capsule reviews

a very murray christmas, baby face, possession

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A Very Murray Christmas (Sofia Coppola, 2015)

There’s not really enough to this one hour Christmas special for a standalone Sofia Coppola post. But it’s very charming! The premise of this special is that Bill Murray has to do a live television Christmas special at the Carlyle, but everything’s shut down because of a massive blizzard and none of his guests can show up. Then the power goes out and Murray (and everybody else stuck at the hotel) has to make do. Which isn’t so bad because the Carlyle is an extremely good hotel.

The casting is a fun mix of celebrities playing themselves (Chris Rock as Chris Rock, and so on) and celebrities playing goofy little bit parts (Michael Cera as an agent who refers to Murray as “Murricane”). In some ways what this reminded me most of was an old movie musical—like Holiday Inn¹—where a thin premise is basically an excuse to leap from one song to the next, from one known charismatic performer to the next.²

Anyway, like I said, there isn’t really much you can say about this special, it’s not really intended to be put up to heavy scrutiny, but it’s a good time. It is tremendously self-indulgent and it has no bigger reason to exist than giving Bill Murray a chance to show off his voice and wear some antlers.³ But then, when you think of all the movies that aren’t doing that… not even the antlers!

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Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

The pre-Code movie to end them all, I suppose.⁴ Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman who, on the advice of a professor and also Friedrich Nietzsche, seduces her way to the top of a bank—chewing up men, spitting them out, ruining lives, inspiring murder-suicides, and so on.⁵ This movie was best known to me for years for a scene where Stanwyck pours hot coffee all over a creepy guy’s hand. It did not lose anything by being so long anticipated:

Baby Face is a fun movie in a “I support women’s wrongs” kind of way. It is genuinely satisfying to watch Stanwyck, who starts the movie being peddled by her own father, figure out how to turn the tables on the men around her. And I feel like it lays the groundwork for a lot of Stanwyck’s great screwball roles—maybe particularly the con artist she plays in Ball of Fire. But it’s also a little repetitive watch Stanwyck do her thing. She would get to explore this kind of dynamic in better movies.

I did not hate the ending of this movie, incidentally, though I think a lot of people do? Or at least that was what I got from looking at Letterboxd. There are only a handful of ways a story like this can end and Baby Face opted for what was, to me, the least depressing option.

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Possession (A.S. Byatt, 1990)

I picked this book up after Byatt died, since I’d only ever read some minor books of hers and I thought I should probably read one of her bigger books. Possession follows two academics, Maud and Roland, as they figure out a past love affair between two poets who were previously thought not to be associated with each other. Byatt goes the extra mile in depicting this scholarly pursuit by recreating the source material Maud and Roland both discover and study. (There are quite a number of other subplots going on in this book, but this is the main thread.)

I had two big thoughts while reading Possession. The first was:

• “Wow, I love this book!”

The second was:

• “Wow, I hate this book!”

Having finished it… these remain my twin reactions. There is a lot I love about Possession. But I find Byatt’s ventriloquism of the past very unconvincing. And since a lot of Possession is made up of this ventriloquism—on Byatt’s mimicking of nineteenth-century poems, and nineteenth-century letters, and nineteenth-century journals—finding it unconvincing is a problem.⁶ I found myself trying to figure out if the flaws in her pastiches of nineteenth century writing were actually important and deliberate—a way of saying the past ultimately is past and beyond us—but I don’t think they are. Nobody could possibly put in the work Byatt does here while making it intentionally flawed in this way.

Possession reminds me a lot of Robertson Davies’s Cornish trilogy, particularly The Rebel Angels, and I mean that in good ways (the simultaneously lush, cozy, and shabby aesthetic it conveys; its genuine affection for the life of the mind and the university) and in bad ways (various prejudices are on display in ways that are often distracting).⁷ Reading Possession it is easy to make a running list of what A.S. Byatt disdains: Americans, feminists, new wealth, and so on.⁸

But is all this a problem? I don’t really know, or at least can’t make up my mind. Because there is a warmth and kindness to Possession, too, and when reading it I did reflect that it’s funny there are not a lot of books that are fundamentally kind in this way, especially about academics. This book really is about loving books and it takes that love quite seriously. The way Byatt works to bring everything to a reconciliation that does not feel cheap or hokey is really masterful. It’s not snide about the people it’s about and it does not suggest that they’re wasting their time caring so much about these long dead people. If only its nineteenth-century writers were not quite so fond of mentioning that they were writing in the nineteenth century, I could probably see my way to loving it.

1. Speaking of movies that feature the song “White Christmas,” I did spend the special on tenterhooks waiting to see if George Clooney was going to sing it. He doesn’t! I couldn’t believe it.

2. The obvious point of reference is the variety show, but I don’t remember those being plotted in the same way… then again, I’m not sure if I ever saw a variety show or if I just saw The Muppet Show.

3. I feel that I went into too much detail on Bill Murray’s face previously to be allowed to do it again, but the moment he turns toward the camera with the antlers on his face, I cracked up. He’s just an inherently funny guy.

4. This Letterboxd review is good about how Baby Face illustrates the limits of “pre-Code” cinema.

5. I believe there’s a Lana song about this career path:

6. For instance, here’s a passage from one letter:

For all I am is a nineteenth-century gentleman plumb in the midst of smoky London—and what is peculiar to him is to know just how much stretches away from his vanishing pin-point of observation—before and around and after—whilst all the time he is what he is, with his whiskered visage and his shelves full of Plato and Feuerbach, St Augustine and John Stuart Mill.

Here’s a diary:

“I have always read it differently.”

“How, Cousin Christabel?”

“As a tale of female emulation of male power—she wanted not him but his magic—until she found that magic served only to enslave him—and then, where was she, with all her skills?”

And so on.

7. An example of what I mean—Maud keeps her hair covered up because she was booed at a feminist conference for having such beautiful hair. (This comes up twice.) When I read that I instantly remembered one particularly goofy passage from The Rebel Angels where our heroine Maria reflects on her own good looks:

This inner confusion plagued me night and day. I felt that it was destroying my health, but every morning, when I looked in the mirror expecting to see the ravages of a tortured spirit etched into my face in crow’s-feet and harsh lines, I was forced to admit that I was looking as well as I ever had in my life, and I will not pretend that I wasn’t glad of it. Scholar I may be, but I refuse to play the game some of the scholarly women in the University play, and make the worst of myself, dress as if I stole clothes out of the St Vincent de Paul box, and have my hair cut in a dark cellar by a madman with a knife and fork.

That’s right Maria! Don’t let the ugly girls get you down!

8. Sometimes she will express a kind of disdain for something she herself has actually done in another part of the book—as when she takes a moment to comment on how “novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer.”

And here’s A.S. Byatt about fifty pages before that sick little burn:

He ordered lavishly, a huge platter of fruits de mer to start with, a mound of shells and whiskers and stony carapaces, surrounded by seaweed on a metal pedestal, followed by a huge boiled sea-spider or araignée, a hot angry scarlet, crusted with bumps and armoured crestings, waving a multiplication of feelers. He was provided with an armoury of implements for this feast, like a mediaeval torture chamber, pincers and grippers, prods and corkscrew skewers.

I think a defense of this specific move can probably be mounted (she is saying that the pleasures of food and sex are easier to replicate than those of reading)—but when I read it I really only thought: what? that’s you!