The Twilight Samurai

One of the Japanese film’s most popular and enduring genres has been the chanbara or samurai film. The finer examples of the genre have always transcended it through individual artistry, and I have always insisted that the grandeur to be found in them far outdistances any of the Westerns produced since The Great Train Robbery in 1903. 

Decades after Kurosawa’s celebration of the samurai as hero, Kobayashi’s severe attacks on the samurai code, and at a time when live action films in Japan were being outnumbered by animated films, few observers were quite prepared for the understated and profoundly humane contribution to the genre known as The Twilight Samurai, made by Yoji Yamada in 2002.

Yamada, still living and working at age 89, is one of those filmmakers whose work was considered too Japanese for export. He wrote and directed 46 out of the 48 films in the series It’s Tough Being a Man (Otoko wa tsurai yo), popularly known as the Tora-san series, after its hero, a hapless but “lovable” n’er-do-well played by Kiyoshi Atsumi. The films indulged in a kind of sentimentality that can be found in many Japanese films, but were unknown outside Japan until recently to anyone except Japanese film enthusiasts. 

Donald Richie once defined sentimentality as “unearned emotion." The Twilight Samurai is remarkably free of sentimentality, but quite rich in delicate emotion. Yamada is not a stylist like his great predecessors Naruse or Ozu, but he is an expert at observing subtle character delineation. Like Ozu, he forces the viewer to make adjustments in pacing and concentration. You have to look patiently to catch the care and clarity with which Yamada shows us Seibei’s - the hero of The Twilight Samurai - home life. The story is set in the great transitional period just prior to Japan’s historic reopening to the West. The very old traditions of feudalism are still in practice, but their usefulness is being questioned. For instance, after the film’s lead character, Seibei Iguchi, causes his clan some embarrassment because of his shabby appearance and strong odor (he is a poor samurai whose wife has died of tuberculosis, leaving him alone go care for two small daughters and an old mother), his uncle tells him such an offense would once have required him to commit seppuku, but times have changed. 

Without a wife, Seibei’s traditional shaved head (known as "chonmage") is sprouting hair and he is also growing his beard. The funeral he had arranged for his deceased wife was so expensive that Seibei has sold his long sword and has only a bamboo replacement in his scabbard. For a Japanese film lover like myself, this detail is a reminder of the Masaki Kobayashi film Seppuku, in which a young samurai, whose infant son is ill with fever, sells his own swords and carries bamboo replacemens in his scabbards. Another reminder of that film is the presence of the once formidable Tetsuro Tamba in the role of Seibei’s uncle. 

Seibei comes across as a dignified, humble, if rather stolid, man. But at about midway in the film, when a fellow samurai tries to persuade Seibei to marry his sister, Tomoe, who is not only a childhood friend, but who cares about him and his children, his humility becomes an obstacle and he declines the offer. Seibei explains that his wife married beneath her and endured hardship because of his lowly position. What he doesn’t address is his lack of ambition and his very un-samurai-like self-effacement. 

But there is one aspect of his position at which Seibei excels – his skill with a short sword. (He has developed such skill only because his long sword is made of bamboo.) He reveals his skill when he intervenes in a duel between Tomoe’s brother and Kouda, Tomoe’s ex-husband, and he trounces him, not with the short sword itself (which would be potentially deadly), but with a short stick. With it, he knocks Kouda out cold. 

A friend of Kouda’s named Zenemon Yogo, who is also the master of the guards, congratulates Seibei at the success of his short sword style and expresses his intention to spar with him some day. That day arrives unexpectedly and it provides the film with a superb climax. There is a power struggle in the clan leadership and the samurai Yogo is dismissed from his position. This requires him to commit seppuku, but Yogo refuses. The clan leadership dispatch one of their best samurai to kill him, but Yogo kills him instead. Having heard of Seibei’s unusual mastery of the short sword, the clan offer him a promotion and a raise in pay if he can kill Yogo. He asks for two weeks to practice, but they order him to fulfil their order immediately. 

Having no one to help him to dress for combat, Seibei turns to Tomoe. In a touching scene she helps Seibei prepare for battle. She gently combs his unkempt hair. He then entreats her to look after his two daughters if he should fail to return, and expresses his regret that he didn’t marry her when he had the chance. 

