Tag Archives: movies

November 7, 2011 · 2:17 pm

Film Review: “Page Eight” (2011)

I had been looking forward to seeing “Page Eight”, the BBC film which garnered some good reviews earlier this summer in the British press when it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and which aired last night on PBS’ “Masterpiece Contemporary”. With a cast of accomplished actors that includes Bill Nighy, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon, and Judy Davis, and a plot that promised to pit the different branches of British intelligence against each other, the package sounded too good to resist. Unfortunately, after unwrapping all of said package’s eye-catching trappings, one is left with something so utterly muted and boring, that one wonders how one is perceived in the eyes of the giver.

The somewhat complicated plot involves a memo in which we Yanks have been doing some rather bad things, and Downing Street is seeking to cover this up as it moves toward replacing MI-5 and MI-6 with something more akin to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The film then revolves around who is doing this, and why, and efforts to either release or stifle this information. Normally this would be a recipe for something at least marginally interesting. Unfortunately, from the get-go the film never really “goes”.

As is inevitably the case in these sorts of films, there is a great deal more talking than action, which is not necessarily a bad thing when it is handled well. The “House of Cards” series, for example, involved complicated political intrigue and lots of conversation, and never dragged in the way that “Page Eight” does. The languid pacing of people standing around, speaking sotto voce about how tired they are simply makes the viewer – or at least this one, at 9pm on a Sunday – rather tired himself.

When you have a cast of the quality of that assembled for a project like this, who are capable of some extraordinary feats of acting, creating this kind of group, it is hoped, will lead to fireworks on screen. Yet most of the actors here seem to be searching about for some sort of direction as to who exactly they are supposed to be. Michael Gambon is killed off fairly early on, regrettably, while Ralph Fiennes does what he usually does post-”Schindler’s List” which is to stand about trying to seem menacing – while looking more like he is about 5 foot 8 instead of his actual 6 feet tall.

Bill Nighy was more interesting as a vampire in “Underworld” than in this film, which he has to carry as the lead. The normally-adept Judy Davis can’t seem to decide which sort of British accent she wants to emulate from scene to scene, and sometimes from line to line. There is however, a beautifully shot sequence between the two of them which begins with Davis striding down a dark, London street in a scarlet coat, to meet Nighy in a restaurant for an incredibly tense conversation. Unfortunately there is not enough of that to keep either the actors or the viewers particularly interested in what happens next.

And then there is the dialogue, which is a mixed bag at best. Sometimes, the back-and-forth about politics and espionage starts to approach the level of crackle that you would hope for in a production of this quality, but just when you think they are about to pull something interesting into the film, it seems to fall back into soap opera writing.I quite literally winced at one point, when Rachel Weisz’ character turns to Bill Nighy’s and says, “I thought I’d never learn to feel again.” I had to double-check the clicker and make sure I was not watching an episode of “EastEnders”.

One of the more unappealing aspects of the plot was the film’s use of America as a kind of moral bogeyman.. On this side of the pond of course, particularly when filming a costume drama, we are not loathe to make the British the “bad guys”, as it were, thanks to that little unpleasantness after 1776. Yet generally speaking we do not make the British our enemies in our contemporary espionage films, but rather our allies – or at the very least our colleagues.

The fact that “Page Eight” paints Americans as being immoral, or at best amoral, and their influence as a corrupting one on the British government, is nothing new, for it has cropped up in a number of British films which I have seen in recent years. Indeed, even on my beloved television series “MI-5″, as the BBC’s “Spooks” is known in America, “The Cousins”, as the Americans are referred to, are more often treated as a potential threat rather than a helpful partner. Perhaps this is because Britain’s influence in the world is not what it was, and so certain British filmmakers feel that this is the only way they have to combat what they perceive as being America’s bad influence on their own country. And perhaps because this was a film made for a British audience, rather than an American one, it would hardly be right for me, as a non-Brit, to complain about this plot device: but there it is, all the same.

The tricky part of doing an ensemble cast of highly-skilled actors in any film, it seems to me, is to make sure that they all balance each other out so that everyone gets to shine, rather than one or two eclipsing the others, or everyone going at it in a free-for-all trying to out-do one another. Unfortunately in this film, whether because of the sluggish plotline or the sometimes chuckle-worthy dialogue, this brilliant group of players seems wasted, lost in a kind of gray funk on screen from which they can never emerge. And while there may be the occasional flicker of interest or intrigue, by the end one simply does not care what happens to any of these people, which is why the piece fails.


