HEREDITARY 2019

"When you get older, there isn't a lot left to be frightened of."

Mrs. Ada Quonsett  Airport (1970)

I was an easy scare as a kid. Afraid of the dark as well as my own shadow, I posed little challenge to older sisters who loved to leap out at me from closets and around corners; their shouts of “Boo!” eliciting a shriek of terror or tearful outburst (often both), followed by the usual threat-yelled-in-retreat, “I’m gonna tell mamma!”

Paradoxically, when not being terrorized by siblings, I did a pretty good job of terrorizing myself. I'm not sure why, but being a dyed-in-the-wool scaredy-cat proved no deterrent to raiding my sister's horror comic book collection (resulting in nightmare-filled bouts of sleeping with the bedcovers pulled all the way over my head), or watching scary anthology TV shows like Thriller or The Outer Limits. Programs that taught me no good can come of exploring the source of a mysterious noise, and that fear comes with its own soundtrack. Just hearing the first few notes of Gounod's Funeral March of the Marionette (aka, the theme from Alfred Hitchcock Presents) was enough to make my skin go all gooseflesh. Similarly, John Williams’ nerve-jangling Suspense Theater theme and that hair-raising whistling intro to Journey to the Unknown.

Toni Collette as Annie Graham

Gabriel Byrne as Steve Graham

Naturally, this masochistic desire to have the bejesus scared out of me extended to movies, too, but by the time big-screen psychological thrillers replaced the atomic monsters and vampires of Saturday afternoon TV,  I'd developed a better understanding of what I was after: the emotional jolt of the safe, vicarious scare. The payoff was that my naturally jittery nature meant that I got more bang for my buck.

I came to enjoy the sensation of sitting in the dark and surrendering myself to whatever reality these films presented; the deeper I immersed myself, the more thrilling the ride. But with the waning of the 1960s, the make-believe horrors of movies like Wait Until Dark (“What did they want with her? What did they want with her?” screamed the film's poster ad copy to my abject terror) and Rosemary’s Baby (“What have you done to its eyes?”) couldn't keep pace with the real-life terrors served up every night on the TV news. Fiction proved no match for the horrific reality of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; the unsolved mystery of the Zodiac Killer; or the nightmare of the Manson Family. So when feeling frightened became a way of life instead of an escapist outlet, I knew it was time to give horror movies a rest.

Alex Wolff as Peter Graham

Then came the '70s, and with it, a slew of new-fangled sources of anxiety: Watergate, the Vietnam War, inflation. All led me to reflect on the inadequacy of Roosevelt's oft-paraphrased, "There's nothing to fear, but fear itself." No, fear itself is plenty to be afraid of. With civilization edging ever closer to resembling those disaster films that were so popular at the time, I once again found myself seeking the sanctuary of scary movies. Happily, the '70s presented no shortage of films offering ample opportunities for primal scream venting: The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976),  Burnt Offerings (1976), and The Sentinel (1977).

Milly Shapiro as Charlie Graham

While I don’t tend to think of myself as a horror movie fan, I obviously consumed enough of them to start to take notice of the clichés, the repetition, and the recycling of themes. Instead of offering up the unanticipated and disturbing, horror movies began to pander to their audiences by following box-office-driven guidelines geared to giving the horror fan everything they expected.
The more market-friendly horror movies became, the more they needed to resemble product. Goodbye, to the unexpected, and hello to by-the-numbers horror plotting and slasher villains armed with quotable quips and taglines.

The Graham Home
As haunting a presence in Hereditary as The Overlook Hotel in The Shining

Which is a shame, because now that I'm no longer the easily-scared kid I used to be, finding a horror movie that gets me to believe in the unbelievable is hard enough; finding one that's actually frightening is becoming a near-impossibility. Gore, jump-edits, loud noises, and a heavy metal song played over the closing credits does not a horror film make (which should come as news to Elie Roth and Rob Zombie). For a movie to really scare me, it at least has to come from a place that is emotionally honest. Hopefully, while tapping into some elemental, suppressed anxiety rooted in human vulnerability and the fear of mortality.

Ann Dowd as Joan

Two recent films effectively and memorably accomplished such a feat. The first was in 2017 when Get Out, the impressive feature film debut of director/screenwriter Jordan Peele, hit me where I lived by using the daily microaggressions of soft racism as the core of its horror premise. The second time was in 2018 when director Ari Aster, another emerging filmmaking talent, made his directing / screenwriting debut with Hereditary. While Get Out was unsettling in a thoroughly unique and personal way (the Black experience of racism as terrorism has always been ripe fodder for the horror genre), Hereditary bridged the above-stated "near-impossibility" gap by reacquainting me with the almost-forgotten, old-fashioned, pleasurable unpleasantness of simply being scared shitless by a motion picture. 

The Dollhouse Effect
Hereditary manipulates the viewer's sense of perception. Many scenes begin with our being 
uncertain whether we're witnessing real life or merely looking at one of Annie's miniatures. 