The scene of Seibei’s confrontation with a drunken, clearly deranged Yogo is streaked with tension and bizarre behavior on the part of Yogo. He tells Seibei that, he, too, had been poor and that his daughter has died. (He even eats some of her cremated remains.) He tells Seibei that he will spare him if he lets him run away. But when Seibei, who is wearing only his short sword, tells Yogo how he sold his long sword and replaced it with bamboo, Yogo flies into a rage and the two men fight. Yoji Yamada expressed his scepticism of movie swordfights in which men are killed with one cut. Seibei kills Yogo, but is himself seriously wounded. He hobbles home to find Tomoe still there, since she was convinced that she would never see him alive again. Their reunion is touching, if typically restrained. 

An epilogue involving Seibei’s elder daughter Ito, who is now an old woman, relates the rest of the story, which has an ironic turn. She is played by Keiko Kishi, still strikingly beautiful. I remember first seeing her in Ozu's Early Spring (1956). Hiroyuki Sanada plays Seibei with great sensitivity. His stoicism may be typically Japanese, but he makes it seem exceptional in his historical surroundings. The divine Rie Miyazawa, whom I have admired since I lived in Japan in the early 1990s when she was dating a young sumo wrestler, gives Tomoe her consummate beauty and grace, but with the additional attractiveness of experience. And Min Tanaka, a famous dancer and choreographer, appears in his first film role as Yogo. His performance is powerful and physically compelling. In the fight scene with Seibei, his face is a ghastly grey in the dim light of an abandoned temple. 

The Twilight Samurai is a solid and subtle character study that entices the viewer to follow the story deeper, and deftly rewards one’s expectations for scenes of action. The age has shifted away from the prominence of the samurai class. Seibei’s ultimate fate, as related by his daughter/narrator, is to die in the last great – and magnificently futile – samurai rebellion. Based on a historical novel by Shuhei Fujisawa, Yoji Yamada created a noble tribute to his fictional life.

Let Us Now Trash Famous Men

James Agee

The era of the greatest discussion and debate about film was in the 1960s, which was also the period of the greatest creativity in international film, when filmmakers like Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and Truffaut produced their best work. Since the work of every one of these filmmakers, and many others, went into sharp decline shortly thereafter, there were no winners in the debates. In the US, critics weren’t aligned with one another, but it was fairly easy to separate them into opposing camps. One one side were critics who applied judgements cultivated in other branches of criticism, in literature and/or theater, and on the other side were critics who approached film as an exceptional art (despite its impurities). 

Since the 60s, however, the level of the discourse inspired by film criticism has declined considerably, as has, of course, the quality of individual films. There doesn’t seem to be anything like the received knowledge one finds in literary criticism – despite efforts at creating a film canon of sorts – about what constitutes good writing. All of the film festivals and the Hollywood Academy awards are as hopelessly commercialized as ever. Prestige means money means prestige is the vicious cycle of an industry encumbered by a publicity machine of monstrous proportions. 

What there are in the place of critical consensus are schools of criticism that operate by their own exclusive standards and apply them consistently, if unconvincingly. Recently, in an Aussie-based ezine called Film Alert 101, critic David Hare (not the English playwright) wrote a review of a Criterion restoration of a 20th Century Fox product called Nightmare Alley. After praising the photographic qualities of the restoration (a subject in which he is an unenviable authority), Hare quoted from a review of the film written by James Agee when he saw it on its first release in 1947. 

"In any mature movie context these days these scenes (of pseudo-religion with fake Temples and media personalities fronting the fakery) would be no better than all right, and an intelligently trashy level of all right, at that; but this kind of wit and meanness is so rare in movies today that I had the added special pleasure of thinking, "Oh, no, they won't have the guts to do that." But they do; as long as they have any nerve at all, they have quite a lot. The rest of the show is scarcely better than average. Lee Garmes camera work is lush but vigorous." (The Nation, November 8, 1947) 

For Agee, this was saying a bit more than needed to be said about a run-of-the-mill failure. In fact, it’s high praise coming from Agee. In his Time review of the film, published five days earlier, he went a little further toward giving the film a positive review. But the last two sentences of Agee’s The Nation review bothered Hare intensely: 

With the last two sentences Agee betrays his lost-in-the thirties-nostalgia for a non-existent socialist cinema of deep-and-meaningful social and moral worthiness, and his snide remarks on Garmes betray his pathological loathing of formalism at the expense of the sort of Hemingway-Huston male weepiedom he so yearned for, even within his own screenplays. 