Rachel Weisz and Bill Nighy in “Page Eight”

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September 6, 2011 · 1:54 pm

The Courtier Reviews: “The Debt”

The British film “The Debt”, which opened here in the U.S. this weekend, is a remake of an Israeli film from a few years ago of the same name.  It deals with a great many themes, too many to address in a single blog post.  However if you are prepared, gentle reader, to challenge yourself and go see this film, you will not only find it entertaining – with plenty of Hitchcockian touches and John Le Carré thrills, punctuated by some superb acting – but you will also find it challenging, raising a number of issues for the thinking man to consider.  And one of the most fundamental of them, for this reviewer, was its frank look at the question of evil.

The film is a tale told in flashback, but not in a strictly linear fashion, meaning the viewer must actually pay attention to what is going on.  I have seen several reviewers complain about this fact but personally, I found it engaged, as Poirot would say, the little gray cells.  That the filmmaker expects his audience to use their brains seems rather refreshing in an entertainment era when the stimulation of one’s brain – let alone the assumption that the viewer has one – seems to have been abandoned in favor of using the cheap and obvious to stimulate other bodily regions.

The film begins with a book launch event, in which the daughter of Helen Mirren’s character Rachel tells a story that has had a profound impact on the main characters of the film. Stefan, David, and Rachel, three agents of the Mossad, Israel’s legendary intelligence agency, are sent to East Berlin in the 1960′s to capture Dr. Vogel, a man who is working as a gynecologist but who had previously performed human experimentation in a Nazi concentration camp.  What happens to him, and to each of them, is woven into a story that at times is very much like one of the “Bourne” series, and at times reminiscent of films such as “Munich” and “Death and the Maiden”.

At the core of “The Debt” is a sequence in which the young Israeli agents hold their man prisoner, feeding him and keeping him clean against his will, until he can be sent to Israel for trial.  The way in which each of the three reacts to the old Nazi is telling about their character.  Stefan, being older than the rest and the leader of the group, never lets the prisoner speak to him.  He has seen his like before, and says he views the doctor as an animal; he mocks and shows his contempt for Dr. Vogel and his ideology by playing and singing a kind of slag-rendition of “Deutschland, Deutschland” on the piano.

The exchanges between Dr. Vogel and Rachel, and Dr. Vogel and David, are very different from his interactions with Stefan, in part because they allow him to speak, but also because neither of them treats him as Stefan does.  And here we move into somewhat different cinematic territory from either a spy film or Holocaust film, for as I watched these sequences my mind kept going back to two reference points: “The Exorcist” and “The Third Man”.  Of course, director John Madden is not deliberately evoking either of these movies, but if the reader will indulge me, I believe he will see why I made these connections.

If you have not seen “The Exorcist” in some time, or dismiss it as mere Halloween fare, you are missing the point. Spinning heads and pea-soup vomit aside, what is truly terrifying about the film is not what takes place physically, but psychologically, in the tony Georgetown home of Regan, the possessed young girl.  The Devil *knows* things about those who are holding him prisoner, and uses his uncanny, infernal mixture of knowledge and twisted reason to try to affect the hearts and minds of his jailers.  By causing them grief or doubt, he hopes he can take advantage of their indecision.

Similarly, the famous “cuckoo clock” speech in “The Third Man”, when Orson Welles and Jospeh Cotten are on the ferris wheel, employs a kind of logic of justification for acts of evil.  Harry Lime (Welles), realizing that his old friend is no longer entirely loyal to him after having seen the evil that Harry has done, points out that during decades of strife under the Borgias and others, Italy gave rise to Michelangelo, Da Vinci, the Renaissance, and all that flowed from it, whereas under centuries of peace and harmony, the Swiss only managed to produce the cuckoo clock.  It is an over-simplification, obviously, but it raises an issue that Harry – in loco diaboli – wants his listener to consider, in an attempt to save and justify himself: is “evil” really such a bad thing?

