And Justice For All

This week, a movie you might have missed. Norman Jewison’s 1979 legal drama And Justice For All was recommended by Q90.1’s very own Jeff Scott. Jeff pointed out the film’s “all-star cast and a great story about fighting the abuse of power, that seems as relevant today as it was when it was made 40 years ago.” He also wrote that “Arthur Kirkland is one of my favorite characters played by Pacino.  I think it gets overlooked in all of the hoopla surrounding Michael Corleone and Tony Montana.”

And Justice For All was made at the tail end of the 70s film school era. It was a period that combined an interest in social justice; raw, emotional writing and performances; and a very healthy dose of paranoia about people in power. It began roughly with 1969’s Easy Rider and ended somewhere around the release of 1982’s commercial blockbuster darling ET, with the final nail in the coffin being 1986’s rah-rah-love-letter to the military, Top Gun.

And Justice For All is the story of Arthur Kirkland, a principled if overworked attorney trying his best to help his menagerie of clients in Baltimore. When the film opens, Kirkland is in a holding cell, where he ended up after punching a judge for sending his clearly innocent client back to jail simply because Arthur filed the appeal late. So from the get-go, it’s clear Pacino’s character is in keeping with the 70s ethos of defying established power, no matter how futile that fight may seem.

The heart of the story is Arthur being asked to defend the same judge he punched after the man is accused of brutally assaulting and raping a young woman. Kirkland is basically told he needs to defend the judge or else his career will come to a catastrophic end. The more he works to defend him, the more convinced Arthur becomes that the judge is guilty of those crimes and many more. All while this is going on, Arthur is also trying to defend a client of his who is transgender and is rightfully terrified of ending up in jail. And Arthur’s partner, played by Jeffrey Tambor, slowly crumbles under the constant pressure of being a lawyer in a place where the law is not necessarily the strongest force in the room.

The film is very much a product of its time with some shouty, over-the-top, method-acting-with-a-capital-M performances and a jazzy, upbeat Dave Grusin score complete with big saxophone solos that seems utterly out of place given the grittiness of the subject matter. But overall the film is still affecting and powerful forty years later. Pacino plays Kirkland as a passionate, decent man who understands the flaws of the system but still expects better of it. He plays the game until he finds it too corrupt and dark for him to continue to participate. The final scene features the famous line, “You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!”

We live in a time that resembles the late 1970s. There is much distrust between government and the press; the environment, gender equality, and race are deep dividing points in our country; and there’s a pessimism and paranoia similar to what drove many of the greatest films of 40 years ago.

And Justice for All doesn’t conclude with some great, deus ex machina happy ending. On the contrary, it ends ambiguously with Arthur Kirkland on the steps of the Baltimore courthouse, not sure what’s going to happen to his client or his career. But to me, the important thing is that he did something. Rather than giving into corruption or giving up, he did his best to make change with the small amount of power he had to exercise. We don’t know how his story ends, but that’s true for all of us. We don’t know how things will turn out, but like Arthur Kirkland, we should do what we can to make things better right now.

Napoleon Dynamite 15th Anniversary

During the mid-2000s, I was living and working in a small, Idaho farm town called Twin Falls. As isolated and rural as it was, the city had an art house movie theater called the Lamphouse. It struggled to bring in customers with foreign films and experimental movies, and it faced stiff competition from the local multiplex that brought in all the blockbusters. But then June 2004 rolled around, and at least for that summer, things changed. The Lamphouse got a little indie comedy that was made for about 400 thousand dollars and happened to have been filmed in Preston, Idaho, just a couple of hours to the east. Napoleon Dynamite was the hit of the summer and kept the second-hand bucket seats in the Lamphouse filled until almost October. This summer marks the fifteenth anniversary of Napoleon Dynamite, the little indie comedy that could. 

Starring Jon Heder, Tina Majorino, Efren Ramirez, and Jon Gries, Napoleon Dynamite was utterly unexpected. At first glance, it wasn’t clear if the film was mocking its title character and the world he occupied. The whole story was so utterly deadpan, it was hard to tell exactly how we were supposed to react. And in fact, the first time I saw it, I didn’t laugh much at all. But the second, third, and fourth times I saw it in the theater, nearly every moment brought me to hysterics. Every line from Napoleon’s constantly half-open mouth was funny. Everything from “Tina, you fat lard” to “I like your sleeves. They’re real big” has entered my family’s personal vernacular. Just the other night, my nine year old passed through the room looking for lip balm saying, “My lips hurt real bad!” Multiple viewings revealed that Napoleon Dynamite wasn’t mocking the strange, insular world it depicted, but instead the film is affectionate and compassionate.

