Christopher Schroeder

Category: community and culture

  • Roses and Thorns

    I’m not the only one who questions the success of the new Roses adaptation by Tony McNamara, but I might be more intrigued by its intention.

    This movie, which is a remake of the 1989 one by Michael J. Leeson and 1981 novel by Warren Adler, focuses on the relationship between Theo, an architect whose major project has failed, and Ivy, a chef whose return to work after this failure was more successful than either imagined.

    Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) is struggling in his new role as primary parent, so Ivy (Olivia Coleman) returns a favor by offering to finance their dream home, which he designs and builds as a way of restoring his professional and personal reputation. Its development is inversely related to the deterioration of their marriage, which culminates in a fateful dinner party that finally reminds them after everyone has left of their shared desire to restore their relationship just before the house and presumably they are destroyed by a gas-leak explosion.

    Many are critical of this movie. The Chicago Reader for example suggests that the pacing is off and that the performances should be funnier, which seem reasonable. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by its intention, which could be a funny foray into the challenges of marriages, especially those that last many years.

    Research suggests that married couples, even unhappily married ones, are generally happier after many years (e.g., Carstensen 2011, 119-120). Anyone in one of these can attest that such longevity often requires unforeseen compromises and challenges.

    Such a reality is central to this movie, which wants to acknowledge it in a witty way. This worthwhile challenge however is ultimately more than it can manage.

    Both central characters are mutually witty, which is part of their attraction and they suggest in a counseling session could be considered repartee, or less caustic criticism and more emotional release. Also, the ending, which is different from the previous movie, more attests to the absurdity of married life.

    These and other conditions never quite coalesce in anything coherent, which is a problem. Such moments are played for laughs before any black comedy discomfort can arise. For example, the new-age-adjacent Amy (Kate McKinnon) offers her husband’s friend and client Theo a romantic road trip but when challenged merely acknowledges her desire for novelty without any intention of leaving her husband Barry (Adam Samberg).

    This mixed messaging means that the move is at most an amusing couple of hours with solid main performances and more than adequate technical elements. These unfortunately are constrained by choices from its author and its director (Jay Roach), and make it a mostly forgettable project.

    As such, it never quite does justice to its central story about a long-married couple confronting challenges. Some obviously fail while others succeed, and this difference could be compellingly considered in a movie but just would need something clearer.

  • Entertaining Enough

    Most top critics seem to like Caught Stealing, a dark comedy crime thriller written by Charlie Huston, directed by Darren Aronofsky, and set in the late 1990s New York City, but I expected, or wanted, more.

    Henry “Hank” Thompson, a functioning alcoholic bartender, and former high school baseball phenom, who relocated to NYC after losing his professional baseball dream and his high school friend in a drunk driving crash, is asked by his neighbor Russ Binder to watch his cat while he unexpectedly goes to London. Hank’s paramedic girlfriend Yvonne brings Russ’s cat and litter box, and unbeknownst to them a key to drug deal money, into Hank’s apartment.

    That key, and Russ’s disappearance, lead to confrontations with the Russian mob that costs him a kidney, a crooked detective Elise Roman who threatens his freedom, and some Hasidic drug-dealing brothers who later kill Yvonne to send Hank a message. Hank must avenge Yvonne’s murder, protect his West coast mother whom he daily calls, and extricate his remaining kidney and himself from this murderous mess, which he ultimately does by recreating the same kind of crash that killed his friend and his dream even though that was the first time he had driven since that tragic event so many years ago.

    This movie seems like a love letter to 1990s NYC, which has a certain amount of audience appeal. This ambience, which was still evident when we lived there in the 2000s, is a testament to the successful technical features, and especially the sets, costumes, and lighting, that suggest an affection for the city and its culture at that time.

    These establish a tone without compromising the pace, which is a credit to its director Aronofksy. At the same time, all the violence, as symbolized in the motif of pooling blood beneath dead characters, occasionally become distractions, and pull focus from the larger story.