So it is that in “The Debt”, Dr. Vogel preys on Rachel’s emotions, and on David’s doubts.   Like Father Damian Karras in “The Exorcist”, Rachel is subjected to mental torture about the fate of her mother, which causes her to lash out at the demonic doctor.  She has, in several superbly restrained scenes, literally put herself in Dr. Vogel’s hands, but even though now the tables are turned and he is in her power, he manipulates his knowledge of her in deliberately painful ways.  He wounds her even though he is physically restrained, just as was the case with Linda Blair’s character of the possessed child, Regan.

Far worse in scope is Dr. Vogel’s challenge to David, about how easy it was for the Nazis to succeed in exterminating the Jews, and whether the Jews ought not to look at their own role in how the Holocaust took place.  Earlier in the film we learnt that David lost every single member of his family in the Holocaust, and cannot open up to others about his sense of guilt as to why that happened, and why he survived and they did not. Like Harry Lime’s cuckoo clock speech, Dr. Vogel’s words to David form an infernal over-simplification of a complicated subject, and yet the words have a profound impact on David.  My Jewish readers in particular may find this exchange difficult to watch, and even as a Catholic European-American it made me squirm, mentally.  I do not know whether this bit of the script was taken from the original, Israeli version of the film, having not seen it, but it is a profoundly disturbing bit of evil to put on film.

It is of course usually the case that evil does not gain control over man through physical attack, but rather through the subtleties of the mind.  From Adam and Eve being tempted by the Serpent into committing sin, to the rotting away of human decency through our educational, cultural, and political institutions coming to embrace and celebrate selfishness over self-sacrifice, Satan does not have to actually show up, horns and all, to throw us into chaos: all he needs is to put an idea into someone’s mind, and then twist it.  As Shakespeare writes in “The Merchant of Venice”, Act I Scene iii,  ”The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

There are many good reasons to see “The Debt” – terrific suspense moments; interesting young actors whom I was not familiar with; the always-superb Helen Mirren, whose performances are much beloved of thinking men and women in this country; and so on.  It is not a perfect film, though I did not find its flaws to detract from the impact of the work. For this reviewer, the best recommendation I can make is to say it is a superb cautionary tale, showing how easy it is to allow evil to walk in and start affecting your thinking – and subsequent behavior – if you are not careful.


Helen Mirren as Rachel Singer in “The Debt”

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August 23, 2011 · 2:03 pm

Senility at the Cinema

Those who know me personally are very much aware of the fact that I rarely go to the movies, and it is extremely difficult to persuade me to see a film I have either not read about or have no interest in seeing.  This is not to say that I do not enjoy watching films – quite the contrary – but rather there is so much garbage foisted upon our screens, and so little in the way of accomplished art, that I prefer to wait until a film gathers a significant amount of well-written reviews, and then rent it so that I can enjoy and study it in the privacy of my own home.  And with my interest and extended family in Spain, the reader could be forgiven for thinking that I prefer films from that country.

Unfortunately, many of the Spanish films that have made it to these shores over the past few decades have been rubbish.  With a few notable exceptions, they mainly feature celebrations of moral relativism and depravity, or weave revisionist tales of the Spanish Civil War, where everyone on the left is some sort of martyr and everyone on the right – and particularly the Church – is evil incarnate.  Of course, how an atheist/relativist can make a logical determination as to what is good and what is evil is another question entirely, but we will leave that incongruity as it stands.

So I was rather surprised today to learn from an interview with the elderly, leftist Spanish film director Vicente Aranda that the reason contemporary Spanish cinema is so repulsively bad is because of Spanish conservatives. Yes, you read that correctly.  Despite the fact that virtually every major film coming out of Spain since the 1970′s has featured themes such as explicit sex and violence, mocking of the Church and traditional values, and the like, Aranda believes that  “the Spanish right refuses to see Spanish cinema”, that there are no Spanish intellectuals on the right, and therefore “the most important historical issue in the country, the Civil War, cannot be touched because the right thinks that a film about this issue is always leftist.”

Before we turn to these assertions, let us start with a bit of background on Aranda himself, who is what old-school conservative Catalans would call a “xarnego”. Despite living in Barcelona for most of his life, Aranda himself is not a Catalan, but a non-Catalan peasant from another part of Spain.  As you might expect, his family supported the left during the Spanish Civil War, and he briefly emigrated to Venezuela for several years due to the climate under the Franco regime that followed.

Aranda’s first film was, tellingly, about a young man from small-town Spain, who moves to Barcelona to try to enter the urban haute-bourgeoisie.  He ultimately fails, and moves to Paris, where supposedly he will be happier than with the stuck-up well-to-do in Barcelona. As my grandfather would say, “¿No quieres? No puedes.”