“Snide remarks”? Since when is “vigorous" camera work a bad thing? Or is it Agee's use of the word “lush”? (Agee was a legendary lush.) But Hare went a little further when he posted his review on his Facebook page: “Agee was also VERY nervous about anything remotely ‘queer’. This and artiness seem to be his slip-is-showing bêtes noirs.” To me, this is infallible proof that there hasn’t been a jot of close reading of Agee on Hare’s part - merely Agee finding Nightmare Alley less than the blinding masterpiece Hare wishes it could be. 

Disagree with something a critic tells you. I do it all the time, with some of my favorite critics. I learn something every time. But calling him out as a homophobe or as a secretly suppressed gay man is outrageous. And since when was Agee a Leftist? Because he once wrote – stupendously – about sharecroppers? Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for Fortune for crissakes (who didn’t know what to do with it)! He was a slave in the Luce mill for fourteen years.

Agee’s most famous screenplays were commissions. (There are even unsubstantiated claims that The Night of the Hunter was written by Charles Laughton, who was unmistakably gay.) His only self-motivated screenplay to be filmed (The Blue Hotel was optioned by John Huston but never filmed) was the charming short film The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. (1) So whatever Hare may have read into Agee’s screenwriting is rather pointless. 

James Agee (1909-1955) was the film critic for Time from 1941 to 1948 and The Nation from 1942 to '48. Living in New York City, he had access to imported films, but his subject was Hollywood. He was in a slightly less precarious position than Otis Ferguson had been in, writing film criticism for The New Republic from 1934 to 1942. But Agee was to be pitied – an enthusiast of an art form that was so rarely in evidence that he had to – was employed to – swim through rivers of shit to find one thing that would make him feel clean again. 

Hare might try to remember what it was like for a cinephile long before the word was even coined the next time he loads a disc into his state-of-the-art player. I think the kind of revisionism being practiced by Hare, a digging up of the dead and zombifying them, is regressive in the extreme. (2) It pretends that the judgements of people of the past are not merely outdated but faulty – that if only James Agee were alive today he would be delighted by the Hollywood pablum he once deplored. And that we who have succeeded Agee have not just the advantage of being alive but of being unencumbered by the values he applied to Nightmare Alley. Incidentally, Agee often wrote reviews of the same film for both publications at which he was employed and the reviews were sometimes at odds with one another. If Hare had bothered to read the three paragraphs he submitted to his Time column (instead of only the one in The Nation), he might’ve been less disapproving of Agee’s opinion of Nightmare Alley.

(1) The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.

(2) Earlier this month, Hare wrote the following: "I Walked with a Zombie is Tourneur's very greatest masterpiece in my view and to me now one of the the five greatest films ever made." I'd rather not know what the other four masterpieces are.

[Postscript July 29, 2021. Still not finished in his feeble attempts to smear the reputation of James Agee, David Hare goes at it again in his latest Film 101 review of a new Blu-Ray transfer of a Monograph Studio release called I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948). 

The "Poverty Row" slur on the studio is a deeply flawed view of the outfit which by the end of the war was making near A-level, length, budget and quality movies in the most loathed of genres by highbrow critics of the time like Agee. Their loss. 

This begs two questions: 1) In an intellectual pursuit like film criticism, or indeed in any pursuit, how is being a highbrow a disadvantage? If he was trying to be sarcastic, Hare should’ve put the word between quotation marks, thereby implying that Agee was a so-called or would-be highbrow; 2) Is Hare admitting that the only way to fully appreciate trash like I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes is by being unabashedly lowbrow (no quotation marks)? 

Whatever the answers to these questions, I know whose shoes I would rather be in.]

The Whole Long Plod

Today is my 63rd birthday and I’m up to page 561 of James Joyce’s Ulysses. (I‘m reading the Penguin Modern Classics’ edition, with the text at 933 pages.) This, in itself, is an accomplishment. Many of Joyce’s contemporaries didn’t get as far along as I have. Virginia Woolf abandoned it around page 200, and of all of his contemporaries, Woolf was Joyce’s most serious competition as a novelist.(1) They were both committed to a style of writing that became known as “stream of consciousness” - finding a means with which to capture a conscious being’s moment to moment life in the world. Joyce actually left Woolf behind in the dust by adopting his own “stream of life” style. I just finished reading the scene that records the words spoken in a pub by unnumbered people present. Every nonsensical word. 

