You’ve hit lay-off time in this shrinking economy and you’re sick of of waiting to be wanted. You’ve always been an executive but your job has been abolished and there don’t seem to be any new ones out there with your name on them.  You’ve always been a journalist but newspapers, if not folding, are slicing staff down to the bone. You’ve always been a good salesman but nobody’s buying and a lot of companies where you had contacts aren’t selling enough to hire anyone new. 

It isn’t fair!  No, it isn’t, but it’s reality at this point in the 21^st Century.  Life’s not a beach, at least not one that you can sit on with no income.  You’ve called everyone you know, scanned the want ads and on-line job boards daily, sent out numerous resumes.  “It takes 8-9 months,” runs the conventional wisdom.

It seems you’re busy searching all the time but you feel intrinsically passive.  Something inside is beginning to writhe in frustration.  You want to spread your wings and fly.  You feel like you have to be practical.  You’ve always dreamed of being an entrepreneur but you’re not quite ready for that, whether because of lack of money or lack of experience.

The old saying, “Do what you love and the money will follow” isn’t so pie-in-the-sky as it sounds.  You probably were already doing it.  Whatever you studied in school, whatever jobs you held probably drew on some element of your affinities.  The more you can use the things you like and do well, the better you’ll do at anything.  Start from there and you’ll widen that road until it gets you where you want to go.

Example:  Dana was a journalist who couldn’t find a writing job but had a never-used degree in education.  She taught an arts journalism class at The Learning Annex, an alternative school, and always made it a practice to go out socially and professionally to almost anything to which she was invited that appealed to her.  One day, sitting around a friend’s pool with a group of women she barely knew, she heard one raving about a class she’d taken at an adults-only college.  Dana sent her resume to the dean and was called in for an interview. 

“I don’t think many of our students would be interested in your journalism class,” said the Dean as the interview wound down, “but we do need someone to teach our Film Appreciation Class.  That teacher just quit.”  Although Dana had never taught that or even studied it, she was something of a film buff, had reviewed film and knew a lot of people in that industry.  When the Dean found out Dana knew more about Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” than she did, she hired Dana on the spot.  Dana found a nice salary, students she loved who loved her back and creative satisfaction in a field she never dreamed of entering..  All from getting out there with an open mind and initiative.

Make a list of things you love, things you’re good at and get out there, either as a volunteer or a part-timer.  Do things on spec.  Your passion, curiosity and persistence will open doors you never dreamed existed.

JUNO

Ellen Page as Juno 

            Screenwriter Diablo Cody has a penchant for evocative names, beginning with her own nom de plume and continuing with the name of her title character in this year’s well-deserved Oscar-winner for Best Original Screenplay.  In ancient Roman mythology, Juno is the Goddess of Fertility. 

             Very few films about teen-agers have universal appeal but Cody’s does, thanks to her witty dialogue and her compassionate fresh take on the universal dilemma of a pregnant teen-ager and how she deals with it.

            Ellen Page, an Oscar nominee for the name role, brings a flippant self-assured edge to a role that she could be too pretty to pull off.  Even her melt-down when she finds the adoptive parents she’s hand-picked (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) are on the brink of a melt-down of their own slashes her tears with furious bewilderment..

            “I don’t know what kind of a girl I am,” says Juno and Cody, who did her post-grad at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop while moonlighting as an exotic dancer, shows how she uses what her mind and body have learned to flesh out this story.

            A guy to watch is the father of Juno’s child, high school classmate Paulie Bleeker, played by Michael Cera, whose stork-long legs flash by in yellow jogging shorts and whose grave innocent face masks the fine mind and warm heart with which Juno fell in love.

            Director Jason Reitman never condescends to his kids or sends them up, treating them like who they are, real people of a young age.

            Make this movie work for you by remembering the humanity of people you’re dealing with at either end of the age spectrum. Delve for what life has leant your creativity and, if you face a life-altering dilemma like Juno’s,.polish your courage.

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue  

Julian Schnabel, director

            Felled by a stroke at age 42, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of the French magazine ELLE, is left with “locked-in syndrome” in which his brilliant mind is as alert as ever but his sensuous body is completely paralyzed with one exception:  his left eye.  Like the Irish writer Christy, given an Oscar-winning portrayal by Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot”, Bauby takes what he has and weaves from it.