Although Aranda had a late start as a film director, he soon found his niche in the 1970′s as a purveyor of smut for the leftist intelligentsia, including “Clara es el Precio”, about a middle-class housewife who becomes a porn actress, “Cambio de Sexo”, about a boy who wants to have a sex change, and “La Muchacha de las Bragas de Oro”, about a right-wing writer who is seduced by his niece into committing incest.  He continued to gain in notoriety through the 1980′s and 90′s, but his more recent films, including 2007′s “Canciones de Amor en Lolita’s Club”, about twins having trysts with the same prostitute, and 2009′s “Luna Caliente”, about a man who rapes the daughter of his friend in the period of the late Franco regime, have been flops at the box office.

Aranda’s assertion that there are no intellectuals on the right in Spain is hardly worth consideration, for I doubt he could tell an intellectual from a dilettante if one bit him on the posterior.  What is truly laughable is his assertion that it is impossible to make films about the Spanish Civil War, because Spanish conservatives will not go see them.  No doubt they will not, but that is only because there is a complete lack of balance to treatment of the subject in contemporary Spanish cinema.

I am not sure what sort of cave Aranda lives in, but there have been many, many Spanish films about the Spanish Civil War made by Spanish directors in the post-Franco period, which I personally have seen over the past 20 years or so. And in every single example I have seen to date, the film in question has a leftist point of view, from “¡Ay Carmela!” and “Libertarias”, to “Las 13 Rosas” and “Los Girasoles Ciegos”. There is, in fact, a surfeit of films about what happened to Spain before, during, and after the Civil War, and all of them favor, either explicitly or implicitly, the left’s side of the story. Aranda’s assertion that it is impossible to make films about this period is ludicrous, and not borne out by the facts.

While Aranda is no doubt correct in stating that your average, conservative, church-going Spaniard does not want to see films such as the ones he himself tends to make, this is probably because such a person does not want to have to wash out their brain with bleach and a scrub brush after seeing the filth which Aranda typically puts on the screen. However, the fact that Aranda himself is increasingly proving to be a failure as a director cannot be laid at the feet of conservatives who do not want to see his films. If the new, moral relativist Spain, which Aranda and those of his ilk helped to bring about does not want to patronize his work, perhaps it is because, like most men of his age, Aranda has lost his powers.

Unlike many conservatives, I do not necessarily eschew seeing a film that has a point of view very different from my own. However, I do feel that I am perhaps a bit more intellectually prepared for what I am to be shown, even if I am still shocked by the depravity that often passes for art in the present climate. Yet what I absolutely cannot stand is the assertion that if such art is not attracting an audience, that the problem is the audience, rather than the artist himself. It seems to me that if Aranda is dissatisfied with the state of Spanish cinema, that he has only himself to blame for turning it into the unwatchable, sideshow freak of an art form that it is today – and perhaps it is high time for him to pack up and head off to the retirement home, where he belongs.


Interior of the historic Cinema Coliseum in Barcelona

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August 3, 2011 · 1:14 pm

Alfred Hitchcock and the Shadow of Faith

With today’s news of the re-discovery of Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s first credited film, we are provided with yet another opportunity to consider the impact of Catholicism on our culture.  Yesterday we looked at the personal role that a French saint played in the history of modern art.  Today we turn to the practical influence of the Faith on one of the most popular and intensely studied of all film directors, who himself just so happens to have been a Catholic.

The 1923 British silent film “The White Shadow” was the first in which the young Alfred Hitchcock, who was 24 years old at the time, was given screen credit.  He worked as the writer, assistant director, production designer, and editor of the piece, which told one of those favorite cinema tales of the good twin and the bad twin. The director, Graham Cutts, was no artiste; his job was to get as many films out as quickly as possible, on time and under budget.

The discovery only includes the first thirty minutes of the two-hour, feature-length picture, though even this is a great gift to film fans because the entire movie had been presumed to have been lost forever.  As is the case with many early films, it will require preservation due to the volatile chemicals on its surface, including the highly unstable compound, silver nitrate.  The restored portion of “The White Shadow”  will be screened on September 22nd at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Los Angeles.

