Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Films

Film Review: Puzzle (15)

REVIEW

Modest champion: Actress Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle

A FILM can sometimes be so quiet and uneventful, yet at the same time so full of tenderness and charm, that at the end you would stand up and applaud if such exhibitionism weren’t so utterly at odds with what you’ve just seen.

Instead you simply sit there, smile or maybe even dab with a finger at the corner of your eye. Puzzle is such a film. It stars Kelly Macdonald, the brilliant Scottish actress whose ability to play a sweet, uncomplaining example of what the Americans call homemakers was recognised years ago by the Coen brothers.

Her performance as Carla Jean, the meek loving, anxious wife of Josh Brolin’s ill-fated Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ 2007 masterpiece No Country For Old Men was one of that great film’s many pleasures.

But in Puzzle, Macdonald’s exquisite performance as an unassuming, unassertive, devoutly Catholic homemaker is the principle pleasure; all the picture’s other virtues radiate from it. She plays Agnes, whom is both cherished by her blue-collar New England family and taken completely for granted.

At the start, someone is celebrating a birthday. Agnes carries a cake ceremoniously into the room, but in fact the birthday is hers. She has made the cake, bought the candles, lit them, and now she blows them out, a deeply reluctant object of attention.

Her principle purpose in life, other than to attend Bible classes, is to care for her husband Louie (David Denman), who runs a car-repair workshop, and their two teenage sons, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) and Gabe (Austin Abrams). She sees it that way, and so do they.

At first, her domestic drudgery and its drab backdrop, even the clothes she wears, suggest a period piece, a story of small-town America perhaps set in the 1950s.

We only learn this is the present because one of Agnes’s gifts is a modern smartphone. She does not welcome it – “like carrying a little alien robot in your purse”, she says – but is delighted to receive a challenging 1,000-piece jigsaw, which she completes in no time, then breaks it up and does it again. It is a map of the world, an irony not lost on us, even if it is on her; Agnes is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but could hardly be less worldly.

The short journey to New York counts as a daring adventure for Agnes. But she undertakes it, because only there, in a shop called Puzzle Mania, can she find more jigsaws like the one she has just completed.

She also finds an advert, “Champion Desperately Seeking Puzzle Partner”, and digging even deeper into reserves of boldness she didn’t know she had, answers it.

 

THIS leads her to a wealthy, lonely Robert, a man as urbane as she is provincial, played with quirky, beguiling charisma by Irrfan Khan. The unlikely duo start practising for a doubles competition in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.

If they win, they will go on to the world championships in Belgium. They appear to have a chance, because Agnes has a genius for competitive puzzling that leaves even Robert agog.

But what this also means is that she must somehow explain to her husband why she’s no longer reliably at home every afternoon, preparing his dinner and darning his socks.

Certainly, a lesser drama would make him a demanding brute. But Louie is a decent cove who adores his wife, albeit preferably on his own terms. She is his puzzle, and maybe that’s the significance of the film’s title, because actually jigsaws are an irrelevance, though a delightfully wholesome one.

Agnes could have demonstrated a rare talent for juggling or mental arithmetic and the one-line synopsis would still be the same: a middle-aged woman seeing beyond the narrow horizons’ life seemed to have mapped out for her.

Moreover, as she grows in confidence, she begins to take charge of the relationships with the men in her life – Louie, her boys, even Robert. She learns how to be assertive with more than just jigsaw pieces.

Of course, this kind of personal growth is not exactly original cinematic territory – in fact, Puzzle is directly inspired by a 2009 Argentinian movie. But nothing about it feels derivative or predictable.

Marc Turtletaub, a first-time director, has made a terrific job of shaping the screenplay (by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann) into a sensitive and very moving film. Hats off to the whole production team for a very lovely film.

