance would cover the cost of the damage to the building, but it wouldn’t cover the books. Fourteen million dollars to replace the burned books plus the unknown cost of storing and repairing 700,000 others. The CEO of ARCO, the oil company across the street, stepped up to co-chair the “Save the Books” campaign and kicked it off with a $500,000 donation. He also offered space in his offices to the library’s administrative staff. His goal was to raise $10 million from Hollywood, and letters were sent to every studio head and movie producer. Outdoor ad companies donated billboards around the city to spread the word. Neighborhoods held “Save the Books” yard sales. School kids held bottle and aluminum can drives. Dr. Seuss donated $10,000. An essay contest “What the Library Means to Me” drew entries from 20,000 school kids and 2,000 adults. A live, 24-hour telethon that featured celebrities reading from their favorite books raised over $2 million.

On October 3, 1993, the library reopened, bigger and better equipped for a new century.

The Los Angeles Fire Department began investigating the cause of the fire as soon as it was extinguished. They suspected arson. A prime suspect soon emerged, and he’s another interesting part of the book. As Ms. Orlean points out, most arsons are done for money, but there’s no money to be made by burning libraries. “Libraries are usually burned because they contain ideas that someone finds problematic.” Woven into her book is a brief history of the burning of books. From a Chinese emperor in 213 B.C. who incinerated any history books he disagreed with, to the Nazis, who destroyed an estimated 100 million books, to Mao Tse-Tung, an assistant librarian in his youth and a book burner once in power, to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to the Iraqis burning most of Kuwait’s libraries after the 1990 invasion, to the libraries burned during the Bosnian War, to the Taliban closing most of the libraries in Kabul and burning the books.

In the U.S. we don’t really talk about burning books, but some people are once again talking about banning books. Many books that were required reading for me in high school—and I grew up in a more conservative era. In response, I’ll point to this anecdote from The Library Book. One of the librarians at Central Library began her library career as a teenager in Mount Vernon, N.Y. (not far, as it happens, from where I grew up) She told Susan that the head librarian shelved “dangerous” books (i.e. sexual) in a locked metal cage in the basement. The girl figured out where the key was stored, and during her breaks she read these books—read them all by the time she graduated from high school.

The new film WOMEN TALKING is based on the 2018 novel of the same name, and it’s earned two well-deserved Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. The story itself is remarkable. While the dialogue is fiction, the events leading up to the “women talking” are based on a true story. A story that seems especially harrowing once you realize it took place as recently as 2010.

As the film opens, an unseen female narrator describes it as both a Doomsday tale and a call to prayer. “This story ends before you were born,” she says, and we don’t yet know to whom she is speaking. “What follows is an act of female imagination.”

A group of women have gathered in the hayloft of a neighbor’s barn to decide their future. They live in an isolated religious community, although they have no idea where it is. They’ve never been shown a map and have no formal education. What they have is each other, but their discussions are heated, angry, and full of questions..

The women have less than two days to reach a decision, before the return of the men. The men are in the city posting bail for their own brethren: eight accused of rape and sexual abuse. Meanwhile, the women sit on overturned milk pails, discussing their options:

1. Stay and Do Nothing (except forgive)
2. Stay and Fight
3. Leave  

These sexual assaults had gone on for several years. The dozens of victims range in age from about five to sixty-five. Sprayed with a livestock sedative as they slept, they awakened to bruises and bloodied sheets. It could be God punishing them for their sins, explained Peters, the Elder; or the devil at work; or merely their wild female imaginations. In the end, Salome (Claire Foy), a victim and mother of a much younger victim, caught one of the men in the act and tried to kill him. He implicated the other men, and Peters called in the police.

Because the women can’t read or write, Ona (Rooney Mara), who is pregnant, has asked August (Ben Whishaw) to record the minutes of their meeting and their votes. August has recently returned to the community as a schoolteacher to the boys. Years before, he was forced to leave the community with his parents, who were ex-communicated. August, as we learn, has always loved Ona, and she, perhaps, him. He’s a sensitive soul (deemed too sensitive and possibly effeminate by the other men), while Ona is considered an odd duck, even though what we see is a woman both luminous and extraordinarily fair-minded. The Do Nothing option is quickly rejected by a majority of the woman, and a Do Nothing woman returns to her home. Eight women (three, still teenagers) remain. Two grandmothers, mothers, daughters. All victims.

The Real Life Story. In Bolivia, South America, between 2007-2009, more than 130 women and girls were raped in their ultraconservative Mennonite community. The elders became suspicious and followed one of the men at night, caught him in the act, and turned him into the Bolivian authorities. The victims caused a sensation when they testified at the men’s trial in 2010; ultimately eight men were convicted and given 25-year sentences.  

