Blu-ray Review: Grace of My Heart (1996)

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Leveling with his former employee and protege, the singer-songwriter Edna Buxton (Illeana Douglas) whom he'd professionally renamed Denise Waverly years earlier, Joel Millner (John Turturro) swoops in after a devastating heartbreak to give her a dose of tough love. Dissecting the way that he's watched from the sidelines as she's fallen into one impulsive, often misguided romantic relationship after another, he says, “Well, I know one thing, the only sense any of these jerks you've allowed to sidetrack you have had in common is a belief in your talent, I know that.” 

Of course, by this point in Grace of My Heart, we realize that belief in Denise's extraordinary talent to turn the emotional truth of everyday life into musical poetry is something that Joel has in common with her lovers as well.

Having left behind her dream of becoming a singer when she was told that girls were no longer in vogue, Denise finds her calling as a hit-maker in the early 1960s, writing pop music chart-toppers that frequently address the issues faced by women and minorities in the real world. Yet her true gift is in the way that she's able to subtly weave her powerful message into an irresistibly melodic soundscape, a skill that eludes her first partner Howard (Eric Stoltz) who – as is often the case with men – prefers to spell out everything literally. Quickly, we deduce that confrontation and controversy seem to be Howard's favorite two words, because both allow him to get on his PR soapbox so that he becomes, in his own mind at least, as big as the song. 

Thus, it's only when Denise writes alone or teams up with Joel's other talented female songwriter Cheryl (Patsy Kensit) that she embraces her knack for subtext once again, deliriously and fittingly writing a love ballad called “My Secret Love” for a secretly gay Lesley Gore-like ingenue played by Bridget Fonda. 

So then why, you might ask, does she first tie her creative and romantic fate to a suitor who prefers the end result of a Denise Waverly song but doesn't truly see the magic in what she does?

The first of three men to be seduced by her gift but are unable to fully understand who she is and where her craft comes from, it's only later in her hard-hitting confrontation with the mentor who knows her best that Denise's romantic Achilles heel suddenly makes sense. Following up his summation about her past lovers, Joel argues that Denise's talent is meaningful to the men but not herself. Or perhaps, sidetracked by love, life, and an upbringing as an heiress where she's repeatedly told she doesn't fit in, Joel posits that Denise hasn't treated her gift the same way.

Brought ferociously to life by an extraordinary Turturro and Douglas who match each other fiery outburst for fiery outburst, it's a mind-blowing scene and one that unexpectedly hit me much harder when I watched this – my favorite Allison Anders movie – for the first time in years, thanks to Kino Lorber's fantastic new release of the film on Blu-ray.

Able to at once hear Joel's words and understand Denise's feelings, it's a staggering sequence that Anders captures in one shot as her cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier slowly pushes in from an overhead crane until we are right in their personal space. It's here we realize that just like there is a difference between an opinion and a fact, understanding and respecting one's talent are two decidedly different concepts, especially when you need to figure out how to prioritize one's craft amid all of the demands that society places on women in both the 1960s and today. 

Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, and written and directed by the enormously talented filmmaker of Gas Food Lodging and Things Behind the Sun, 1996's Grace of My Heart is a film that speaks one way to men and one way to women, and another still to female creatives everywhere.

A historian of the era who sought inspiration in the artists of the '50s and '60s, including Carole King, Lesley Gore, Joni Mitchell, Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and others, from the songwriters of the famed Brill Building to the symphonic surf rock of California and beyond, Anders' film is a love letter to one of my favorite periods in American music.

Featuring instantly memorable songs like the wondrous “God Give Me Strength,” which was written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, although it can be treated as just a compelling overview of the time, Grace of My Heart is an unmistakably personal film for Anders and the affection she has for the people at its center spills over and makes us feel the same.

Breaking down something true and universal about the way we evolve from the role of daughter to friend, girlfriend, wife, and mother, while also trying to reconcile that with our work as an artist, as we watch Denise be drawn into one new love after another, we start to see that there is more than just a basic belief in her talent connecting how she relates to these men.

Each one of them – and this includes her platonic relationship with Joel – appreciates something different about her and sees a side of herself that she tries her best to hide. Howard can be somewhat excluded from this list since above all, we feel that the connective tissue between the two might just be lust, plus his hope to use her as a professional stepping stone (even if he'll never admit it to himself). Still, all of the other men in her life –  all three with names that start with the letter “J” –  play a vital part in Denise's journey to better understanding herself, her place, and her art.