Verdict: Charming and captivating

★★★★★

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Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy) Marx: On Religion and Faith

“Religion is the sign of the oppressed . . . it is the opium of the people.” Karl Marx (1818–1883)

THE philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is, for good or ill, the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the nineteenth century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claimed to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified by the forces of history and his theories adapted to a great variety of political circumstances, for the most part detrimental to those upon whom they have been enforced. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that it has been only recently that scholars have had the opportunity to appreciate Marx’s intellectual stature.

Marx, and his associate Friedrich Engels, developed a philosophy known as dialectical materialism. This essentially is the merger of the ideas of dialectics and materialism, which surmise that all things in the universe are material, that evolution is constantly taking place at all levels of existence and in all systems, that defined boundaries are manmade concepts that do not actually exist in nature, and that the universe is an interconnected unified entity in which all elements are connected to, and dependent upon, each other. The philosophy holds that science is the only means by which truth can be determined.

TO understand Marxism, you must understand the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment. Marx was part of a larger movement in German Enlightenment philosophy; his ideas didn’t come out of nowhere, they were an extension of the theories that had been developing in Europe throughout the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. Marx was a member of the Young Hegelians, which had formed after the famous German philosopher Hegel’s death. Hegel’s philosophy was based on the dialectic.

After Hagel’s death, his philosophy continued to be taught in Berlin and an ideological split occurred among the students of Hegel’s teachings. Eventually a right, centre and left branch of the ideology emerged, the Young Hegelians taking up the leftist branch of Hegelian thought. They began using Hegel’s dialectical method to openly criticise Hegel’s own work, attempting to prove that Hegel’s own philosophy, when fully extended, supported atheistic materialism. The Young Hegelians criticised religious institutions and, as a result of this, many of them were denied professorship at institutions around what was to become Germany and further afield. Thus began Marx’s period of disassociation from his relatively wealthy origins and his move towards the austerity that was to last the rest of his life. He ended up living and writing his greatest work, Das Kapital, in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Marx’s own contribution to Hegelian debate was to write the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which contained in its introduction the oft-paraphrased paragraph: “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

MARX viewed religion as a consequence of man’s relationship to the means of production. It was a result of man’s unhappiness with life and man’s lack of understanding of social and economic forces. Therefore, the Marxist position on religion is: 1) that criticism of religion and the advance of science are important weapons for combating religious views; and 2) that religion will never be fully eliminated until man has control over the economy and man is no longer alienated from productive forces.

It is a misconception to believe that Marx was saying that religion was a metaphorical drug, created, maintained and tolerated by the ruling class to keep the masses happy. Marx was actually concerned with far more weighty problems. Among other things, he was describing the basic human conditions under which an abstract human being could exist. “Man is the world of man, state, society,” he concluded, and the concept of God was a necessary invention in an “inverted world”. Once the world was right side up, the idea would not be needed. In other words, religion was a requirement of the proletariat to deal with their living conditions. Once the revolution had created a just and purposeful society, the need to believe in anything other than that which “is” or that which has material existence would be gone.

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: Endeavour

REVIEW

Endeavour

“Endeavour” by Peter Moore is a factual historical insight into the ship’s discovery of the New World. The ship was led by Captain James Cook.

THERE are many books about Captain James Cook and his circumnavigation of the globe whilst aboard HMS Endeavour. Cook’s biographer, JC Beaglehole, wrote: “Really, that voyage makes most of the other Great Occasions of the 18th century seem pretty silly.”

Peter Moore is the first to concentrate on the ship itself, which set sail 250 years ago this week, having begun life as the Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby-built collier: flat-bottomed, round and sturdy, with a broad and voluminous hull, launched in 1764 to ship coal from Newcastle to London.

Moore’s approach is lavishly digressive, and he is inclined to foreground his subject’s background. So, he gives a detailed account of Whitby’s development from a fishing village, and of the career of the master shipbuilder Thomas Fishburn. Nor does he neglect the oak trees used for the Earl of Pembroke’s floors, futtocks and so forth, beginning with their growth from acorns to oaklings, “capped with a pair of helicopter leaves that tilt and turn and thrill to the sun”. After rather a lot of this, Moore turns to the transformation of an “utterly ordinary” ship into a “completely extraordinary” one, and his story takes wing.