I came to Hereditary not knowing anything about the story; all I knew was that it was a movie starring Toni Collette, an actress (like Laura Dern) I could watch in anything. I’d just finished binge-watching Collette's limited BBC One series Wanderlust on Netflix, and her extraordinary performance in that program left me clamoring for more. Always intrigued when an actor of her caliber appears in a horror movie, I purposely avoided reading anything about Hereditary beforehand, preferring to dive in blindly with eyes wide open, curiosity piqued, and with a great deal of enthusiasm.

I wasn’t disappointed.
In fact, I’m not even sure it's possible to be disappointed by Hereditary, for it's a film that has, as its primary defining characteristic, a dogged refusal to deliver anything remotely resembling the expected.

Portrait in Black

The death of a family matriarch is the catalyst event sparking an interlinked eruption of remorse, reflection, and revelation that ultimately sends an already loosely-tethered family spiraling horrifically out of control. Annie (Toni Collette), whose mother died in hospice after a long, grasping illness, is an artist whose method of coping with her traumatic childhood is to recreate the most painful events in breathtakingly disturbing miniature dioramas. And with a history involving a mother who suffered from dissociative identity disorder; a clinically depressed father who starved himself to death; and an older brother with committed suicide when she was just a teenager, Annie is not exactly at a loss for traumas to draw upon for her work.

Small Worlds

Understandably, Annie's family legacy of mental illness hasn't left her unscathed. In fact, her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is the psychiatrist who saw her through a nervous breakdown. No longer his patient and largely managing to handle her issues with her late mother, a dark cloud hangs over the family due to a terrifying sleepwalking incident two years prior, in which Annie doused herself and her two sleeping children in paint thinner, awakening only as she heard herself striking a match. As a result, Annie's relationship with her now 16-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff) has grown strained and contentious. At the same time, her 13-year-old developmentally disabled daughter Charlie—who shared an unnaturally close relationship with her deceased grandmother—also channels her emotional dissociation into creating art. In her case, the creation of creepy, pagan-like figurines.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Afflicted with a lethal allergy to nuts, Charlie's sweet tooth and love of chocolate
turns every member of the family into around-the-clock sentinels 

Hereditary presents us with a dysfunctional family caught in the aftermath of a tragedy. As each is faced with the difficult task of processing loss, a series of disturbing, seemingly random events threaten what appears to be the hard-won calm of the household. Charlie's bereavement over the loss of her beloved grandmother manifests in the peculiar concern that no one is left to take care of her. Steve takes to drinking as he grows stressed and overburdened with always having to be the family's steadying force. Juggling complicated feelings of maternal mistrust, blame, and resentfulness, Peter numbs himself with drugs. And Annie, anxious about her own sanity while plagued with guilt over what role, if any, her genes and history have played in the fates of her children. Sensitive to the stress all of this has already placed on her marriage, she isolates herself--both physically and emotionally--while suppressing resentment over feeling she has no one to whom she can unburden herself.

Intimate Strangers

What I like most about Hereditary is that it is essentially a dark family drama cloaked in a horror film. Using the constricted, hemmed-in spaces of dollhouses as a visual motif, the film presents us with a family coping with unbearable trauma. Yet, they persist in shutting themselves off from one another. And not because they want to; they simply lack the tools to do otherwise. Barely speaking, struggling to communicate when they do, each remains in their separate, insular spaces, victims of their own severely-flawed coping mechanisms. It's a rarity for a horror film to put human conflict and emotional incapacitation so front and center, but the brilliance of Hereditary is that once the narrative dives off into almost grotesque levels of horror, our hard-earned investment in these characters makes everything that happens all the more terrifying.

Contents Under Pressure

Like the sinister sculpture perched near the stairwell of the Graham house--another of Annie’s grim works of art, it’s a depiction of three deteriorating houses sinking, one atop the other, deep into the bowels of the earth--Hereditary presents us with a family enveloped in personality pathology sinking under the weight of the kind of crisis and catastrophe that's worthy of Greek Tragedy. As horrific events multiply and natural threats take on a preternatural cast, the film's pervading atmosphere of dread makes even the most startling, mind-bending developments feel somehow inevitable.

Don't Be Afraid

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When film critic Pauline Kael titled her 1965 collection of reviews I Lost it at The Movies, she was (wittily) referencing the subtle loss of innocence that happens each time one watches a film. It's a slow maturing process that begins with being so unfamiliar with the vocabulary of cinema, everything elicits a strong response because it is all so fresh and new. As we grow more accustomed to the tropes of narrative structure and film's visual language, our experience of moviegoing becomes more enriched, but often at the cost of our ever really being able to recapture that sense of awe and astoundment born of our movie innocence. I readily admit that each new film I see brings the hope of reclaiming a trace of that lost innocence. Even if it's only for the length of one scene.
Hereditary brought a lot of those feelings back for me. Everything about the film caught me off guard. So much so that watching it became a little unnerving for me. It brought back that long-forgotten sense of feeling on edge long after a film ended, my mind carrying around a vague apprehension that resulted in an over-awareness of noises and a wariness of shadows.