Throughout the film, she becomes involved with a married man (Bruce Davison) who connects to her on an intellectual level, a virtuoso yet unstable musician (Matt Dillon) who sees the raw emotion behind her music and immediately relates to her soul, and of course, Joel, who knows she's cut out for bigger and better things altogether. 

Is she attracted to these men because they're able to articulate her talent in a way that society frowns upon when it's a woman doing the same for herself? Do they allow her to “try on” new sides of herself the way that Jane Fonda has admitted that from the '60s to the '90s, for example, she became an entirely different woman with each new partner? Is Denise drawn to them because they're the first cheerleaders she's ever had, and if so, do they really see her for who she is or who they want her to be?

Not blessed with that inherently male trait of solipsistic confidence – even without the goods to back it up – Grace of My Heart understands how many mixed messages women receive from men both romantically and in our art, even when they're our allies, lovers, or are otherwise unaware that they're sending them.

Through the film, Anders uses Denise to illustrate just how vital it is to make mistakes, to go through all of the love and pain that comes from living your life because that's the only way you have anything of value to offer anyone else. Knowing that you can't get everything from one person – man or woman – we see Denise's goodness starting out as a Philadelphia steel heiress who gives the expensive dress her mother ordered Denise for a music contest to a Black contestant (Jennifer Leigh Warren) whose vocal talent is unparalleled. 

The start of a friendship that lasts throughout the course of the movie, even though Denise has been taught to be fearful of other women trying to take her place in the professional world, when women have the courage to let down these walls and support one another, they make beautiful music together. We know this because – especially in the 5.1 Dolby soundtrack included on the Blu-ray – we can so clearly hear their harmony in Douglas' scenes with Kensit, Fonda, Warren, and scene-stealer Tracy Vilar.

The towering achievement of her career as an actress, Illeana Douglas is incredible here. Struggling to come into her own, first as a singer-songwriter before love, marriage, and children enter the picture, Denise's authentic vulnerability in the way she tries not to let the equally tender Matt Dillon see just how badly she's been hurt when she performs “God Give Me Strength” is a scene that immediately rings true. Lip-syncing the number, it's in both her nervous energy – acutely aware of being observed – and the way she struggles to reign in her emotions that makes it one of the most exquisitely compelling moments in the entire film and also one of the hardest ones to watch.

Knowing that her talent has gotten her to where she is today but trying hard to figure out just what that means in the scheme of things or where she really wants to go, her journey from song-to-song and “J” to “J” never fails to move me each time I press play on Grace of My Heart. Filled with passionate performances, historical touchstones, and autobiographical details that are the result of cathartic artistic sublimation by Anders, this film is more than just the story of a creative woman learning to both believe in herself and find her way in the world. In the end, it's about all of us, and through Denise, Allison Anders lets us know that as long as we have the strength, we'll get where we're going in time. 

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Blu-ray Review: Being There (1979)

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"Again and again throughout [Hal] Ashby’s films, his characters are confronted by authority figures and pressured to conform to societal norms, but they only gain a measure of humanity when they assert themselves and endeavor to experience life and to live it on their own terms.”
-- James A. Davidson; Images Journal:
"The Director that Time Forgot: Hal Ashby"

(Photo From Images Journal)

In the endless sea of film criticism, little ink has been spilled on editor turned director, Hal Ashby. When he is mentioned, journalists often attribute his success to his iconic collaborators (several of the actors in his films were nominated for Academy Awards) and most of the slanted coverage given surrounds his downfall to drug-induced paranoia.

Originally from Ogden, Utah, Hal Ashby was the youngest child born in 1929 to a Mormon family. His parents divorced when he was just six years old – forever-tainting young Hal’s view of marital relationships. After his father lost the family dairy farm in 1941, he committed suicide and Ashby found the body himself when he was twelve years old. This unfathomable event colored his filmmaking greatly as suicide and tragedy abound throughout his works, most notably in Harold and Maude, which when viewed with this in mind seems like Ashby’s cathartic and most personal work although the screenplay was written by Colin Higgins.

Before embarking on his Hollywood career, Ashby proved to be far worldlier than others his age, having been married and divorced twice before he turned twenty-one. He hitchhiked to L.A. at seventeen and worked at least fifty to sixty jobs before he walked into the California Board of Unemployment and asked for a position in a film studio in 1950.