Back in the hayloft, the women bicker and rage and sometimes laugh. We get a sense of the lives they’ve led—apart from the assaults. When one woman suggests they ask the men to leave, Agata (Judith Ivey), who is a grandmother, points out that they’ve never asked the men for a single thing. Not for the salt to be passed or a moment alone or to open a curtain or “to put your hand on the small of my back as I try again, for the 12^th or 13^th time, to push a baby out of my body.” The women break out laughing as she concludes, “Isn’t it interesting that the one and only request the women would make would be for them to leave?”

As gripping as the dialogue is, the film is not all “women talking”. There are glimpses of a beautiful landscape, children playing, the night sky. The women would rather not leave. It’s all they’ve ever known. Their faith is strong. Their discussions are spiritual as well as practical. If they leave, will they be denied entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven? If they stay, could they ever forgive their rapists? If they leave, can the boy children come with them? At what age is it too late for a boy to un-learn his conditioning? In the end, their faith guides them. They want to keep their faith, they want to be allowed to think, and they want to protect their children. Anything less would be putting themselves on a collision course with violence.

Miriam Toews, who wrote the novel, grew up in a Mennonite community in Canada and left when she was eighteen. She’d written a number of novels when she heard about the Bolivian women. “I needed to write about these women,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. “I could have been one of them.”

An American journalist living in Bolivia at the time reported on the trial in TIME magazine. Jean Friedman-Rudovsky said she was still haunted by the story several years later and wanted to write a follow-up piece. What she found, after moving in with a host family, was devastating. The women had been denied counseling, the rationale being that they were passed out during the attacks and wouldn’t remember them. The victims were also told to forgive their rapists or face eternal damnation. What’s more, incest was prevalent throughout the colony and the rapes had not stopped.

Perhaps that’s one reason why Toews in her novel and Sarah Polley in her adapted screenplay refer to the story of women talking to decide their own fate as “an act of female imagination.”

Looking ahead to the challenges of the new year—hostile weather patterns, divisive politics, the deadly covid wave in China—the movie A Man Called Otto offers a two-hour reprieve. Life is not without problems, but they’re very personal and revolve around one exceptionally cranky older man—recently widowed and forcibly retired—and his interactions with a few neighbors and people in his community. It’s a drama, but one with lots of laughs, and it’s sentimental in the best of ways. In other words, a nice way to begin the New Year.

We first meet Otto (Tom Hanks) in a store buying a length of rope. It’s so he can hang himself, but we don’t know this yet. All we know is that he’s extremely ticked off that the store is going to charge him the price of six feet of rope when he only needs five and that the cashier ringing up his order is one unlucky person. Back at home, because he detests waste, Otto arranges for the electric company to shut off his power before stringing up the noose. He almost succeeds with his plan, but then there’s a commotion outside his window that propels him outside.

Some new neighbors? This doesn’t improve Otto’s misanthropic attitude one bit. The woman, Marisol (Mariana Trevino), is everything he is not. She’s exuberantly warm, friendly, and very pregnant, and worse still, she’s married to a “nitwit” (Otto’s word). Also, they have two young daughters in tow. Soon the couple is knocking on Otto’s door for advice, to borrow a ladder, for a ride to the ER, and even for some child-sitting. For Otto, these are unwelcome intrusions. He’s determined to join his wife, who has died, and there will be other suicide attempts gone awry, arguments with his neighbors, and run-ins with the real estate company that wants to buy up the modest neighborhood of identical row houses where Otto lives. Something’s gotta give, as the saying goes, and that something is a someone and it’s Otto.

This film is a remake of the popular Swedish film A Man Called Ove (2015), which was based on the best-selling Swedish novel of the same name. The American version is set somewhere in the Midwest, but people are people everywhere. Sad-sacks, the misunderstood, the sick or dying–and their opposites. As good as Tom Hanks is in the film, it’s Mariana Trevino as Marisol who bursts with life and steals every scene that she’s in.

A series of short flashbacks shows us Otto as a young man (Truman Hanks, Tom’s son in real life with wife Rita Wilson). Young Otto is socially awkward with few prospects, but he has the good fortune to meet the lovely Sonya, who sees something special in him and marries him.

Most of us have probably known at least one or two ‘Ottos,’ although maybe not quite as extreme. Otto, through his backstory, is a reminder that people’s behavior is often a symptom of problems or sadness we know nothing about. Otto and his neighbors are everyday people with nothing in common except their community. But community, as it turns out, is not just a noun—it’s a verb. An active, miraculous verb when it’s put to good use.

And with that thought, let the New Year begin.

Long before the Capitol insurrection, long before the War in Ukraine, long before our nail-biting mid-term elections, Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh were two long-dead artists who were beloved throughout much of the world. That has not changed. Much has changed in the world, but not that.