    That could be one reason why it might work better as the 2004 book by Huston even though the adaptation was done by the original author. Novels obviously allow readers to modulate violence or any other features in ways that don’t unproductively distance them from the narrative.

    Nonetheless, the film intriguingly illustrates how authors establish crazy conditions for their characters and then enable them to escape these, which mostly work until they disruptively and distractingly don’t. For example, Hank, who has been mostly restrained, beats the crooked cop with his fists, and stabs her with a broken bat, but won’t shoot her, and doesn’t object with the Hasidic brothers do.

    My biggest problem was the confusing conclusion, which leaves an odd aftertaste. Hank sends half of the money Russ was holding to his mother, and then he steals Russ’s passport, Elise’s retirement dream, and absconds to Tulum where he refuses a bartender’s beer offer, and instead asks for a club soda. Who got caught stealing what?

    Many would agree that Hank murdered his neighbor and the two Hasidic drug dealers like he did his high school friend, and at least contributed to the murders of his girlfriend and the crooked cop. Some might also argue that he had his girlfriend and his current life, and perhaps even his professional baseball dream, stolen from him.

    Perhaps the more plausible interpretation is that all these characters were caught stealing, and had their lives, literally or figuratively, stolen from them, as a result of drug deal that goes wrong after its banker disappears to attend to an ailing father. Only Hank, and his mother he hopes, emerge alive, and yet he has had to relinquish his life as he knew it although he might regain some semblance of it (and in the subsequent novels presumably does).

    But why would he steal Elise’s retirement dream of relocating to Tulum? And what will he do there that he hadn’t done hundreds of miles from his high school tragedy in NYC?

    Time for Hank will tell, and presumably does in the subsequent Henry Thompson novels Six Bad Things and A Dangerous Man by Huston. For us, it ends with the rolling credits and the reilluminated theater, which left me wondering whether we were merely entertained or had experienced something more.

  • Encore or Expected?

    This week is my first week of retirement, and I’ve been wondering for the last nine months or so what comes next. I certainly understand the appeal of a leisure life. I also believe that I have ten or more potentially productive years.

    Some suggest that an inevitable professional decline starts sooner than most think (Brooks 2019). Others report that some people pursue other meaningful work in their later years (i.e., encore careers), and that older people can continue to create, learn, and grow throughout their lives (Brooks 2023, e.g., or Rauch 2024).

    I hadn’t expected to retire as an academic. I just needed a smart strategy for repaying substantial student loans, and then I assumed I would do something else.

    I had entered universities in 1988 as a student and have never left. I started teaching college courses in 1994, was offered my first professorship in 1999, and have been a tenured full English professor for the last fifteen years.

    I decided to stay after repaying those loans to help our recovery from the Great Recession, cover our kids’ college costs, and fill our retirement fund. Then I realized about a year ago that I finally had a choice: I could continue what I was doing, or I could do something else.

    I not only had stayed somewhat longer than expected but also had an unexpected crisis of academic faith. Its cause was unclear, but its existence was undeniable.

    Too many unstable students and uncourageous administrators. Too much professional excess that produced a social and political backlash, and contributed to the rise of a vindictive presidential administration. Too expensive dues for a union that wouldn’t always advocate for its members.

    For these and other reasons, a better life seemed to be one after academia, which again was something I had always assumed but never developed in any detail. Nothing in my professional training, or PD since then, had encouraged such aspirations.

    Perhaps we need to reimagine the career concept, and not just academic ones, and to encourage a second part, or something more to do with our working days. Such an approach would mean that workers do something now, and something else later, and perhaps even something after that.

    This approach might be easier if workers had purpose statements, and amended or revised these over the years (see, e.g., Stretcher 2016). Such statements could contextualize our current and future choices, including ones about work.

    That would mean that careers were constructed not to conform to traditional and conventional patterns but to reflect, and respond to, our personal values and goals. These “encore” careers in other words would become expected chapters in larger stories about working and living.