Anatomy of a Miscarriage (A Separation)

When discussing Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011), it’s difficult to stay away from the term neorealism. Indeed, at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, the movie was awarded the Golden Bear by a jury headed by Isabella Rossellini, the daughter of Roberto Rossellini, making the connection almost official. However, the verisimilitude of Farhadi’s mise en scène tends to bely not only what a skillfully constructed legal drama the film is but also the fact that Farhadi gives the viewer very careful instructions about what to think and how to feel.

Unlike the neorealist films of Rossellini, in which causal relationships are often somewhat loose—Paisan (1946) and Francis, God’s Jester (1950) being probably the most extreme examples—A Separation is a tightly scripted drama in which the plot presents a logical sequence of causes and effects that seem to arise naturally from the characters’ individual traits. As the film opens, Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are in the process of getting a divorce because the latter wants to move to Europe with their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), and Nader—who has to look after his father, who has advanced Alzheimer’s—is too proud to ask her to stay. As Simin is staying with her parents, Nader hires a devout working-class woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), to look after his father while he’s at work. One afternoon, however, Nader comes home to find Razieh missing and his father tied to his bed. When Razieh returns, Nader accuses her of also stealing some money, and in the ensuing altercation, he forcibly ejects her from his apartment. Razieh subsequently suffers a miscarriage and her hot-tempered husband, Hojjat (Shabab Hosseini), takes Nader to court for murder. (Under Iranian law, a four-month old fetus is considered a person.)

Although the film’s narration isn’t restricted to any one character’s range of knowledge, Farhadi often elides certain events in order to set-up dramatic revelations later on. For instance, when Nader comes home and finds Razieh gone, we aren’t told where she went and Nader isn’t interested in asking her. However, the film has already given us a clue, so that when we do find out where she went and why, we’re forced to think back through the film to see how the narration misled us. At a more local level, the framing of some shots, by keeping certain things offscreen, creates a sense of mystery and anticipation. After the climatic encounter in Razieh and Hojjat’s apartment, Nader, Simin, and Termeh are on their way out when they pause in the street and look at something behind the camera. The framing here serves to delay the revelation, and by holding the shot for what seems like a very long time, Farhadi generates a feeling of expectation. It’s only with the next shot of the family in their car that we’re able to infer an event that’s been omitted by the narration.

What’s more, the way that Farhadi controls the flow of story information affects how we judge the characters. By not telling us where Razieh went, the film aligns our sympathies with Nader when he discovers his father tied to his bed. (That said, while Nader’s rage seems entirely justified, our allegiance to him is complicated by the presence of Razieh’s daughter and the persistence with which she defends herself against the accusation of theft.) In other words, while the form of the legal drama gives the impression of impartiality (everyone gets to make their case), Farhadi doesn’t present his characters in a manner that’s, as they say, fair and balanced. During the trial, we tend to side with Nader not necessarily because he’s innocent but because Hojjat is kind of a jerk. In general, Razieh and Hojjat’s emotions are a lot closer to the surface than Nader and Simin’s, but while this makes Hojjat less likable than Nader, it also makes Razieh more sympathetic than Simin, as the emotions being expressed are chiefly fear and indignation at being accused of stealing (as opposed to class-based resentment). On the other hand, Simin registers as somewhat aloof. The paradoxical thing about the movie is that, by seeming to be impartial, it’s able to manipulate us that much better.

Traité de bave et d’éternité (There Will Be Blood)

Perhaps an American director would not have seen greed as a vice.—From a review of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) in Picture-Play (March 25, 1925)¹

Negativity is rare in American cinema, and those films that are strongly critical of society are seldom received favorably by the public—one obvious example being Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which was panned by reviewers, flopped at the box office, and led to Chaplin having to leave the United States.² So I was rather bemused when one conservative commentator cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), along with The Muppets (James Bobin, 2011), as yet another Hollywood movie attacking the oil industry:

They’ve been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media—they hate the oil industry. They hate corporate America. And so you’ll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was Cars 2 [John Lasseter, 2011], which was another kids’ movie, the George Clooney movie Syriana [Stephen Gaghan, 2005], There Will Be Blood—all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means to most people: Fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don’t want to tell that story.³

To be sure, Anderson’s film isn’t an unambiguous affirmation of the oil industry’s positive influence on American life, but it doesn’t precisely criticize it either. In the course of the story, several characters are killed or disabled in accidents on an oil rig, but in every instance, this is due to some freak occurrence that couldn’t be prevented, such as a sudden explosion—not, as with the BP oil spill off the Gulf Coast, because a company was cutting corners at the expense of safety in order to maximize profits.⁴ Ultimately, the movie isn’t about the oil industry per se, but a character who becomes rich by drilling for oil. The impression that the film is disparaging the oil business is a result of its ambivalent attitude towards its protagonist.