Woolf was also put off by Joyce’s concentration on what George Orwell called the “dirty handkerchief side of life” and by his fearless portrayal of what Woolf doubtless regarded as the bestial level of human behavior. I don’t know if she got as far as the passage, for example, in which a character describes how hanged men are found to have full erections: 

-There’s one thing it hasn’t a deterrent effect on, says Alf. 

-What’s that ? says Joe. 

-The poor bugger’s tool that’s being hanged, says Alf. 

-That so? Says Joe. 

-God’s truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker. 

-Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said. 

-That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It’s only a natural phenomenon, don’t you see, because on account of the ... 

Trying to imagine Woolf’s immediate reaction to this passage is . . . hard. Or, indeed, to be a fly on the wall as Woolf was reading Molly Bloom’s closing monologue. 

But it has been 99 years since the publication of Ulysses in Paris, and such objections are by now out of date. The book is so much more than just a giant curiosity, an “omnium gatherum” of random thoughts and sensations during the passing of a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. And the average reader needn’t be afraid of missing every obscure allusion that Joyce makes. There are annotated versions, but you don’t need to consult any of them to get the point that Joyce was making – repeatedly. After all of the references and divagations and metaphors are tallied, the reader may hope there is a cumulative effect. But why? It’s just as philistine a hope as to expect all of the story’s loose ends to be neatly tied up by the final chapter. While reading it, I kept thinking that after a few paragraphs have passed and a different character enters the scene, that there had also been a time shift, an ellipsis moving me forward in time. Instead I am constantly reminded that the whole narrative is following the burial of Paddy Dignam, following the course of characters introduced in the funeral procession to the cemetery as the day passes minute by minute. I was reminded of a moment in David Lynch’s beautiful film, The Straight Story in which we see Alvin Straight driving his riding mower down an Iowa highway. The camera cranes away from him moving slowly down the highway and pans up to the sky. But after a moment, the camera pans back down to show us the mower only a few yards farther away from us. It was Lynch’s way of telling us to adjust to his slower paced narrative. 

After reading the novel, T. S. Eliot asked “How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?” But I have a few hundred pages to go before I reach the last chapter. So far my favorite passage is the one at the seaside with Bloom watching Gerty MacDowell in the waning light and she letting him watch until she gets up to follow the other two girls home: 

It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because Gerty MacDowell was ... 

Tight boots ? No. she's lame! O! 

Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! 

And she leaves Bloom alone to get a long way around to his first meeting Molly and his lost youth: So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. That Bloom is Ulysses and Gerty Nausicaa requires an effort for the reader that Joyce intended to be difficult. The Heroic Age has been replaced by the glorious sordidness of modern life. 

One last fact about Joyce’s Ulysses. He uses the n-word (the ultimate verboten in the present era of virtue signaling and cancel culture) seven times. An Evelyn Waugh novel I read a few months ago uses the word quite casually. It’s currency has long since expired for writers that aren’t themselves black. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has been variously condemned, removed from school reading lists, from library shelves, and even been rewritten replacing the word with something harmless, like “slave.” Ulysses was banned before – for its purported obscenities. Before it was burned and then banned in England, Ireland, and Canada, it was banned in the U.S. nearly two years before its first appearance in book form. The ban was lifted in 1933 by Judge John Woolsey, who took a month away from his duties to read the text. He concluded that: 

"I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes ‘Ulysses’ is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive though normal person to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses of the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” 

I hope to be finished with my own long plod across Dublin before the end of May. 

(1) Joyce and Woolf were almost exact contemporaries. She was born just eight days before him in 1882 and she drowned herself in the River Ouse two months after he died in Zurich in 1941.

Solving a Minor Mystery

By the time I got around to reading Michael Caine’s splendid autobiography, What’s It All About? (the audiobook skips over much of the material in the printed book – as Caine put it, “you pays your money and you takes your chance”) in the late ‘90s, I was curious to find, when he arrived at his memories of making a film called Deadfall in 1968, the solution to a mystery that I’d been carrying around with me for twenty years. 