"You never even cried as a baby- you know that? Not even when you were born."

A movie like Hereditary makes suspension of disbelief terribly easy, for in addition to being skilled at keeping the viewer off-balance, it's a story told on its own terms, in its own unique voice, and benefits from a distinct, fully-realized world view. And in a horror film landscape increasingly dominated by the box office-friendly predictability of franchises, a movie as audaciously bizarre and off-the-rails as Hereditary feels like a revitalization of the genre. 

The visual motif of low ceilings, narrow corridors, and confined spaces reinforce themes of emotional confinement and the notion that the Grahams (by heredity) are manipulated like dolls in a dollhouse by fate.

With each frame crammed to overflowing with information, clues, and foreshadowing, Hereditary is a film that practically demands a second viewing. If only to discover all the pieces of the puzzle that had been laid out, hidden in plain sight, from the first go-round.

PERFORMANCES
It's accepted that horror films, like comedies, rarely get any respect come awards season. For every Sissy Spacek Best Actress nomination for Carrie (1976) or Ellen Burstyn for The Exorcist (1973), there are far too many Mia Farrow (Rosemary's Baby - 1968) - Deborah Kerr (The Innocents - 1961) snubs.
Toni Collette, all exposed nerve-endings and bottled-up tensions, gives the performance of her career in Hereditary. But, unfortunately, she's so inarguably brilliant, her being passed over for an Oscar nomination feels more like a voter response to what can charitably be called a "difficult" film than an oversight regarding one of the most compelling screen performances of the year.

Hereditary boasts superb and sensitive performances from its entire cast, but Toni Collette pushes waaaay beyond the usual boundaries, inhabiting a complicated, dimensional characterization. Equally impressive, to a heartbreaking degree, is Alex Wolff as the son. Not since Timothy Hutton's agonized (and Oscar-winning, I'd like to point out) performance in Ordinary People (1980) have I seen such a movingly recognizable depiction of adolescent grief. There's an unforgettable moment in Hereditary where Wolff, at a point in the story when family relationships are at a peak deterioration point, is standing silently by his bike outside the front door, trying to muster up the courage to simply enter the house. It's a heart-wrenching example of how Ari Aster somehow makes the small moments pay off as powerfully as the large scale.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Singular-vision films like Hereditary and Get Out--both amplifications of the day-to-day terrors of contemporary life--do a great job of injecting some much-needed vitality and blood (literally) into a genre grown anemic over the years of tapping into the same worn-out vein of horror tradition. It took Aster five years to get Hereditary to the screen, directing from his own screenplay, and, from all accounts, finalizing every detail of the production before even a foot of film was shot. The end result is one of the most effectively scary horror films I've ever seen. An uncompromising work of individuality that still manages to pluck the nerves of universal anxieties. 

Annie's art installation dioramas were created by Steve Newburn, and Hereditary's stunning production design was by Grace Yun. Everything from Colin Stetson's shivery musical score to cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski's eerily burnished images, combined with Aster's sculptural blocking and emphatic use of stillness, turns the characters into mannequins--work in concert to formulate Hereditary's blue-hued world of haunted interiors.

The members of the Graham family move about from one isolated space to another. Even when they leave the confines of their homes, they merely find new places to be alone.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

 For me, the mark of a truly effective horror film, a quality evident in favorites like Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie, or Don’t Look Now, has always been its ability to make me feel something for the characters. To get me to relate to and/or empathize with their circumstances to the degree that I care what happens and I’m engaged in whatever conflicts—emotional or psychological—arise.

In the equally-bereaved Joan, Annie finds someone outside the home to whom she can confide.
Or has she? 

Horror films are hollow films if they don't feature characters with whom you can identify or situations whose outcomes you can become invested in. Hereditary goes to places that even fans of the genre find disturbing, but the darkness feels at one with the world Aster has created.
I don't know what kind of mind could come up with a movie like Hereditary, let alone the genius capable of pulling it off so tremendously. But my hat is off to Ari Aster for taking so many chances, and in the process, reminding me what a thrill it is to be scared at the movies again. 

Unsafe Cinema
Nothing's more terrifying than a horror film that takes death, loss, and grief seriously.

BONUS MATERIAL
Hereditary father and son Gabriel Byrne and Alex Wolff played father and son in the HBO series In Treatment from 2008 to 2010.

