The Cosmopolitan Perspective, the Rebellious Impulse: The Activist, Belle, Dear White People, Omar, Selma and Proposals for the Future (Part 2)

Films tell similar—and very different—stories of human existence, past, present, and future, imagined and true: and the ones I am considering now are The Activist, As I Lay Dying, Before Midnight, Belle, Best Man Down, Black Sea, Blackbird, The Book of Negroes, Boyhood, Confusion of Genders, Dear White People, Edge of Tomorrow, 52 Tuesdays, Frankie & Alice, Gandhi, God Loves Uganda, Half of a Yellow Sun, Hannah Arendt, Hemingway & Gellhorn, The Hollow Crown, The Homesman, Horns, The Hundred-Foot Journey, The Imitation Game, The Interview, Kill the Messenger, Leviathan, Lord of the Flies, Love Is Strange, The Loving Story, The Misfits, A Most Wanted Man, Nebraska, The Normal Heart, Omar, The Others, Out of the Furnace, Peeples, A Place in the Sun, Selma, The Signal, Sophie’s Choice, The Southerner, Steel Magnolias, Tess, That Awkward Moment, The Two Faces of January, Whiplash, Winter in the Blood, and Winter Sleep. (The film is mostly impressive; but in one scene you can see briefly the boom mike at the top of the frame.) When the film premiered at the Cannes film festival, The Hollywood Reporter’s reviewer Todd McCarthy wrote, “Franco, with co-scripter Matt Rager, has wrestled to the ground the author’s fragmented, multi-voiced tale of the ordeal an impoverished Mississippi family endures to bury its matriarch and emerged with something many have tried but few have delivered, a worthy screen adaptation of Faulkner” (May 20, 2013). Even here something of the free spirit is exuded by James Franco, whose performances in True Story and Wild Horses were more complicated: in Rupert Goold’s True Story (2015), a story of ambition, shame, and murder, Franco plays a man, Christian, accused of killing his family, and he suggests melancholy, charm, slyness, and doubt; and in Robert Duvall’s Wild Horses (2015) Franco is the son, Ben, trying to get the truth out of his father, a rough-talking Texas patriarch, Scott Briggs (Duvall) who has had trouble coming to terms with the people around him and changing times. Belle learns the limits of her life when she gets to be the age when she might marry but finds there are a paucity of men considered appropriate (and yet an idealistic law clerk with liberal politics and an aristocrat without money of his own are attracted to her); and Belle discovers the important legal case involving slaves murdered for an insurance claim.