Frida Kahlo’s image is just about everywhere you go in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a 16^th century city with cobblestone streets and a cathedral that looks like a fairytale. When I visited in early November, the city’s Day of the Dead celebrations had just ended. The decorations were still up, but even when they’re not, Frida lives on. The artist and feminist icon is a year-round presence in shops and galleries and restaurants.

Day of the Dead is a joyous celebration, even if the skeleton figures you see around San Miguel—decorating buildings, for sale in various shops, roaming the streets on stilts—seem somewhat macabre despite their fancy clothes. There’s no escaping death but isn’t it ‘loverly’ to imagine the people we leave behind setting aside time to remember us. For the good things we did, for the pleasure of our company, for simple kindnesses.

And then there’s Frida, a woman more famous in death than in life. An artist who’s celebrated throughout the year in countless ways by millions of admirers. It’s not just her distinctive paintings they admire. It’s what she went through—what she lived through—before dying too young at forty-seven. Late last year, in 2021, Frida’s self-portrait “Diego and I” sold for $34.9 million in New York City, the highest price paid for a painting by a Latin American artist. She was married to the famous muralist Diego Rivera, but her fame has long since eclipsed his.

Frida could’ve been a doctor. At eighteen, she was riding the bus home from university in Mexico City when her bus collided with a trolly car. A metal handrail shot through her hip and came out the other side. After three weeks in the hospital and three months at home recuperating in a body cast, she gave up on the idea of being a doctor. Instead, she taught herself to paint.

Resilience. A year before her death, she arrived by ambulance for her first solo exhibit in Mexico City. Hobbled by her earlier accident and thirty subsequent operations, she held court from her four-poster bed. Frida embraced life despite all her pain—both physical and emotional. It was just three years after her bus accident that she asked Diego Rivera for artistic advice; he in turn courted her, visiting her weekly at her parents’ house. He was twenty years older, and his many affairs broke her heart, but she seems to have found some solace in her own affairs, with men and woman. Still, by all accounts, the couple had a deep bond and love for one another. They divorced in 1939 and remarried the following year.

One-of-a-kind Style. Frida had this, but she cultivated it. Her husband was tall and heavy. She was petite, with a stunted right foot and a limp as result of polio as a child. She chose to wear long, brightly colored Mexican folk dresses with elaborate hair accessories that were often adorned with flowers or fruit. She sported a unibrow on her pretty face and sometimes the hint of a mustache. Her sense of fashion concealed her disability, but it also empowered her. Of her 143 paintings, 55 were self-portraits that reflected her physical or emotional pain, but also her resilience and her appreciation of life. Today she inspires fashion designers as well as girls who like to dress up like Frida while viewing exhibits of her work.

“I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better.” Frida Kahlo

Vincent van Gogh died before Frida was born. He lived in a different century on a different continent, but he, too, has an infatuated fan base, and it’s not just because of his distinctive paintings. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, established in 1973, reports two million visitors a year and even more to its website. His most famous painting “The Starry Night”—valued at about $100 million—hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It was purchased in 1941, but midwesterners ‘discovered’ him first. In 1922, the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum bought an 1887 “Self-Portrait.” The next four van Goghs were also bought by public museums in the midwest. In 1971, the singer/songwriter Don McLean wrote the song “Vincent” when he was a struggling musician, and it became one of his greatest hits. By 1990, Vincent’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” painted in 1890 shortly after he left the mental asylum, sold for $86 million. There have been at least four major feature films about Vincent’s life, beginning with Lust for Life in 1956. For the last two years, a travelling “Immersive Van Gogh” exhibit has wowed millions with its fantastical light show that explores his life and work.

It’s too bad Vincent didn’t live to see any of this. He took up painting at twenty-seven, having failed at several other professions. He lived an impoverished life. He had few friends, apart from his younger brother Theo. Plagued by mental demons, he cut off one ear, spent a chunk of time in a mental asylum, and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at thirty-seven, his work virtually unknown. But his legacy, thanks in large part to Theo’s widow Jo Bonger-van Gogh and an increasingly adoring public, lives on. Two thousand paintings, drawings, and sketches, plus hundreds of letters, mainly written to his brother Theo:  

I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is within me a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corners, I see drawings and pictures.”

Our collective admiration for Frida and Vincent shows that we have more in common than we are different, even in the U.S. where battles still rage over our divisive politics. We’re alike because we applaud one-of-a-kind talent and appreciate the hard work it takes to cultivate it. We champion individuals who work hard to overcome their disabilities; we better understand the complexity of mental illness, in part because one in five adults suffer from some form of it during their lifetime (according to the National Alliance of Mental Illness). For all these reasons, and because their paintings touch our souls in myriad ways, we give to Frida and Vincent the life we wish they could have had here on Earth.

Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane. So says the flyer pasted to the side of a mailbox in downtown Chicago. Joy sees it after she stumbles out of a creepy-looking back-alley abortion clinic, unable to go through with the procedure. The year is 1969.

This is a feature film, not a documentary, but “The Jane Collective” was a real underground organization that helped women get safe abortions—and the all-important aftercare. (A documentary The Janes was released by HBO in June.)

Joy (a terrific Elizabeth Banks) is happily married to Will, who’s just made partner at his law firm, and they have a fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte. Joy is a traditional stay-at-home mom but sometimes edits her husband’s law briefs because, as he tells her, “You make me sound like Clarence Darrow.” Joy is very happy to be expecting a second child, until she develops congestive heart failure and the only way to reverse it is through “therapeutic termination” of the pregnancy. Barring that, she has a 50/50 chance of survival. Her doctor says she’ll need hospital board approval to terminate. She goes to the meeting bearing a tray of homemade cookies. The all-male board treats her as if she isn’t there. When they are told she might have a 50/50 chance of survival, that’s good enough for them. “Is there any number that would sway you?” Joy asks, but her question falls on deaf ears.

At home, Joy tells her husband she’s not ready to die. She still has much she wants to accomplish, including being there for Charlotte. Her husband, although upset, doesn’t have any answers. He’s always been a rule-follower.

Joy’s doctor tells her there’s another option: convince two psychiatrists she’s suicidal. Yes, she can do that, she tells him, but one of the psychiatrists doesn’t believe her. Plan B is to fall down a staircase. “It worked for me,” the receptionist at a doctor’s office tells her. Joy can’t quite bring herself to do that, which is how she ends up at a back-alley abortion clinic, unbeknownst to Will, and ultimately—unbeknownst to Will—calls Jane.

The real Jane Collective started up in 1969, when abortion was generally illegal in all but four states. This volunteer network consisted of working women, stay-at-home moms, and students, some of whom had used the service themselves and joined the cause. In the movie, Joy joins the cause and trains herself to do the procedure. “You could have been a nurse,” the abortion doctor tells her after she performs her first procedure. “I could have been a doctor,” she replies.

In May 1972, the Janes were raided by a Chicago homicide detective who came looking for the abortion doctor but found only women. As in the movie, some of the real Janes had trained themselves to do the procedure after discovering that a doctor they’d hired was actually only a medic who’d served in the Korean War. This enabled them to provide more abortions at a much lower cost or even for free. In the beginning, most of the women who came to them were affluent. Later on, many poorer women sought them out. Seven Janes spent a night in jail and were still awaiting trial eight months later when their case was thrown out because the Supreme Court had decided Roe v. Wade, making abortion legal in all fifty states. In any case, the women had proven hard to prosecute. On the way to jail, they’d swallowed their ‘clients’ names/addresses ripped off index cards; additionally, the DA couldn’t find anybody who wanted to testify against the Janes—they’d performed about 11,000 abortions without a single fatality.

In the film, the leader of the pack is Virginia (Sigourney Weaver, also terrific), an older woman who’s fought for causes all her life. In real life, the founder was a student at the University of Chicago who helped an almost-suicidal friend obtain an abortion. Not long after, another woman called. Then another, and another and . . . Overwhelmed, she conceived the idea for the Jane Collective in her dorm room. At the time, Cook County Hospital in Chicago had a septic abortion ward that was always full of women who’d had botched abortions–as did many hospitals across the country.

Despite the subject matter, Call Jane is an entertaining film. It’s a drama filled with some funny moments (just like any real life) and it doesn’t feel preachy. Joy is a conservative and extremely likeable character, and she initially tells Virginia she disapproves of what the collective is doing after she meets a young woman who seems to be using the service as birth control—her married boss keeps footing the bill.

The movie finished filming last year, well before the Supreme Court decision in June that overturned Roe v. Wade. If I’d seen a movie like this a few years ago, I would have thought, wow, what an amazing thing these women did, and thank goodness the sneaking around is over and all women have access to a safe procedure if they need one. There are those who disagree, those who believe the life of a fetus is as important—or more important—than the life of the mother.

My hope is that many people from both sides will see this film and discuss it. Reasonable minds can disagree and still agree on ways to see another’s point of view and compromise. Sex isn’t going away; unplanned or unwanted pregnancies are inevitable, even with birth control; medical emergencies sometimes threaten the life of a pregnant mother; rape and incest are as old as mankind.

As a woman and citizen of the United States living in the 21^st century, what I find totally unacceptable is that a woman’s right to an abortion—or not—is now a decision left to each state. It means that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not equal for all women in these United States of America.