One unexpected joy of the coronavirus outbreak is people may see first-run-in-theater films on television if they have Amazon Prime. We have seen a couple of them this past week, including Emma and Birds of Prey. And then, last night, we stumbled upon a 2010 comedy film, The Trotksy, that merits much discussion and should be seen by anyone familiar with the intellectual Marxist history of the first thirty years of the last century, and familiar with Marxist philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s, and those who remember high school. Yes, it is that funny.
Emma--This is a new adaptation of the great Jane Austen novel of the same name. This was previously done as a miniseries, which had the advantage of developing characters, including especially the lead character, in a way a two hour film cannot do. I say this because, in this adaptation, one is liable to not like this film's Emma as much because one sees far more of her aristocratic arrogance than her fear of emotional commitment. However, the actress, Anya Taylor-Joy, turns an outstanding acting performance to give us enough of a reason why Mr. Knightley would ever fall in love with her. What makes this film compelling is the way in which characters walking are done in a choreographed style, which heightens the drama and comedy in the story. There are also clever camera cuts and angles, which give brisk pace to the story and keeps us in thrall in each moment. Autumn de Wilde, a photographer and portraiture artist, and daughter of a legendary late 1960s rock music scene photographer, made her debut as director, and one hopes to see more direction work from her in the future.
Bids of Prey--This is the latest DC Universe film, and one which The Daughter highly recommended we see. I admit I had trepidation about the film because I saw a fundamental contradiction between woman power and vengeance against men who treat women as sex objects, and sexy women in scantily dressed clothes exuding and exhibiting their sexuality in a way that asks us all to define them by their sex appeal. I am happy to report The Daughter's schooling of me to relieve me of this trepidation. Margot Robbie, and director, Cathy Yan, ensured a far less sexualized clothing for the lead women characters, and changed camera angles that would have highlighted breasts and buttocks. The film made the sociological point about women having to deal with male physical domination and objectification, and deftly allowed Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie's character) to pivot away from her abusive sado-masochistic relationship with The Joker, and reclaim independent agency. Each of the women characters--and yes, Rosie Perez is on the scene and brilliant as usual--is on a journey to reclaim independent agency, and to kick some patriarchal butt. This film has the same high quotient of choreographic-cartoonish violence that makes Deadpool films so compelling, and the fight scenes show Margot Robbie is as capable of stunts as Tom Cruise. I admit I still find the New Yawka accent from this Aussie actress to be a bit too caricatured, but it works in line with the cinematic fantasy. The film has some of the Marvel sardonic dialogue and was a welcome return to some intelligence, after the vacuous dialogue in Aquaman. I am admittedly at a personal peak superhero film genre, and have not gone out of my way to see the recent films in theater runs or even to watch on television. However, Birds of Prey is well worth viewing, and is a worthy addition to the pantheon of superhero films. It deserves status next to the Patty Jenkins-Gal Gadot Wonder Woman film, for which I am so looking forward to the sequel. No matter all the political, economic, environmental and even cultural calamities of our time, we should be glad to see women superheroes who are not defined by their clothing. For even the Wonder Woman sequel trailers are showing less skin on Diana (aka Wonder Woman) and have a promise of more character development than in the first, still otherwise brilliant film.
The Trotsky--See the trailer here for this Tribeca Film Festival winner from 2010. I am still not sure how this one popped up on our Amazon Prime, but I am so glad it did. This is a high school comedy set in Canada, where the writer-director and producer are from. It is about a high schooler named Leon Bronstein, who thinks he is reincarnation of Leon Bronstein aka Trotsky. In fact, he is a spoiled rich son of a very, very, very wealthy manufacturer-merchant who lives with his second wife--a kind hearted and well meaning shiksa (the only one with no agenda and a true moral center)--and two children, and one adult son who shows up with wife and child in tow. The film opens with the father giving Leon a summer job at the factory, but Leon insists on working on the factory floor and then organizing the workers to have a hunger strike--after Leon researches and finds the father has violated various wage and hour laws. The father retaliates by calling the police to remove Leon from the factory and punishing him by sending him to--egad--a public school! Leon is devastated, but knows, from having read Trotsky's biography, My Life, that trials and tribulations are good for the soul and the revolutionary. Leon enters a sort of arts public charter school, where the new principal and vice principal are determined to bring order to unruly arts oriented students.
The film veers into creepy territory as Leon meets an older woman (age 27) who is completing law school named Alexandra, which is the name of Leon Trotsky's first wife. He stalks the woman, breaks into her apartment to bring her flowers for her successfully completing her exams, but ultimately wins her over, when Alexandra comes home drunk from her graduation party, after hearing from a close woman friend how it is good to bed a younger man. Still, in 2020, we can see how culturally times have changed. Yet the film never loses its overall charm, so this element becomes part of the merriment and satiric send up of highly intellectual revolutionaries in an apathetic world. Michael Murphy plays an old near retired radical lawyer who initially finds Leon a pathetic pest, but who finds sympathy in Leon as Leon knows the lawyer's personal and lawyer career history as well as the lawyer who lived it. Genevieve Bujot--yes, her--is the exasperated liberal-left school board commission chair who has no patience for this high school intellectual poser, but who begins to learn Leon's obsessive nerdy behavior casts a revolutionary influence over otherwise apathetic high schoolers in the face of the school administrator's arbitrary and oppressive authority moves. The dialogue throughout the film is fast, sharp, and witty, and as the film reaches its crescendo, the speeches from Leon and another student who is influenced by Leon become remarkably profound. The film credits open with Leon's bedroom bookshelf, which contains Trotsky's My Life, the three volume Isaac Deutscher biography of Trotsky, The Prophet, and, most amazingly to me, a volume from the legendary Russian-French revolutionary, and friend to Trotsky, Victor Serge.* On the left side of Leon's bedroom bookshelf and screen is a volume from the brilliant 1960s-1970s era Marxist intellectual, Terry Eagleton. Leon quotes directly from Eagleton later in the film, using Eagleton's interpretation of Marx's philosophy to wiggle out of what looks like a contradiction in Leon's words and actions. Throughout the film, Leon has a recurring nightmare of being the baby in the baby carriage in the Eisenstein silent film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), but each time with different people in his life playing the mother and the guard.