He mimeographed scripts at Universal and eventually became a widely respected film editor, winning a richly deserved Oscar for his work with friend/mentor/collaborator Norman Jewison for editing In The Heat of the Night. Ashby has often stated that film editing provided him with the best film school background outside of traditional university study and he carried the techniques learned as an editor with him when he began directing.

While it was his skill as an editor that helped kick-start his career, becoming a director at the age of forty when an overworked Norman Jewison handed him the assignment to helm The Landlord, it's one that has helped make his direction nearly invisible as his work is so seamless – from Harold and Maude to Shampoo and Coming Home and ultimately up through his final work of the '70s, Being There, releasing onto Warner Brothers Blu-ray disc in honor of its thirtieth anniversary – that we just take it for granted.

The film boasts Peter Sellers in a role that Davidson noted was "Ashby's most fully-realized 'innocent' protagonist." And while on the surface it seems as though it's an archetypal Ashby free spirit, ultimately at the oft-debated end of Being There, it's left for viewers to decide whether or not Sellers' character – Chance the Gardener – may in fact be a higher being, brought in by the Gods to comment not on the '60s like Shampoo or Coming Home but on events as they were happening in the late '70s.

The film, you see, takes place as conservative sentiment began to creep into the pre-Reagan era foreshadowing the 1980s, that would find bearded, wandering Ashby not only “out” but ultimately dead, a literal testament that the idealistic era of the '60s and '70s was over for good.

In Being There, based on the 1971 novel by Jerzy Kosinski, who adapted his own work along with co-writer Robert C. Jones, Peter Sellers plays Chance the Gardener, a simple minded Forrest Gump meets To Kill a Mockingbird's Boo Radley-like character, who spends his days gardening for a rich man and every other moment is spent in front of the television.

When the master dies at the start of the film, Chance must leave the sole home he’s ever known – the only life lessons he packs with them were learned from the “idiot box,” and the music from Kubrick’s 2001 plays during his odyssey into the streets of Washington D.C. His journey eventually leads him to becoming involved in business matters, economic policy and politics in what Darren Hughes calls, “a satiric jab at the co-opting of the nation’s public discourse by television’s empty images and content-free rhetoric,” as Chance imitates the images that surround him, soaking it all up like a newborn child.

Some mistake his deadpan seriousness and naiveté for a sense of humor and others (mostly women) find him intense and seductive— disarming them with his genuine honest nature in a world comprised of double-talking politicians and others who conceal their real political motives. The president, I may add is impotent throughout the film, just like the only other major male character – an invalid with a sexually unsatisfied wife played by Shirley MacClaine — possibly serving as a symbol for the uselessness of figureheads and that the true power is hidden.

Although Chance never learned to read or write, he succeeds in this new gimmicky U.S. where sound bites thrive and ultimately appears on television (now dubbed Chauncey Gardiner) after his gardening comments are mistaken as political gems by the president of the U.S. Chance, who – like newspapers and television news – talks to audiences at a third grade level, is suddenly viewed as sexy not only by MacClaine, (ironically named Eve), but also by others including an attractive homosexual at a party who mistakes Chauncey’s earnest “I like to watch,” as an invitation to view him with another man.

Later, Chauncey is the subject of an investigation by no less than sixteen other countries until, after endless searching for a nonexistent past or any records indicating just who he may be, his character is mentioned by several characters near the end of the film as a likely candidate for the next presidential election.

Finally, as the film ends and Chauncey walks on water, the following quote from a deceased character is read – “life is a state of mind"– leaving viewers scratching their heads over whether or not Chance was merely a simpleton or a mystic/Christ-like figure sent to ease others approaching death (the film is book-ended by death, making one wonder if he is an angel).

The idea that life is a state of mind is fascinating when viewing the work of Ashby — a man with allegedly, as critics frequently state – no style. Upon closer inspection, one notices not only a signature style and recurring themes brought forth in his films, but also a greater understanding of the man behind the films, whose state of mind is echoed in the hearts and dialogues of the free-spirited wanderers who populate his films. Some, like George Roundy in Shampoo delude themselves, others like Harold in Harold and Maude finally find a way of accepting mortality in a cathartic celebration of life, until in Being There one actually walks on water.