Psychologist Paul Weston and his son Max

Modern Family / Ordinary People 
The original cut of Hereditary ran 60 minutes longer than the theatrical release.
The original shooting script is available to read HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 20019

A SIMPLE PLAN 1998

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; 
he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” 

                                                          Mary Wollstonecraft -1790

The plot of A Simple Plan initiates with the simplest of premises and most relatable of fantasies: found wealth. Three men hunting in the snowy woods of Minnesota happen upon a downed private plane in whose wreckage is discovered a dead pilot and a bag containing $4.4 million in cash. Reasoning that no one is likely to lose that kind of money without someone eventually coming to look for it, Hank (Bill Paxton), the most level-headed and intelligent of the trio, suggests they alert the authorities and hope for a reward. The two remaining discoverers--Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), Hank’s slow-witted older brother, and Lou Brent Briscoe), Jacob’s equally slow-on-the-uptake best friend--motivated by chronic unemployment and an inability to fully grasp all that’s at stake, argue that such a sizable cash sum MUST mean the money is drug-related and therefore less likely to be reported as lost or missing. So they all vote and instead decide to keep the money, splitting it three ways. 

Bad Omen
A fox attacking a henhouse sets into motion events that appear at first glance to be good fortune, but the film's recurring visual motif of crows signals something entirely different

Hank, outnumbered, already an accomplice, and swayed by circumstances of his own—his job is dead-end and his expectant wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) is due any day—agrees not to report the money on the proviso it remains in his possession and they do nothing until enough time has passed to assure no one is looking for it.

Sounds simple enough. 

The bad luck crow motif materializes in Hank and Sarah's home

But this is a contemporary morality tale. If good fortune is responsible for awarding this trio“The American Dream in a goddamn gym bag,” then their tragic flaw proves to be their inability to realize what a bad omen it is to have such a stroke of good luck come at the expense of someone’s life (the anonymous pilot of the downed plane). Once the deal to keep the money has been struck, it isn't long before the group (which has now come to include Sarah, exhibiting heretofore-untapped reservoirs of resourcefulness and guile) is beset by a veritable Pandora’s Box of setbacks born of bad judgment, greed, mistrust, and betrayal.

Bill Paxton as Hank Mitchell

Bridget Fonda as Sarah Mitchell

Billy Bob Thornton as Jacob Mitchell

Brent Briscoe as Lou Chambers 

Combine the intricate plotting of Alfred Hitchcock with the psychological complexity of Claude Chabrol, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how deftly A Simple Plan mines both the suspense and moral ambiguity in this tale about a group of otherwise decent people entering into a hastily-conceived plot to stealth away a fortune in ill-gotten gains. But as much as unforeseen narrative twists make for a story full of roller-coaster thrill ride of obstacles, and grievous, sometimes fatal, errors in judgment; it’s the complicated, contradictory impulses of the various characters—their individual personalities, motivations, and interrelationships—that give the film its most compelling jolts of knots-in-the-stomach intensity.

Merging elements of the crime thriller, the heist film, and the murder mystery, A Simple Plan’s unique perspective distinguishes itself in never feeling as though the machinations of plot and genre are the forces moving the characters along. Everything that happens—even those events furthest beyond the scope of the expected, feel like the organic, inevitable consequence of the combustible, putting-out-fire-with-gasoline interactions of dissimilar individuals forced by circumstance into an unlikely, unlucky alliance.

Three on a Match

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I can't say I'm all that familiar with the work of Sam Raimi. Fans of the director will cite his series of Evil Dead cult films, but of the director’s to-date 15 feature film releases, I’ve seen only The Gift (2000) and Spiderman (2002), neither making much of an impression on me. So A Simple Plan,  to my way of thinking, a practically perfect crime suspense thriller, exists in a pristine little bubble. I can enjoy it as a free-standing work of distinction, without having to attribute any of its merits to director trademarks or signs of a talent maturing.

Happy New Year

I don't recall being interested in seeing A Simple Plan during its theatrical run, but on the strength of all the buzz surrounding Billy Bob Thornton's Oscar nomination later that year (one of two received by the film, the only one in the acting categories) I checked it out when it became available on DVD. If curiosity about Thornton's impressive physical transformation is what initially drew me to A Simple Plan, it ultimately became the least significant aspect of the film.
Almost instantly I responded to the dramatic potential of the setting, characters, and situation, engrossed by the unexpected intimacy achieved in approaching a heist/crime film as though it were a character drama. Raimi builds suspense like a master, overlaying the story with telling small-town details and a well-sustained tone of enveloping dread and tragedy. Even the bleak, wintry landscape seems less the work of Mother Nature than an ill-effects response to the numbing effects of greed.

Indeed, the weather is practically another character in A Simple Plan. I credit Raimi with giving his film a look representative of what its nearing-middle-age characters’ lives must feel like: constrained, hemmed-in, and as anchored as the figures in a snow globe. As Sarah brutally lays out in a scene of clear-eyed fatalism, when it comes to what possibilities life holds for these average, unexceptional people, the die is pretty much cast. Many scenes begin with shots of vast, icy stillness or crow-eye views of limitless banks of snow and nothingness.
Even at the very start of the film, when the streets are adorned with Christmas decorations and Hank walks with a lightness we’ll never see in him again, at no time is the snow made to appear picturesque or poetic. From the frosted windows, slate-gray skies, and characters swathed in layers and layers of insulated clothing (even indoors); the weather is presented as just another hardship. A severe, isolating, suffocating obstacle to an easier life. 