If we had to boil it down to something identifiably Hollywood, we could say it’s an underdog story, with Napoleon and his partner-in-tater-tots Pedro clinching the student body presidency with Napoleon’s sweet dance moves in front of the entire school. But the film doesn’t feel that formulaic or predictable at all. With its weird asides into chicken farms, second-hand clothing stores, and Pedro’s still inexplicable head-shaving incident, the movie stays just weird enough that it surprises audiences throughout its entirety.

I love Napoleon’s oddness and how the film champions the unlikely and even the absurd. There’s no explanation for why Napoleon’s last name is Dynamite or why his family has a pet llama in the field next to the house. There’s no logical reason why Lafawnduh from Detroit would fall in love with scrawny, nerdy, would-be cage-fighter Kip. It doesn’t make a ton of sense that “I caught you a delicious bass” and a game of tether ball would be the way to a girl’s heart. And yet the final sequence of the film set to Patrick Street’s wonderful instrumental “Music for a Found Harmonium” reconciles all of it. We see Grandma Dynamite reunited and nuzzling with her beloved Tina, Kip and LaFawndah getting on the bus to go start their life together, and Napoleon and Deb high fiving after their tether ball game. Things work out. There’s love and reconciliation for everyone. Every weirdo has another weirdo who appreciates them. Even vainglorious and deluded Uncle Rico seems to get a second chance at finding his soulmate in the final moments of the film.

I was so glad when the Lamphouse got the windfall of having Napoleon Dynamite for almost four months straight. Of all the movies that could have helped that strange, incongruous little business to continue on, it’s fitting that it was this one – a love letter to weirdos, individualists, and the unlikely. We are all a little Napoleon or Deb or Rico or maybe even Rex Kwon Do on the inside, and it’s nice to know that there are others just like us and that there’s love and hope for all. 

Dearness Only...

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you sit down on your couch or bed to watch a movie on a streaming service and start clicking through the possibilities. There are the shiny, new releases, the ones you kind of wanted to see in the theater but just didn’t get around to. There are the critical darlings that you’ve heard a lot about and know you “should” see, but you’re not sure if you’re in the mood for something “important.” Then there’s the host of old favorites – movies from when you were a kid, that comedy that never stops being funny, that cool action movie with that one scene. You click back and forth, weighing the length and likely entertainment value of each movie, and after twenty or thirty minutes of indecisive clicking around, you give up and binge-watch a bunch of episodes of The Office. Is this you or is it just me?

I have been thinking a lot about this phenomenon and asking myself what the problem is. Why is it so hard to just pick a movie and watch it when I have thousands at my disposal and free time each night to watch? As I ponder this question, the words of two different influential Americans come to mind. First are those of Thomas Paine, one of America’s founding fathers and an influential pamphleteer of the revolutionary era. Paine wrote, “the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ’tis dearness only that gives everything its value.” The other influential American is the Boss himself, Mr. Bruce Springstein, who, on his 1992 Human Touch album, included his song, “57 Channels (and nothin’ on).”

 The thing that occurs to me is that we have an overabundance of ease and choice. Streaming technology has made movie-going so easy, not only do we not have to get dressed, get in the car, buy the tickets, find seats, and wait for the lights to dim, we don’t even have to walk across the room to a shelf and crack open a DVD case anymore. Watching movies is so easy, it almost doesn’t mean anything. Watching a three-hour long feature film created by thousands with a budget of millions intended to change lives is physically the same as watching a Youtube video of a four year old unboxing PJ Masks toys. The convenience of our technology has cost us something in the way of ritual and distinction.

Additionally, there’s such an abundance of choice, we are often paralyzed by possibilities. When there are three movies on the marquee or sitting in cases on the coffee table, it’s easy to decide which one is the better way to spend ninety minutes. When there are three thousand, where do you even begin? Even if you narrow it by genre, how do you choose between seventy five sci fi movies? When everything is available, it’s almost as though nothing is.  

There’s no stopping streaming technology or cutting back on what is available to us. The only thing we can do is choose to be more mindful about how, when, and why we consume movies. I can choose to be more purposeful when using a streaming service by researching ahead of time what’s available and deciding then what to watch instead of just mindlessly browsing. I can consciously decide to screen more movies at the theater so I am invested in what I’m watching because I am paying the money and taking the time to be in that environment rather than just on my couch at home. Our decisions about how, when, and why we watch films are a big part of what gives the movie-watching experience meaning. If we want to really watch movies instead of just having them on in the background of our lives, if we want movies to have value, we have to treat them as though they are dear to us. Otherwise, it’s just 5700 channels and nothing on.