Chance the Gardener was a man whose luck brought him wandering into all the right places at the right times, like Ashby whose life had taken numerous directions before he’d even turned twenty-one. Although, sadly, some consider him to be a casualty of the times as his dependency on drugs led to wildly erratic behavior that caused the studios to seize film away from him in the '80s as money entered studios minds more and more – yet, one cannot let this diminish the importance of his career.

He was a man of the times—possibly, like Chance, a mystic wanderer and as Hughes points out, “Being There is a strangely fitting conclusion to Ashby’s enviable run during the 1970s,” as his “politically motivated irreverence and his simple faith in humanity’s potential for radical change were suddenly an anachronism.” The tragedy may have indeed been with Ashby who began on a downhill spiral that ended with his excruciating last few years and death from liver cancer, but when viewed in retrospect with all honesty, the great tragedy was that as – to misquote Bob Dylan – "The times they [were] a-changin’."

Suddenly, a man whose characters made up their own life mottos as their lives were a state of mind went out of fashion and Reagan’s new-economy was in. Sadly, Ashby was the '70s and the '70s ended, for better or worse, and the new decade began. He perished before the dawn of the independent film boom and before a young man named Sean Penn, who stole an Ashby sign (violating Penn’s parole as was noted on the DVD of Coming Home) to bring to his memorial at the Director’s Guild of America, dedicated his first directorial effort to two men that defined the '60s and '70s: John Cassavetes and Hal Ashby. Ashby, through those of us whom he’d inspired, continues to live on and therefore so do the sentiments of the 1970’s.

Although to fans of Being There, the film is mostly synonymous with Peter Sellers who was so committed to the role that as revealed in the Warner Brothers press release, after Kosinski's novel was published, the author received a telegram from its lead character which read, "Available in my garden or outside of it." When a curious Kosinski called the number that accompanied the message, Peter Sellers himself answered the call and spent nine years committed to getting the film into production, which was greatly challenged until the success of his Pink Panther work solidified a deal with Lorimar.

Modeling the voice of Chance "after his idol Stan Laurel," Sellers, who once told Roger Ebert as quoted in his Great Movies series that he had "absolutely no personality at all. I am a chameleon. When I am not playing a role, I am nobody," was so deeply invested in the role that as a young Illeana Douglas reports on the Blu-ray, watching him in a scene was almost embarrassingly private as he nearly went into another dimension.

Douglas, the granddaughter of the film's Oscar winner Melvyn Douglas who was actually bequeathed his Oscar after his death, shares great insights and recollections in a wonderful intimate featurette on the Blu-ray – Memories From Being There – wherein she revealed the close relationship that her grandfather had with Sellers as incidentally they'd been stationed in Burma together when both were in the military (with Douglas in the American side and Sellers, the British one respectively) and she also elaborates on Sellers' complete concentration in his work.

Noting that he'd once said that the only enjoyment he ever had in life was when he was on the floor working or being in a scene – it seems like it was a natural fit for his best and penultimate work to star in a film where the final result or meaning is ultimately left up to the viewer – whether they want to assume it's indeed Christian or overtly religious is one interpretation or rather the way both Douglas and I ultimately believe, it simply celebrates the idea of being in the moment.

As the film ends with the idea that "life is a state of mind," it seems entirely practical that as such we can imagine walking on water and while there are those like Ebert who intriguingly share interesting and astute observations that the film could be a caution that perhaps we're all a bit like Chance the Gardener as passive participants in life, there's plenty of food for thought.

And ultimately, in my eyes and despite the film's slightly sluggish final hour involving a few scenes that should've been trimmed or abandoned altogether, I feel that it provides the precise and perfect final note for the careers of Ashby (who suffered terribly in the '80s) and Sellers, who died shortly thereafter and was amazingly denied an Oscar, which he blames on the inclusion of "outtakes" at the end that "broke the spell" of the film.

The film, which is captured in a rich high definition transfer from Warner Brothers also unearths two recently discovered scenes including the original alternate ending, a longer gag reel and the original trailer that fills widescreen television with Caleb Deschanel's gorgeous cinematography.

And in the end Being There seems to celebrate (at least in my eyes) the individual journeys we all take, choices and relationships we make, in going about our daily lives and the idea that not only is it okay to "like to watch" but it's equally important to process what we've seen as well and walk away from it with humanistic understanding on a deeper level, whatever that may be in our own states of mind.