Gary Cole as Neil Baxter

PERFORMANCES

A Simple Plan's Oscar-nominated screenplay is by first-time screenwriter Scott B. Smith, adapted from his own 1993 novel. Paring down the story to the bare bones of its suspense-thriller structure, Smith's economic screenplay combines a strong eye for the shortcuts of visual storytelling with an ear for the kind of character-establishing dialogue one associates with a stage play. The tension-filled narrative flows easily from plot twist to plot twist, never once feeling contrived or labored. Best of all, he manages to accomplish all this while keeping the film’s central focus on the disintegrating relationships between the characters, and the telling ways they respond to having their theoretical (superficial?) principles tested by a genuine moral dilemma.

Without the benefit of much in the way of backstory, Smith’s characters, whether in moments of monstrous callousness or pitiable despair, are granted a level of humanity lacking in the novel. A grace attributable to the authenticity and depth of emotion the cast brings to their characters.

Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton (who appeared together in 1992’s One False Move) share a symbiotic anti-chemistry as the brothers with nothing in common “…except maybe our last name.” The late Bill Paxton, whose settled-in boyishness lends his Hank the look of a self-disappointed fair-haired child, is all agitated exasperation and impatience in his scenes with Thornton. College-educated and preppy-fastidious next to the town’s hayseed casual, one senses Hank enjoys feeling like the civilized big fish in a little pond. Paxton taps into the seeds of disenchantment that lay just below the surface of Hank's easygoing affability. Paxton is terrific and it's easy to see why he was so often cast as likable characters. He radiated an easy openness and accessibility masking layers of complexity.

Sarah Discovers the Source of the Money 

Personal fave Bridget Fonda (Single White Female), exuding almost Shakespearean levels of steely dominance, proves to be as much of a surprise and dramatic force-to-be-reckoned-with as Thornton. From the moment her character is introduced we’re made aware of how smart she is, but as the promise of “what can be” comes to poison her tolerance for “what is,” she morphs into something of a domestic underworld mastermind. It's great fun (and plenty scary, too) to witness her transformation from bubbly bride to hardened housewife... like Carroll Baker running that all-lady hit squad out of her kitchen in Andy Warhol’s BAD.

Brent Briscoe as the oafish Lou is a Master Class lesson in how to humanize an unintelligent character lacking in self-awareness. He even achieves the impossible by playing a drunk scene convincingly. Pouring a life's worth of resentment into the way he unfailingly refers to Hank as “Mr. Accountant,” Briscoe's pivotal drunk scene calls for whiplash emotional shifts from jocularity, betrayal, heartsickness, desperation, and ultimately, rage. Briscoe plays it in a manner that takes us with him on this rollercoaster, letting us see where these emotions come from. 

Billy Bob Thornton pulls off something similar, but on a much more heroic scale, with his brilliant turn as Jacob. True, it’s become an Oscar-bait cliché for an actor to deglamorize, adopt intellectual disabilities, or lose themselves under pounds of prosthetics; but Thornton's external transformation is no acting stunt. The change in his outward appearance is largely the result of what he's doing on the inside; Thornton inhabits his character.
In showing us the man behind the loser’s countenance, Thornton sidesteps the easy pathos, revealing Jacob to be one of the least self-deluded characters in the film, one wholly lacking in self-pity. One of A Simple Plan’s many twists is the upending of the expectation that the relationship of these polar-opposites brothers might bear a trace of a George and Lennie Of Mice and Men dynamic. Far from it. In a particularly uncomfortable scene (exceptionally well-played by Paxton), the casually supercilious Hank learns that the misfit Jacob not only mocks him behind his back, but regards him with a level of disdain that borders on contempt.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I think one of the major reasons I love movies about “plans gone awry” is because I’m a control freak and lifelong non-joiner who goes out of his way to avoid groups, teams, and collaborations of any kind. These movies confirm my worst fears. My favorites: Silent Partner (1978), Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, (2007), What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972), Jackie Brown (1997), The Killing (1956), Fargo (1996), and Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)—all involve meticulously arranged plans going horribly awry due to the human factor. The factor of error that comes from disparate characters pursuing the same goal, but for wildly different reasons.

"Did you tell him about the plane?"

A major thrill to be had in watching A Simple Plan is getting caught up in the yo-yo pull of being initially drawn to one character, only to be confronted with something unsavory in them, then suddenly having your sympathies shifted elsewhere. The trick of making the viewer complicit in a crime is nothing new (Hitchcock’s Psycho), but the quality of performances in A Simple Plan raises the emotional stakes and ups the tension ante. By the time the film arrived at its crushing conclusion, I was fairly wrung out from the suspense.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The first words spoken in A Simple Plan belong to Hank, recounting in voiceover something his late father (a simple farmer who lost his land to debt) once said to him about what it takes for a man to be happy: “A wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbors who like and respect him.” Hank, in carving out a life for himself substantially more stable than that of his parents, has attained all of these. Hank and Sarah both work at jobs neither finds particularly fulfilling: she at a library, he as an accountant at the local feed mill; but with a nice home, the respect of the community, and a baby on the way, they have realized a humble their version of the American Dream.