At the time he worked on “The White Shadow”, Hitchcock was a practicing Catholic from a Catholic family, and had been educated at a Jesuit school. No doubt like other devout Catholics of his day and ours, he intended to settle down with a nice Catholic girl and have a nice Catholic family.  Thus, three years after the original release of  the film, Hitchcock married his long-time sweetheart and film assistant, Alma Reville, at the Brompton Oratory in London.

Lady Hitchcock converted to Catholicism prior to their marriage, and the two remained married until Sir Alfred’s death well over 50 years later.  Their only daughter Patricia went on to marry the nephew of William Cardinal O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan in 1952; they are still married today, nearly 50 years later.  One can reasonably assume that she took the example of her parents’ long marriage to heart.

Those who know better than this scrivener about cinema theory have written scores of books and articles about Hitchcock’s views on morality and religion, among other topics, and I do not mean to try to condense all of that information into a short blog post.  Nor do I mean to suggest that Hitchcock remained what we would call a “devout Catholic”: his mass attendance reportedly declined over the years, and toward the end of his life he expressed a kind of fear of the clergy, many of whom he felt were too ready to attack him for some of the films he had made.  Fraternal correction is all very well, and indeed it is the unpleasant duty of Catholics who are in a proper position to exercise it, but Hitchcock did not like it; of course, one then must raise the question, “Who does?”, but that is a topic for another day.

Whatever he may have felt toward the Church as he grew older, it is important for us to recall Hitchcock’s faith, when we view his films.  It lingers like a shadow over his work, and informs the way that he looks at himself and the world. This recall should not be an academic exercise in God-searching, like those trying to discern points in Tolkien’s fantasy writing where the author is taking his cues from Catholicism.  Rather, I suggest there is a more practical line of inquiry for those of us who live outside of the ivory towers.

Keeping Hitchcock’s Catholicism in mind is a bit like when we look at a painting or photograph, and realize that the person who created it grew up in the same neighborhood as we did.  What experiences, ideas, sensations did we experience in common, even if separated by time?  What touchstones do we hold in common, and where do we differ?  Asking such questions allows the viewer to not only come to better understand the work of an artist, but also to better understand how that work does or does not reflect the viewer’s perception of the world around him.  In the case of asking such questions of a Catholic artist, it encourages the adult Catholic to engage their understanding of the Faith more deeply, and to explore some of the questions that are raised in that artist’s work.

Thus, if in Hitchcock’s films he examines such topics as man’s inhumanity to man, broken sexuality, standing up to do good in the face of overwhelming odds, and so on, we can look at those topics in the light of what the Church teaches, for Hitchcock was very much aware of those teachings himself.  Film was his way of poking at some of these issues and trying to gain some sense of them, through artistic means.  Most of us do not have the talent or the resources to be able to do the same, of course, but the grace of intelligence allows us to do so in our minds.

Whether you are attending the re-release of “The White Shadow” this September, or watching an airing of one of Hitchcock’s more popular films like “The Birds” on television, I would ask that you keep Hitchcock’s Catholicism in mind as you enjoy his work.  At their best, Hitchcock’s stories of suspense are riveting tales, beautifully acted and terrific to look at, and they can be enjoyed for the pure joy of escapism from the everyday that cinema provides.  Yet if you watch them keeping to hand a kind of Catholic lens with which to examine how the great director viewed the world, you will get even more out of the experience.

A scene from the newly rediscovered “The White Shadow” (1923)

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July 14, 2011 · 3:34 pm

God and the Discothèque

Today being Bastille Day, as I have every year for many years I mark the occasion not by celebration, but by wearing black and stopping in at church to pray for my ancestors who were killed by godless leftists in the French Revolution. It is rather fitting, then, that tonight the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown, named for the 19th century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, will be screening writer-director Whit Stillman’s “Last Days of Disco”.   Both de Tocqueville and Stillman regret the cheapening of traditional values in their own communities and times, but each holds out hope that – in America at least – through the influence of religion such values are by no means dead and buried, despite the best efforts of moral relativism.

In his thinking and writing de Tocqueville – whose parents had had to flee the guillotine – was committed to the restoration of order and tradition in France, so that the ideals of classical liberalism he believed in could grow naturally, rather than through violent means. Stillman, working in the arts rather than public policy, has been chronicling the decline of the urban haute bourgeoisie of which he is a member, as ideals become cheapened through association with and the ascendancy of the seedier side of life. Both in their respective worlds witnessed an erosion of the high value formerly placed on good moral judgement, true talent, and even personal style, and its replacement by an embrace of lowest common denominator pandering.