            In a heart-wrenching performance by Mathieu Amalric, we see him roaming his glamorous pre-stroke world like an erotic panther and, later, as a grotesque creature whose one bulging eye and drooping lip make him look like something from a horror movie.

            After being taught to spell by blinking his eyelid, Bauby composes his memoir, contrasting the images of a diving bell in which his physical body is encased and a butterfly which is his unconquerable imagination.

Adapted by Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) and shot by the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the film is melded by its director, the artist Julian Schnabel, into an experience that loses none of the horror and none of the pain while tracking all of the determination and ultimate glory and success of this remarkable man’s journey.

Beginning in his hospital room when he first wakes up, we see the blurred faces of the medical staff through his eyes as they tend him, the blunt devastating analysis of the senior doctor, the compassionate face of Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his children.  Although it’s she who visits him, Bauby yearns for his exotic mistress Ines (Agathe de La Fontaine), who says she adores him but can’t stand to see him the way he is now.  It’s equally difficult for Bauby’s aged father (Max Von Sydow) whom he has shaved tenderly.  Von Sydow conveys both the power and the anguish of a strong man wracked by his son’s disaster.  Now the caregiver is in the care of his therapists who teach him to blink and tend his needs. 

As Bauby determines to use his imagination to travel the world and create the life he loves, Schnabel and Kaminski take the camera from his body’s eye to his mind’s eye.  What he sees on the sand dunes and imagines in the sea is rivaled by his memories of Ines and the joy he takes in his children who, though saddened, are not appalled by his appearance.

As he completes “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, he tells the world his next book will be a female version of “The Count of Monte Cristo”.  Bauby’s memoir is published to rave reviews.  The novel may be alive in his head but, just ten days after the memoir is published, he dies.  His autobiographical work of power and imagination is interpreted by Schnabel, Harwood and Kaminski.

Make the movie work for you by remembering to take what happens and build on it.  Bauby’s work sets high standards. He makes life worth living by exercising imagination, cherishing memories and, above all, never relinquishing the sense of joy

Reviewing Your Life On Stage and Screen

Daniel Day-Lewis           

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney

How intriguing that the Savage siblings, Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), have both chosen theatre as a profession.  They’ve spent their lives hiding behind other peoples’ dreams as an escape or reinterpretation of their own blighted reality. 

“The Savages”, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, reveals these characters subtly and naturally without exposition. Their mother abandoned the family when they were very young and their father Lenny (a portrait of helpless rage by Philip Bosco) is at best distant and at worst, well, we never really know, but resentful and unfeeling may be just the tip of the iceberg.           

Jon is a professor of theatre, submersed in his biography of Bertolt Brecht.   Hoffman plays him with the crackling opaqueness of dry ice.  Wendy, the braver one, is an aspiring playwright, who survives through temp jobs and dubious grants.  She’s not above telling Jon she’s gotten the Gugenheim grant he’s pursued for years when, in fact, her grant comes from an award to 9/11 survivors whose work has been affected by that disaster.            “All the temps do it,” she tells Jon feistily when he outs her.  Linney brings out the vulnerability and determination  in Jenkins’ well-written character.          

Jon and Wendy are reunited by the hospitalization of Lenny, left alone since the demise of his long-time girlfriend, and suffering from early Altzheimer’s.  There’s no joy in taking care of Dad.  The siblings’ personalities are most distinctively defined in their choice of nursing homes.  Jon goes for practicality, a drab hulk near him with warm Hispanic caregivers.  Wendy picks a resortish place where she’d like to spend the week-end.Their private lives are similar.  Each has an inaccessible lover.  Wendy chooses a married man whose visits include his giant ailing St. Bernard.  Jon’s love is a Russian who can’t stay in this country without either the green card she can’t get or the marriage license Jon won’t grant.  The fences the Savage siblings have built around their emotions have been in place since childhood.                      If Lenny hasn’t brought up his kids, the very fact of their empty final reunion becomes a catharsis.  Although Jon may take the more conventional next step, Wendy’s denouement is the most satisfying. In the sly final scene she’s jogging past the city skyline followed by the rescued St. Bernard.              Making this movie work for you involves scanning the obvious next step taken by Jon and exploring the alternatives illustrated by Wendy.  Rescuing the dog and making him a permanent part of her life is a big baby step on the road to commitment.  Jenkins astutely quits while she’s ahead and there’s nothing too scary about musing over her options. 