Set in California in the early part of the twentieth century, the story centers on a ruthless oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, and three people who become, for a time, his adopted family. Early in the film, when one of his workers is killed in an accident on the rig, Daniel decides to adopt the man’s infant son, H.W. (Herbert Walker?) Nine years later, after getting a tip about there being oil under the ground, Daniel proceeds to buy up almost all the land around the religious community of Little Boston, where he finds himself at odds with the town’s preacher, Eli Sunday. However, sixteen years later, H.W. marries Eli’s younger sister, Mary, and in the final scene, as Daniel chases him around his bowling alley throwing wooden pins at his head, Eli shrieks, “We’re brothers!” The other important character is a man who turns up in Little Boston one day claiming to be Daniel’s half-brother, Henry. By the end of the film, Daniel will have either permanently alienated or murdered all of them.

The film’s characterization of Daniel, by its starkness, invites allegorical readings. His unchecked desire for wealth is already fully in place when the story begins, and is seemingly inborn as the movie doesn’t provide him with a backstory to explain how he got this way. (Daniel himself suggests that it’s hereditary when he remarks to Henry, “If it’s in me, it’s in you.”⁵) Nor does the film reveal the source of his deep antipathy towards religion. In order to convince the Sunday family to sell him their property, Daniel promises Eli that he’ll donate some money to his church, but after the well begins to produce, Daniel repeatedly snubs him. It’s only when he needs to build a pipeline through the one piece of property in Little Boston which he doesn’t own that Daniel goes to church and allows himself to be baptized. He isn’t a psychologically rounded character but the embodiment of American capitalism.

Although the opening scenes establish Daniel as a self-made man who builds his oil business single-handedly, as the story progresses, he becomes increasingly unsympathetic. When H.W. is injured in an explosion on the oil rig, rather than stay with him, Daniel spends the entire night staring at the oil fire. As the fire rages, he remarks to an associate, “What are you looking so miserable about? There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!” When his associate inquires if H.W. is okay, Daniel replies matter-of-factly that he isn’t. He isn’t indifferent to H.W.’s well being, but ultimately the oil is more important to him than his son. From there, Daniel’s relationship with H.W. rapidly deteriorates and he becomes increasingly unhinged. When a representative from Union Oil suggests that he sell his holdings in Little Boston and spend more time with his son, Daniel takes it the wrong way and threatens to cut the man’s throat. At one point, he confides in Henry that he wants to make enough money to get away from everyone, and the final scenes portray him as a Howard Hughes-like recluse, drinking to the point of unconsciousness in his cavernous mansion.

However, the film doesn’t simply condemn Daniel as a monster, but views him with a combination of horror and fascination. In contrast with Anderson’s earlier Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), which were both sprawling ensemble pieces, There Will Be Blood is single-minded in its focus on Daniel, who appears in nearly every scene. The other characters, including H.W. and Eli, are only important to the plot insofar as they serve Daniel’s plans or weakly attempt to resist them. For instance, Daniel uses H.W. as a sort of prop in his business dealings to show people that he runs a family company, but after the explosion, H.W. becomes more trouble to him than he’s worth, so Daniel has him sent away. After Daniel’s baptism, H.W. returns, but we never find out what happened to him while he was away. Years later, H.W.’s decision to start his own company in Mexico leads to the immediate termination of his relationship with his adopted father (“That makes you my competition”), after which he permanently disappears from the film. Tellingly, after H.W. leaves, the movie stays with Daniel and there’s a brief flashback to happier times in Little Boston. This is the only time that the film gives us access to Daniel’s subjective memories, and clearly the purpose of this flashback is to show us how much he’s lost by contrasting his bond with H.W. in the past with his solitude in the present. In other words, the dissolution of their relationship is only important to the story in terms of what it means to Daniel rather than H.W.

As this example indicates, the film allies our sympathies with Daniel more than the other characters.⁶ Although some viewers might see Daniel’s atheism as a negative character trait, the story thoroughly stacks the deck against religion.⁷ Early in the film, Daniel learns from H.W. that Mary’s father beats her if she doesn’t pray, and sees to it that it never happens again. Furthermore, Eli isn’t truly a man of god but a charlatan who performs faith healings. After the explosion, Eli confronts Daniel about the money he promised to the church, and he responds by slapping him around while shouting, “Aren’t you a healer and a vessel for the holy spirt? When are you coming over and make my son hear again?!” Because of Daniel’s obvious sarcasm, the effect of this scene is largely comic. (By way of contrast, there’s no such irony in the subsequent sequence, in which Eli berates his father in a somewhat similar fashion.) In the film’s final scene, the humorousness of Daniel’s caustic remarks as he chases Eli around his bowling alley (“Did you think your song and dance and your superstition would help you? I am the third revelation! I am who the lord has chosen!”) makes it that much more shocking when he finally bludgeons Eli to death.