In “Democracy in America” de Tocqueville (himself a Catholic), noted that Catholicism was flourishing in the United States, alongside many other religions, which in conjunction made sure that while religion did not rule the state, it informed the way people behaved toward one another and in public life.  He was pleased to note that, as of 1831 anyway, worship of the state had not trumped the worship of God in the United States, as he had witnessed in France. The accompanying siren song of libertine moral relativism was kept muffled in America by the fact that there was a common moral good, upheld by religious people as being more important than the good of the state:

Hitherto no one, in the United States, has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible with a view to the interests of society – an impious adage, which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all the tyrants of future ages. Thus while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.

Stillman of course is working in the arts rather than political theory. Yet in “Last Days of Disco” as in his other films, Stillman casts an accusing glance at the embrace of libertine behavior.   What are supposedly well-brought-up girls like his two central characters of Charlotte and Alice (played, respectively, by Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny) doing mixing with men who embrace moral relativism over virtue and self-sacrifice? In probably the most well-known part of the film, Stillman has the idealistic young attorney Josh (Matt Keeslar) criticize the message of amorality which he perceives as integral to Walt Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp” in discussion with Charlotte and Alice:

There is something depressing about it, and it’s not really about dogs. Except for some superficial bow-wow stuff at the start, the dogs all represent human types, which is where it gets into real trouble. Lady, the ostensible protagonist, is a fluffy blond Cocker Spaniel with absolutely nothing on her brain. She’s great-looking, but – let’s be honest – incredibly insipid. Tramp, the love interest, is a smarmy braggart of the most obnoxious kind – an oily jailbird out for a piece of tail, or whatever he can get…He’s a self-confessed chicken thief, and all-around sleazeball.

What’s the function of a film of this kind? Essentially as a primer on love and marriage directed at very young people, imprinting on their little psyches the idea that smooth-talking delinquents recently escaped from the local pound are a good match for nice girls from sheltered homes. When in ten years the icky human version of Tramp shows up around the house, their hormones will be racing and no one will understand why. Films like this program women to adore jerks.

This is a process which continues today, of course. For example, if decades ago the press in the United States was captivated by the (admittedly choreographed) wedding of the elegant and talented Grace Kelly; today media in the United States appears captivated by the (unabashedly choreographed) wedding of – and I am being exceedingly kind here – the inelegant and untalented Kim Kardashian. Whereas the former event allowed us to dream, the latter gives us nightmares. And I suspect – though admittedly without being able to state for certain – that both de Tocqueville and Stillman would agree to some extent that this is a natural result of a decline in the standards of what people ought to aspire to or seek to emulate, as a result of American society turning its back on traditional values of morality, and the attempts to marginalize religion in favor of the worship of celebrities, or of oneself.

Nevertheless, rather than wring their hands, de Tocqueville and Stillman are not pessimists – at least not as far as America is concerned. In looking at the America he observed first-hand, de Tocqueville saw that there was much good coming out of the American experiment with democracy, even if it was by no means a perfect system.  His belief that the role of religion in American society is ultimately a positive one should give those who would otherwise despair some hope that not all is yet lost.

Similarly, Stillman sings a lament for the trashing or watering down of American ideals he believes in,  but never adopts the attitude that the United States will somehow fully succumb to selfishness. The importance of the words of traditional religious hymns, which come to bear repeatedly throughout “Last Days of Disco”, give him and us at least some sense that the role of religion in American life is, while under attack, never going to be completely barred from the public square.  Indeed, the character of Josh, arguably the most religious of the bunch, gives an impassioned proclamation that, “Disco will never die!”, even as he and Alice head off into an old-fashioned, self-sacrificial type of happy ending in which disco music is merely something fun to dance to, rather than providing moral guidance to live by.  And Stillman ends his film not with the soul-disco classic “Love Train”, which appears over the first part of the final credits, but instead with the traditional hymn “Amazing Grace”.

In the end, both de Tocqueville and Stillman remain hopeful that, even if it will be a difficult path back, virtue will ultimately triumph, and this will come about because the important role religion plays in American society will provide the stability that such a re-emergence of virtue needs.


Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny navigate the “Last Days of Disco”

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