Reviewing Your Life On Stage and Screen

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.  We hope you’ll add your comments to reviewing your life on stage and screen.  

THE AFRICAN QUEEN

  Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart

            A wonderful adventure story but an even more unique love story, this 1951 classic, based on C. S. Forester’s novel and directed by John Huston, pits religious spinster Rose (Katherine Hepburn) against hard-drinking boat captain Charley (Humphrey Bogart).  Heading down river in Africa away from the Germans during World War I, their flight is necessarily slow, giving the pair plenty of time to overcome their initial antipathy.  Thrown together in enforced solitude for days, they gradually get to know each other.   

            Rose believes she can only appreciate someone like herself and her brother, someone spiritual with the Victorian moral standards that were drummed into them.  Charley has strength and the kind of integrity that gave birth to those Victorian standards.  Unlike Rose, he doesn’t think there’s anything bad about feeling good.

            In this world, we look for soul mates, filling out questionnaires on E-Harmony to see how we can bypass those strangers we might encounter and find someone exactly like us.

            Opposites finally attract in “The African Queen” and I’ve seen how that worked in my own family.  My parents were childhood friends who lost touch until my father, a college basketball coach, spotted a magazine article written by my mother, a psychiatric social worker.  They got together and got married, much to the anxiety of my mother’s mother who thought they were too different to be happy.  But my gregarious Dad brought more people to the house “than I ever would”, in Mother’s words.  And she helped him with business projects and introduced him to people in her world that he would never have known and who would never have reluctantly acknowledged their pleasure in this handsome, eager man with his fun-loving personality. When he died, the funeral home was packed.with his “boys” and the people of the town who knew they would miss his bright smile and ebullient presence on their Main Street.

            Don’t disdain your opposite.  Give him room, if not house room.  See what he brings out in you.  Appreciate what you can do for him.  He may not be your soul mate but he may be the complementary half of yourself.

REVIEWING YOUR LIFE ON STAGE AND SCREEN:

INTRODUCTION

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.  We hope you’ll add your comments to reviewing your life on stage and screen

Keira Knightley and James McAvoy

   Some viewers call this movie a romance, others call it a downer.  What novelist Ian McEwen is after here and what director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton faithfully portray is guilt.   An imaginative child’s resentment and fantasizing highlight the prejudices of the British class system to condemn an innocent boy to prison. 

Like the novel, the film has three parts.  In the first, set in the opulent country home of the Tallis family, 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), already a writer of plays and stories, sees the growing attraction and ultimate love-making of her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and the housekeeper’s son, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy).  When she comes across a young cousin Lola (Juno Temple) wrapped in a man’s arms in a dark wood, she accuses Robbie of rape and he is sent to prison.

Part Two follows Robbie across the grim battlefields of France during World War II just before the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk.  In the novel, it’s one of the most powerful depictions of that war you’re likely to encounter.  Wright depicts the war surreally, perhaps through the eyes of the feverish Robbie.  Girls in school uniformas, each neatly shot through the temple, lie in an orchard like sarcophaguses with marble faces.  On the beach at Dunkirk, the camera pans in one long brilliant shot across squadrons running naked into the surf or singing like a choir on a platform.  The choreography includes horses being shot, a ferris wheel slowly spinning against the sky, a soldier apparently sunbathing.  It has the fictional quality of Briony’s stories.  Part Two cuts between the war in France, Cecilia’s life as a nurse in London and the life of Briony, now 18 and played by Romola Garai, as a student nurse there unforgiven by her sister.

Part III portrays Briony in old age, played by Vanessa Redgrave, telling the story of the lovers, first as she wrote about them giving them the life she wanted them to have and confessing her guilt and remorse.  As the film ends, she tells the final truth about Cecilia and Robbie.

“Atonement” is the story of how an artist uses and mis-uses the truth and how some guilts last a lifetime. 

Making this movie work for you.  We each dream of atoning in our own way for our mistakes.  What remains with us after the movie ends is the importance of doing that, the search for how and the resolution to take what happens to us and build on it.