Thomas F. Cook

Many people don’t know this, but it is not legal or possible for an underage child to give consent. They can say they wanted the relationship. They can say they wanted the sex. But legally, they do not have the right to do so.

This is sort of the unspoken truth at the heart of May December — that Julianne Moore. as a 36 year old woman, seduced and fucked a 13 year old boy. Their sex resulted in a daughter which she had during her time in prison. Later, out of prison, she married him and they had twins. But in trying to do the math, it seems like he may have been 18 when she got pregnant with their twins and the older daughter was conceived when he was 13 — there seems to be about 4 or 5 years between the siblings. In any event, the boy, Joe Yoo, played by Chris Melton, is now 36 himself which makes Gracie (Moore) 59 or 60. He still insists it was what he wanted: that he wasn’t like other kids. But the intrusion of Natalie Portman, an actress named Elizabeth, is going to temporarily bring some of these unspoken truths to the surface. Elizabeth is there to study Gracie, but her presence brings doubt to Joe’s world, and doubt is what makes a story interesting. Gracie has no doubt — still — decades later — does not think she has done anything wrong. But if you look, like a jury might, she tells herself lies to keep this fantasy going. One, is that she says Joe was in charge (of the pet shop where they met). That he was in charge and he was the one who seduced her. It was already established that Gracie was working there and hired him to help out. Another clue – is that when Elizabeth starts filming a new movie about this scandal, she is shown seducing Joe (and the actor playing Joe for this scene looks nothing like a 13 year old.) Joe may have believed he wanted it, but in a powerful bedroom scene/fight, he says to her “What if I was too young..” (to make that decision.) That’s when her lies come out.

Scotty Bowers (of the Hollywood gas station), told in the documentary about him, that he lived across from a monastery, and as a 13 year old, walked across the street to get to know some of the monks and have sex with them. The interviewer said, “But that’s illegal,” and Scotty shot back, quite angrily, “It was what I wanted.” But this is what so many people don’t understand about the law and statutory rape. He was too young to give consent and the monks that he had sex with, even if he initiated it, were committing statutory rape.

Gracie, in her final line, says to Elizabeth, “I’m confident.” It’s a strange quirky line, and, in fact, we’ve seen many instances of her having extremely bizarre breakdowns — one about losing a cake client (she bakes cakes for a living, but basically has five customers who are just doing her a favor) that sends her into fits because she’s going to have a cake go to waste. And another where she irrationally complains that Joe smells like the barbecue grill. But I think that final line means, “I’m deluded and am going to stay that way.” This is quite sad because in the meantime, Joe has been questioning their whole relationship and I was quite convinced that he was going to have to leave. But that “I’m confident,” line ended it. It tells us that she still doesn’t believe she has done anything wrong, whatsoever.

Yet after viewing it twice (once in the theatre and once on the tv), it becomes even more clear that Joe has missed out on nearly everything that young people are meant to go through. He went from 13 to 36 with his abuser dictating the rules of their relationship — the main one being that they cannot talk about their relationship. Even Joe’s relationship to his children is so strained and awkward. The son can barely call him “dad,” and it’s only when they share a joint that Joe and his son make a small attempt to be a normal father and son. That moment, of course, is stifled by Gracie.

It’s a very interesting movie, but in thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve ever quite despised a lead character as much as this one. And Elizabeth, the actress who can’t possibly be very good, is just as despicable.

I’m not sure if they actually released a movie poster for this film, but this seems to be at least a poster for the movie when it played at Cannes.

I’m not a Martin Amis fan so I have not read the book, but apparently Jonathan Glazer radically re-adapted this novel to fit his vision of what evil looks like. There are also a few flaws with his adaptation and one is that you have to understand something about Auschwitz in order to understand the movie.

Without an understanding of what the “ovens” meant, or “ash,” or random gunfire, trains heading toward a walled camp, and the barbed wire on those same walls, you’d probably not understand a thing about this movie.

I was pretty certain, and I was right, that horrible reviewers like Manhola Dargis would bring up the “banality of evil,” phrase that Hannah Arendt coined, but I don’t think this movie is about the banality of evil, but much more about how ordinary and perhaps — even more important — untalented people can blind themselves to the horrors that they are inflicting on, in this case, about 3,000,000 prisoners. And yet, are they blind? Or is there some moral flaw in the human mind that rationalizes the wrongs being committed in order to keep living in paradise. (The mother of this clan — Hedwig Höss — referes to their home as a paradise.)

Just to go back and do a plot summary, this movie is about Rudolph Höss, who was the commandant of Auschwitz death camp for about four years. He and his family lived in the southeast corner of the original Auschwitz prisoner camp and they apparently lived a very luxurious life, with a large garden, a small swimming pool, a backyard gazebo, and a lot of slave labor to help them maintain it. The movie focuses solely on these people and their children. It never once shows us what’s going on inside those walls. Other than the slave labor, it doesn’t show anything except how this family ignores — but that’s not the right word — embraces maybe — the killing that’s happening on the other side of the barbed wire.