The only clink in the film's excellent historical use of Trotsky's life and meaning, and Marxist intellectual battles, is when Murphy talks about his being at Berkeley at some point in the 1960s. He strangely says Leon should not define Berkeley by the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping and the 1968 Democratic Party convention protests and police riot in Chicago, which have nothing to do with Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, and where Leon had not brought up either post-FSM event. In the scene, Murphy is telling Leon that most young people don't want a revolution in the sense Trotsky or any political revolutionary meant, and that apathy is the greater enemy, something the principal laughingly and contemptuously tells Leon throughout much of the film. Murphy said Leon needs to reach the students where they are, and, again, strangely says this apropos of Berkeley in the 1960s. There is some truth to this, but with no context, it is misleading. The reason for the Free Speech Movement was because the UC Regents ordered UC Chancellor Clark Kerr to clamp down on Berkeley students being too engaged with the burgeoning civil rights movement. Kerr, ever the technocrat, decided to ban all political activity on the Berkeley campus in the fall term of 1964. This led the students of all political stripes, from radical civil rights movement and early Vietnam War protestors to the right wing Young Americans for Freedom, to band together and protest against the banning of political speech. It led to the legendary Mario Savio's off the cuff speech that should be as known to every high schooler (in a just world) as Liincoln's Gettysburg Address. The most recent and great book on the FSM, and the way in which the Regents, Clark Kerr, and eventually Ronald Reagan, with the help of the FBI, crushed that movement, is in the book, Subversives, by Seth Rosenfeld. However, other than that clink, the acting is outstanding, the direction sure and fast-paced, and the ending is preciously funny.
I am certain most American (and Canadian) audiences would not really get this film, though young people who are engaged will, I think, love the film, though not understanding the references along the way. For me, the reason Trotsky remains a compelling historical figure because of Trotsky's wide ranging knowledge of not only politics, economics, philosophy, and military strategy, and, on top of that, literature. It is Trotsky's failure to succeed Lenin which leaves open the romantic possibility that the Soviet Union would not have descended into the totalitarian madness exemplified in Joseph Stalin. And his murder in 1940 at the long-reaching hands of Stalin into Trotsky's exile in Mexico also lends a literary and romantic air. That this, again, romantic view of the Bolshevik revolution is faulty is one learns from Victor Serge himself, as well as Chomsky, I.F. Stone, and others who said Trotsky's suppression of the sailors' mutiny at Kronstadt in 1921 showed Trotsky, had he ended up succeeding Lenin, would have cunningly and horribly used the military-police state apparatus which developed within the Bolshevik government during the Western Allies' intervention on behalf of the Czar, and the ensuing Russian Civil War (1918-1921). Whenever a Western intellectual or political radical gave up on the Soviet Union, it became known as the person having had his or her "Kronstadt moment." The late, great sociologist Daniel Bell once quipped his Kronstadt moment was, well, Kronstadt. What happened in that instance did not surprise either Emma Goldman, who was already critical about the direction taken, nor Bertrand Russell, who had already critically written about what the Bolsheviks were doing in 1920. Ultimately, I have seen no reasonable way out of the totalitarian result in most time lines one may envision, though I do not think the direction was in the DNA of the revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky, unlike Chomsky. I read Victor Serge's Year One of the Russian Revolution, and saw how the Czar and Western Allies' contemptible and violent acts against the Russian people played a major role in the creation of the Cheka, the forerunner to the GPU and KGB. The revolutionaries had initially opened the Russian jails, ended pogroms against Jews, and early in the civil war, twice captured Czarist generals, only to let them go on the naive promise the generals would bring back to the Czarist forces and the Allies the word for peace. Serge's analysis was that the Bolsheviks learned violence solves problems in a manner that is ultimately not true, but convenient for those holding power.
Nonetheless, Trotsky remains an extraordinary, almost Shakespearean historical figure, and will continue to fire the imagination of many creative minds for years to come. In watching this film, I thought a couple of times, about the Monty Python extended routine about the British man who has multiple personalities, one of which is Leon Trotsky--and how, as Trotsky, ends up journeying to the Soviet Union to reclaim his power. I was also reminded of the late Anthony Burgess' brilliant novel, The End of the World News, where part of the novel consists of an operatic libretto about Trotsky's time in Greenwich Village, New York City, not long before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. The Trotsky is a great and fun film, and deserves a revival house double feature with the bitingly funny satire about Western intellectual romance with Bolshevik Communism, Children of the Revolution (1996).
* Serge remains one of my top intellectual and revolutionary heroes, having devoured last year the finally translated into English notebooks Serge left behind. I have read every single thing from Serge that has been translated into English, and never tire of his fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, or other writings. He is the true witness, most extraordinarily objective about even his enemies, and most insightful about the nature of human history and institutions. I recall Robert Conquest personally telling me (we met at the LA Times Book Festival long ago) how Serge was the most reliable guide to the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin's reign over the Soviet Union.