But built into the American Dream is a paradox: a reverence for achievement, ambition, and accumulation that’s at fundamental cross-purposes with being content with what one has. As a culture, we don't seem to respect people who are happy in their lot…we call them slackers and underachievers. Yet for people who devote their time and efforts to amassing and hoarding obscene levels of wealth, we've only terms of admiration.

A Simple Plan reveals that Hank, like many people in this country, has adopted the belief that having more is always preferable to having enough. He can’t conceive of happiness as a place in the present, only an idealized destination point on the horizon of some nebulous “future.”

This thematic subtext underscores everything that happens in A Simple Plan, asking us to examine the moral distinction...if there exists one...between need and want. Happiness is always held up as the ultimate goal behind all the greed and hunger for acquisition our society seems to worship. We keep telling people to dream big and set their sights high, to meet goals and then set bigger ones when those are achieved. But does there ever come a time when chasing after the next big thing is too high a price to pay for happiness? 

As each news cycle brings with it increasingly disheartening evidence of America’s rapidly disintegrating moral compass; as absurd and corrupt “leaders” normalize justification and deception while distorting the values of truth and honesty in the interest of money and power; I’m afraid A Simple Plan already reveals itself to be a bit of a timepiece in suggesting that the loss of one’s humanity is a loss of considerable significance.

BONUS MATERIAL

Mr. Schmitt, a disgruntled customer accusing Hank of faulty bookkeeping, was played by actor and producer John Paxton, the 77-year-old father of Bill Paxton. John Paxton died in 2011.



Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2019

STEPPENWOLF 1974

Price of Admission is Your Mind

I read Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf when I was 15-years-old. The year was 1972 and my family had moved across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Berkeley; a college town still so enmeshed in hippie-era philosophical exploration and the quest for spiritual enlightenment that Steppenwolf and Hesse’s Siddhartha were practically required-by-law reading in order to cross the border. Self-reflection of the sort encouraged by these novels was a big part of the appropriately-labeled “Me Decade,” novelist Tom Wolfe's name for the era of mass navel-gazing and spiritual introspection that coincided with my adolescence. 

For emotionally untethered teens such as I, adrift in a sea of inner conflicts and uncertain certainties (when our limited experience of the world tricks us into believing the truth of our feelings is truth itself), J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was held up as the go-to novel of adolescent angst. Several of my classmates found something they could connect with in Holden Caulfield’s privileged-class bellyaching, but I came away with a strong dislike for the novel, finding nothing in it remotely relatable to me or my experience.

As was my custom in those days, I went to the local library to check out books I knew were adapted into films I was too young to see. In 1972 Siddhartha was made into a film whose provocative poster, R-rating, and arthouse cachet had captured my imagination. So, not knowing anything of the novel beforehand, I read the book and found the exotic chronicle of the trials and travails of its spiritually-disenchanted hero, if not exactly relatable, most certainly flattering to my Catholic School image of myself. My unexpected enthusiasm for Siddhartha led me to read Steppenwolf not long thereafter. And what a mind-blower that one turned out to be! At age 15, I won’t say I actually saw myself AS Harry Haller, the misanthropic and melancholy 49-year-old man/wolf protagonist of Hesse’s Jungian rumination on the dual nature of man...but I will say that I most certainly saw a great deal of myself IN Harry Haller.

Max von Sydow as Harry Haller

Dominique Sanda as Hermine

Pierre Clementi as Pablo

Carla Romanelli as Maria

Set in Basel, Switzerland in the 1920s, German author Harry Haller is the self-proclaimed Steppenwolf of the title. A bourgeois intellectual and pacifist suffering from gout, loneliness, and a lingering post-war malaise occasioning both his physical abandonment of his nationalist homeland and his spiritual dissociation from mankind. He is, both inside and out, a stranger in a strange land. A divorcé, Harry reads a great deal, drinks to excess, treats his pain with morphine, and spends entirely too much time living in his head. His soul longs for the peace and tranquility of self-realization--things he’s long-believed attainable by living the life of an intellectual ascetic--but due to an indistinct restiveness within, his searching only makes his isolation and self-estrangement more keenly felt.

This is in part due to Harry’s fault-finding dissatisfaction with the world around him. For he is a man who holds the achievements of the dead in high regard—the lofty spirituality in the compositions of Mozart, the idealist principles in the literature of Goethe—while disparaging the modern, jazz-age distractions of the day (automobiles, gramophones, dancing) as idle and worthless as those who pursue them.

The other side of Harry's discontent is rooted in his lifelong belief that he is preternaturally a subhuman creature separate and apart from others. A creature of contrasting dual personality…neither wholly a man nor fully a beast…that exists as a primitive animal masked by the thin veneer of a cultured human.