 

IN 1766, the Royal Society resolved to send astronomers to North America, Norway and the South Seas to observe the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun, on June 3, 1769. To lead the South Seas mission it chose Alexander Dalrymple, a thrusting young Scot determined to discover the rumoured southern continent of Terra Australis.

However, in March 1768, the Society’s clerk and collector absconded with all its money. It appealed for funds to the King, who provided £4,000. That meant that the voyage would be a joint venture between the Society and the Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty, which vetoed the civilian command of a king’s ship. Dalrymple was ousted in favour of James Cook, a seasoned naval commander, joined by the 25-year-old Joseph Banks, “a remarkable botanist and intrepid man of science”.

The Earl of Pembroke was not an elegant ship, and had no great cabin for officers, but she was strong, and her massive hold was suitable for the storage of necessary provisions. She was duly acquired and refitted at Deptford with a new internal deck and cabins, including a great one. As “a hybrid of a transport and a sloop”, it was given the more dashing name of Endeavour, and stock with great quantities of bread, salt beef and pork, oil and sugar, beer and spirits and, to remedy scurvy, “a proper quantity of Sour Kraut”.

In 1767, Samuel Wallis, commanding HMS Dolphin in search of the elusive Terra Australis, had claimed Otaheite (Tahiti) for Britain as King George’s Island, to which the Endeavour set off on August 25, 1768. When it landed the next April, Cook set about building Fort Venus, with an observatory, telescopes, clocks and astronomical quadrant.

During its three months on the island, the expedition met the formidable Purea, known to them as “Queen Oboreah”, and her lover, Tupaia, who became their fixer and prepared them a dinner of roast dog to celebrate King George’s birthday. Tupaia insisted on accompanying them on their departure, and guided them through the 250-mile archipelago that Cook named the Society Islands, and onwards to New Zealand.

Initial contracts with the Maoris were violent, and Cook shot four of them, but after Tupaia addressed them in his own language, and was understood, Cook and a Maori “saluted by touching noses”, which Moore inevitably calls “an iconic first encounter”. With great accuracy, Cook then charted the 2,400 miles of New Zealand’s coastline. In April 1770, the expedition had its first view of the eastern coastline of New Holland, failing to realise that it had found Terra Australis, and landed at what would be called Botany Bay, where the natives seemed indifferent to the Endeavour and its proffered trinkets.

Cook decided not to explore the bay to the north, so missing what became Sydney Harbour, and Endeavour set off on her return voyage. On the night of June 10, she crashed into the Great Barrier Reef and was badly holed. It put in for repairs at what would become the Endeavour River, in what is now Queensland, where many of the ship’s company died, Tupaia among them. Before they left, they sighted a strange new creature, “as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour and very swift.” The natives called it a kanguru.

The Endeavour’s return to London in July 1771 was met with general acclamation, but Samuel Johnson was unimpressed. “They have found very little, only one new animal, I think,” he told James Boswell, who recalled his imitation of it: “He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.”

In 1776, after three voyages to the Falkland Islands, the by now rather decrepit Endeavour was patched and plugged and renamed the Lord Sandwich, and carried Hessian mercenaries to defeat Washington’s army in New York. The next year she became a prison ship at Newport, Rhode Island, and in August 1778, to obstruct the French fleet that had come to the aid of the Americans in the Battle of Rhode Island, she was scuttled. In 1971, a fragment of her travelled to the moon on Apollo 15.

Much of the story of Cook’s ship is familiar, and Moore’s telling of it makes for quite heavy going, but it is, undeniably, a rollicking yarn.

– Endeavour, by Peter Moore, is published by Chatto & Windus for £20, EBook £9.99

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