A small detail early on is when a prisoner pushing a wheelbarrow, comes through the camp to the back door of the commandant’s residence and drops off two sacks. They contain clothing, and one contains a full length fur. Hedwig allows her laborers to take whatever they want from one sack, but takes the sack containing the fur to her room and shuts the door. She tries it on to see how glamorous she looks and that single act, suggests she knows absolutely what’s going on and what she is participating in. A little later you hear some Polish or German women laughing about one of the slave laborer’s taking a tiny little Jewess’s dress and not fitting into it.

Auschwitz 1 is still there. It was originally a prisoner for Russian p.o.w.’s, but eventually, under Höss ‘s command, it became a death camp. The home is in the lower right in this google map photo. It’s labelled Don Komendanta obozu, which I think means The Commandants abode. In the movie, the garden and pool extended up NNW in that clear space which looks like a small field. Toward the top of the photo with the red arrow is the first crematorium. In the movie, this chimney is seen constantly smoking or burning orange and red.

When the Germans expanded their extermination campaign, other camps were built in the area — they have different names like Auschwitz-Birkenau, etc., and were march larger.

There are a multitude of reactions in this family to what’s going on in that camp. One girl has become a sleepwalker, and using a thermal camera the director captures her sleepwalking dreams which mainly consist of her gathering apples and leaving them in places for, presumably, the prisoners. A boy can’t stop staring at the flames coming from the chimney because he’s troubled by them. Most effective, however, is Hedwig’s mother, who has come to stay with them for an unspecified time, but it seems like it’s supposed to be a permanent move. She is horrified by the smoke (and when the wind changes direction the smell comes into the house in paradise and all the windows have to be shut) and without saying a word to her daughter or anyone else, she packs up and leaves. And Rudolph, when he is at some big gala in some town that is quite far from their home, calls his wife and tells her that he mostly spent the night thinking about how he would gas this crowd and explains that the ceilings are too high there.

Höss’s testimony at Nuremberg was creepy and horrifying. (The movie ends long before he is caught and tried.) Basically he admits that he killed and burned between 1.5 and 3 million people, but that he didn’t really keep the numbers. And basically, the psychology behind what happened there and elsewhere has occupied minds (like Sigmund’s daughter Anna Freud) and others for the last 75 years and is ongoing, as we can see with so many Trump/Maga people who are calling for the extermination of liberals and leftists and with Trump himself starting to use Hitler style language such as “infecting our blood,” and “vermin.”

But for me, that fur coat scene tells you nearly everything you need to know about how we blind ourselves to the evil we do. As long as the gifts keep coming, we can reduce people to others, and then never have to look at them again. And I for one, think this adaptation perfectly encapsulated how we commit evil by not seeing it.

Höss, like all cowards, tried to hide as a gardener. But he was found by a Nazi hunter, tried and was hanged. At the request of survivors he was executed at Auschwitz. He was the last execution in Poland. He wrote some interesting letters to his family after (after!) he knew he was going to be executed. He wrote that he had blindly believed in what his superiors said and their philosophy, and he told his son never to believe without questioning. (I’m paraphrasing of course.) But I have to take that contrition with a grain of salt, because he had basically been a career criminal before he ended up joining the SS. He was always on that path and probably always had murder in his heart.

Another outsourced review of The Times by Wesley Morris gave this a terrible rating, and boring. It is anything but.

As I wrote about when doing my own review of Promising Young Woman, the question the writer is asking (of herself and of us, as watchers) is whether or not the main character is in love with a secondary character. In Promising Young Woman, if you look closely, you can see that she wasn’t just devastated by the suicide of her friend after her friend had been group raped, she was devastated by the loss of her love.

In this, Oliver (Barry Keoghan) appears to be in love with an upper class college student named Felix (Jacob Elordi). He gets himself invited to spend the summer at his family’s estate which is called Saltburn. And then he starts to get a little weird. It’s riveting and not at all boring. By the time you understand what is actually going on it becomes a little like the end of PYW when they find the locket. It all comes together in a kind of tied up package. Oh… he’s a clever psychopath. But the question still remains, did he love Felix? He even asks this question over and over at the beginning of the movie and then the camera cuts away suddenly, as if he finally realized the answer but the director decided not to let us hear him. Later, when we return to that room, we find out. The uber rich live like they have no predators… except one.

Anyway, the reviewer this time has (I’m quoting) has written about the moral force of civilian cellphone videos, Hollywood’s addiction to racial reconciliation fantasies, and the endangerment of romantic comedies. I don’t think he was the right person to review this very entertaining movie. Stick to articles about cellphones.