Harry’s conformist side—nurtured and validated by bourgeois society—is ever at war with his wild, rebellious side, a side that has been vigorously suppressed since childhood. All would be fine if Harry were content to walk the centrist tightrope preferred by his peers, but in finding himself emotionally drawn to the hedonist and intellectually drawn to the spiritualist; Harry is, within his soul, unable to make peace with his conflicting sybarite compulsions and pious sensibilities.

Tractate on The Steppenwolf
Czechoslovakian artist Jaroslav Bradac contributed surreal cutout
art and animation reminiscent of Terry Gilliam (Monty Python)

In much the same way that the depressed spirit longs for the release of sleep, Harry’s beleaguered soul has come to idealize the possibility of suicide. Unfortunately, the notion of irrevocable escape by his own hand (in his 50^th year, via “an accident while shaving”) only makes the pain of life easier to accept, not easier to endure.

Beset by dark, brooding feelings of dread, Harry aimlessly roams the desolate streets, seeking occasional solace on the stairs of neighbors’ homes—like an animal too wild to be allowed indoors, too domesticated to survive on its own in the wilds. In this middle world he sits, comforted by the clean steps, polished doors, perfumed window boxes, and warmth emanating from behind the closed doors; resigned to remaining alone and apart from the interactions of humans…a wolf residing on the steps...a Steppenwolf.

When it appears as though Harry has reached the point of seeing or feeling little else other than the pain of his own existence, spiritual deliverance materializes in the form of an enigmatic courtesan named Hermine. Hermine introduces him first to a razor (“You don’t have to use it, you know”); then an antithetical option to his thirst for rebellion (“Obedience is like sex: nothing like it if you’ve been without it too long”); culminating with a mocking castigation of his presumptuous world-weariness (“You’ve got a lot of nerve saying you’ve tasted life to the bottom and found nothing in it. You haven’t even found the easy, fun part yet!”).

Alfred Bailou as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

Allowing himself to be taken under the wing of this mysterious stranger who knows more about him than he's ever dared explore within himself, Harry embarks—through means both medicinal and metaphysical—upon a trippy, existential Magical Mystery Tour of spiritual discovery and soul realignment. A journey back to the eternal "home" of the self where beckons the unification of the physical and the spiritual.

Helen Hesse, Hermann Hesse's granddaughter appears as Frau Hefte 

To recognize Steppenwolf as a film that clearly bears the stamp of the ‘70s is to be grateful that Hermann Hesse’s illusive philosophical tome was adapted in the era when cinema freely embraced its inner weird. Fred Haines’ directorial vision (he also penned the screenplay) manages to be every bit as structurally bizarre as its source material and makes no effort to simplify Hesse’s inscrutable prose or make the wordy speeches sound less pedagogic. Steppenwolf is a film inherently meditative and somber, but it is not without wit, it is extremely gentle with its characters, and ultimately, its message proves to be both optimistic and joyous.

It’s a boon to a film like this that the ‘70s were also a time when movies felt free to pace themselves; developing character and employing editing methods to manipulate the concept of time (in this instance, fractured and stream-of-consciousness) for dramatic effect. Lastly, the look of Steppenwolf—so in step with the nostalgia trends of the day—atmospherically evokes the look and feel of the 1920s in tableaus stylized and shimmering in one moment, dark and distorted the next. 

Not a film without its flaws, Steppenwolf is nonetheless a faithful adaptation true to the tone of a sometimes-difficult book.

Pablo, a jazz musician, bandleader, and drug dealer, appraises Harry: "He is very beautiful." 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

Steppenwolf may have had the distinction of being a film adaptation of a classic 1927 novel written by a Nobel Prize-winning author, but in the pop-cultural zeitgeist of the ‘70s, it felt as though it was at least the 900^th movie released in the still-young decade about a nonconformist male in search of his true self.  With its emphasis on depicting the psychedelic states of mind-expansion, while exploring such then-popular counterculture themes as self-actualization (the EST movement was still in its infancy), spirituality, drug use, and free love; Steppenwolf at times feels like a film made a good four or five years earlier.

The first and only directing effort of screenwriter Fred Haines (Ulysses – 1967) and apparently a labor of love, Steppenwolf was released in December of 1974. And although I wanted to see it badly, in terms of publicity overload, Christmas '74 was so dominated in my mind by the debuts of both The Towering Inferno and The Godfather Part II, the modestly-budgeted Steppenwolf slipped past my radar. I didn't manage to see it until well after its initial run, practically waiting for it to fall into my lap when it was booked at the movie theater where I ushered on weekends. I wound up seeing it at least five times during its run.

A critic once observed that the character of Henry Haller seemed psychologically stalled at 14; the age he first caught sight of, but failed to speak to, his first love, Rosa Kreisler. I'm sure this was meant as a criticism of the perhaps superficial conflicts at the center of Haller's existential crisis. But it was an observation that explained (at last) why, at age 15, I found myself so completely relating to a character nearing his 50s. I was 17 when the film version was released, but no less overburdened with adolescent angst, so I was thrilled to discover Steppenwolf to be as affecting on the screen as it was on the page. Seeing it now, I know I feel much the same. I guess there's something elemental about the quest to find out who we are that changes very little, no matter what our age. 