Eli’s murder is made brutal and disturbing by the foley effects suggesting the impact of the bowling pin on Eli’s skull. The only other noise on the soundtrack is Daniel’s labored breathing, and by keeping the camera on him rather than Eli, the movie emphasizes the physical exertion required to literally bash some one’s brains out. However, it’s indicative of Anderson’s desire to confound viewers that this horrific act of violence is immediately followed by a joke. Daniel’s butler comes downstairs and asks if everything is alright. Cut to a long shot of Daniel sitting next to Eli’s corpse that corresponds to the butler’s optical point of view. In response to the butler’s query, Daniel cheerfully calls out, “I’m finished!” Triumphant classical music rises on the soundtrack, and the film ends. Are we supposed to be appalled by Eli’s murder or amused? Both responses seem valid. Likewise, the film doesn’t yield an unambiguous message, but can be interpreted either as an ambivalent critique of unbridled greed or as a backhanded celebration of American capitalism as a pitiless Darwinian testing ground in which only the strong survive.

Notes:
1. I came across this quote in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s monograph on Greed, which was published by the British Film Institute in 1993 as part of its “Film Classics” series.

2. A 2008 article by J. Hoberman on the reception of Monsieur Verdoux can be found on the New York Times‘ website.

Some other critical films that fared poorly with reviewers and audiences include Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park (1971), Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), and Olivier Assayas’ demonlover (2002).

On his website, Watkins writes this about his film’s reception in the United States: “Punishment Park was released in the Murray Hill Cinema in an out-of-the-way part of Manhattan, New York City, and it was already apparent that the US distributor was not going to properly handle the film… [The movie] was withdrawn from the cinema after only four days. Since then, Punishment Park has rarely been shown in the US, and never on TV. A representative of a main Hollywood studio which could have released Punishment Park was quoted as saying something to the effect that, ‘We could never show this film, we would have the Sheriff’s office […] on our necks in five minutes.’ Participants at a seminar for TV producers from 24 Public Broadcasting System (PBS) stations across the US all swore that they could never, and would never, show a film like this on American TV. And so they haven’t.”

3. This quote comes from Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center, who was speaking on Fox News. (Miss Piggy’s response can be found here.)

According to its website, the goal of the Media Research Center is to “not only prove—through sound scientific research—that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values, but also to neutralize its impact on the American political scene.”

Of Syriana, Peter Bradshaw wrote in the Guardian, “What complicates the plot is writer-director Stephen Gaghan’s reluctance to criticize America too much. Instead of complexity, there is a blank, uncompelling tangle, which conceals a kind of complacent political correctness. […] However tricky the details, the mystery has already been solved. The petro-political complex is to blame, but Gaghan does not care to state it so baldly, perhaps fearful of unsophistication or anti-Americanism or just taking a clear position. […] Gaghan is careful to endorse only free-market liberalism as the acceptable side of Arab nationalism in the Middle East.”

Incidentally, one movie Gainor doesn’t mention is Avatar (2009), even though the film’s director, James Cameron, has been an outspoken critic of the oil industry (particularly, the Alberta Tarr Sands). Maybe this is because Avatar was distributed by 20th Century Fox, which is owned by the same conglomerate as Fox News.

4. From Wikipedia: “On January 5, 2011, the White House oil spill commission released a final report detailing faults by the companies that led to the spill. The panel found that BP, Haliburton, and Transocean had attempted to work more cheaply and thus helped to trigger the explosion and the ensuing leakage. The report states: ‘Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Haliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money)’.”

5. This line recalls Frank Norris’ description of “the foul stream of hereditary evil” in his novel McTeague (1897), which was the basis for Greed.

6. A 2011 blog entry on alignment and allegiance can be found on David Bordwell’s website. In writing this blog entry, I also drew considerably on Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s analysis of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) in the fourth edition of Film Art: An Introduction (1993).

7. I don’t know what Anderson’s own religious beliefs are, but it’s worth remembering that Magnolia portrays a Catholic police officer in a wholly sympathetic light. And while it makes no explicit reference to Catholicism, Hard Eight (1996) is essentially the story of an old sinner looking for redemption.