Like Hesse’s Magic Theater itself, Steppenwolf is not for everyone. Full of bizarre images and curious rhythms, it’s a strange film in ways that suggest it is indeed intended "For Madmen Only." But there’s something so gentle about it…something so touching in its reaffirmation of the redemptive power of laughter and the importance of not taking life or oneself so seriously, that I found it to be an uncommonly engaging cinema experience. Steppenwolf didn't inspire in me my usual desire to forget myself and escape into a film's narrative; it encouraged me to constantly look for traces of myself in its characters and situations. 

Pablo and Hermine require Harry to confront and extinguish his
concept of personality before entering the Magic Theater 

PERFORMANCES

Possessed of a Mona Lisa smile and an ethereal sensuality, Dominique Sanda’s enigmatic beauty graced many a European arthouse film in the’70s (The Conformist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1900). Often cast as an unattainable dream girl or sphinxlike woman of mystery, the French-born actress has the gift of always looking as though she knows a great deal more than she’s willing to disclose. Steppenwolf was the first time I ever saw Sanda in a film, and in an instant, she won me over as the most ideal Hermine imaginable.

In a role requiring her to be more of an idea than a person, the actress’ years as a model prove an asset in bringing to Hermine a striking, vaguely androgynous bearing in her stillness (at times she resembles Mark Lester in Oliver!) that is at once open and yet impenetrable. Her intelligent, questioning eyes express wit and wisdom, her marvelous voice and sometimes unusual vocal inflections only contributing to her overall otherworldly allure. (Like a great many European films with international casts, Steppenwolf relies quite a bit on dubbing.)

As mesmerizing an entity as Dominique Sanda’s Hermine is for me (she has the same enlivening effect on me as she does Harry and the film in general), it is Max von Sydow’s agonized Steppenwolf who ultimately makes the film work. The Ingmar Bergman stalwart (11 films total) gives one of my favorite of his many outstanding screen performances as Hesse's alter-ego. Anyone reading Hesse’s novel is bound to picture Harry Haller differently, but I can’t think of an actor better suited to play the range of compulsions and conflicts raging war within Hesse’s straining-against-optimism hero.

Von Sydow, who was forty-four at the time, uses his rangy elegance and gentle, expressive eyes to create empathy for his character. A factor that prevents Haller’s internal and largely self-inflicted despair from ever coming across as self-centered.  

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Steppenwolf did well in San Francisco where its then-vanguard imagery and visual effects made it a favorite of the college crowd (aka, young people who got stoned at the screenings). In addition to the many fantasy interludes and dream-logic lapses throughout the narrative (in one naturalistic scene a bicyclist is viewed moving in reverse in the background), the 15-minute Magic Theater sequence presents a surreal reinforcement of the philosophical themes of Hesse's novel pertaining to identity, the psyche, and the spirit.

Life's Options

The Metaphysical Struggle of Modern Man

The Fragments of Harry's Personality

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

When Steppenwolf (book and film) came into my life, I was every bit as rootless as Hesse's hero. Like a great many teenagers, I carried around an image of myself as being too smart and too sensitive for this world. Perceived by others as a kid who “kept to himself”; inside me, there wasn't actually much of a real “self” to keep to…being painfully shy, I merely felt isolated and apart. These feelings were intensified by my home life (the only boy in a household of women with a loving but old-fashioned dad); burgeoning self-awareness (onset puberty as a gay teen); my environment (a Black male in an all-white neighborhood); a spiritual crisis (a Catholic school kid, growing ever more disillusioned with organized religion); and the times in which I lived (I never knew a U.S. that wasn’t at war, and it was Nixon’s second term, to boot). 

Hermine introduces Harry to the joys of contemporary culture 

As a way of dealing with my shyness, I read a great deal, often gravitating to works by Black authors that fed my rage and abhorrence of injustice. Even more often I was caught off guard by the works of white authors who engaged in the erasure of my existence and/or experience. Out of instinct more than intent, films became my own personal Magic Theater of self-examination and discovery. A means by which my mind could be surrendered...all the better to explore what lay within my soul.

Like Hesse's Harry Haller, over time I learned to appreciate the aspects of my own nature (cerebral/emotional) that once felt at odds with the person I thought I wanted to be.

And it was then I discovered the frivolous joy of good/bad films. My life changed the moment I realized absolute truth and beauty could be found as authentically in the sight of Jane Fonda doing a zero-gravity striptease as could be found in the haunting image of a medieval knight playing chess with the specter of Death. It taught me that life is simultaneously sacred and profane, crass and astute, nightmarish and glorious...and none of it is to be taken too seriously.
Movies taught my adolescent self to lighten up, and in accord, open up. In the end, this is what saved me. Just as it did Harry Haller.

Learning to laugh with the Immortals

For Madmen Only

"As a body, everyone is alone. As a soul, never."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2019