It must’ve been in 1978 or ’79 that I first watched the Bryan Forbes film Deadfall on late night television. Based on a novel by Desmond Cory, it’s about a pair of jewel thieves, Eric Portman and Michael Caine, who pull off a heist at what one might call the climax of the film that involves Caine using his expert cat burglar skills, which look more like mountaineering, to break into a villa whose owner has gone out to a local concert. The scene cross-cuts shots of the concert, that features a guitar concerto written for the film and conducted by John Barry, with the break-in. 

I won’t bother to write a review of the film, because I remember it chiefly for one otherwise insignificant detail that has no bearing whatever on its impact. Late in the film, when Henry, Michael Caine’s cat burglar character is casing a rich man’s palatial home for his next (and, alas, his last) heist, he attends a fancy dress ball where I could’ve sworn I recognized the English poet Robert Graves sitting at a table dressed like Ali Baba in a red turban. He speaks no lines in the scene, and merely looks up at Michael Caine when he approaches the table. Moments later, I saw him again, dancing wildly with other revelers. 

Graves wasn’t listed in the end credits, but they mentioned that the film was shot “on location in Spain.” I knew that Graves had lived in Spain, on the island of Majorca, since 1929, but aside from these tantalizing clues I had nothing else to go on in my search for a solution to the mystery. Was it Graves? I had fallen under his spell, which is precisely the right word for it, when I was in college around the same time I saw the film. I was quite taken with his studies in poetic mythology and his championing of the Matriarchy. 

Need I remind the reader that my minor mystery arose long before the Internet and personal computers were around to help me to solve it. As it turned out, it was Michael Caine’s autobiography that definitively solved it, which was published in 1992, also some time before the world wide web was commonly accessible. The Spanish locations that were used in Deadfall, it turns out, were on the island of Majorca. In his recruitment of non-professional “extras” to appear in the fancy dress party scene, Bryan Forbes asked the most famous expat on the island, the world-renowned poet Robert Graves, if he would like to join in the shooting. He agreed, but for reasons that were highly personal. Graves had been an officer in the British Army in World War I, and his regiment was the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He had heard that the star of Deadfall, Michael Caine, had served as a conscripted soldier in the same regiment and saw combat in Korea. As Caine relates in his book, during a break in the shooting of the fancy dress party, he was sitting alone and Graves approached him and introduced himself as a fellow Fusilier. Somebody snapped a photograph of them standing together.

Ironweed

"Who cares about bums? And especially bums in Albany." William Kennedy

“We’re all all right. I never met a bum I didn’t like.” Francis Aloysius Phelan

This year’s Best Picture Oscar went to a thoroughly unpromising item called Nomadland, which is about 21st century dispossessed boomers forced to live on the fringes of America. Only instead of being merely homeless, sleeping under the bridges of cities, getting an occasional meal from a mission, Nomadland’s people wander the country – the itinerant homeless. In the first half of the 20th century they were called hobos. 

Ironweed didn’t win Best Picture in 1988 (it was released the year before). Bernardo Bertolucci’s pretty but empty The Last Emperor won that year. Ironweed's two lead actors, however, were nominated for Oscars, but neither of them won. (They were beaten out by Michael Douglas and Cher.) If I imagine that Ironweed wouldn’t have done much better at this year’s Academy Awards, it clearly isn’t because audiences would’ve been put off by its depiction of the lives of unemployed fringe dwellers. 

I suppose it’s instructive to people unaware of the art of film that the production singled out by the academy last weekend is conspicuously lacking in any of the qualities they associate with Hollywood – all of the glamorous romance of movie stars, of red carpets, paparazzi and publicity. Art is something that goes on very far from these glittering things. Winning the Oscar will mean that many more people who probably weren’t interested in seeing the film will now do so because the award must mean that it’s worth seeing – even if most people are no longer as convinced as they once were. 

It used to be that when Hollywood made a movie on a subject as – let’s be honest – repellent as Ironweed's - two days in the lives of alcoholic derelicts (in 1938, no less) - they called it a “prestige picture.” The studios made them to demonstrate that they weren’t interested exclusively in the bottom line. The problem, of course, is that the prestige was hypocritical. The studios expected the movie to lose money, but the loss was acceptable because it fooled people into believing that the studio cared about such an arcane subject as “art.” 

I won’t bother to make any claims for Ironweed the novel, because I don't need to. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a place in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. William Kennedy’s prose has a hard-won integrity: 

“I used to live down at the foot of that street,” Francis told Rudy, and then wondered why he’d bothered. He had no desire to tell Rudy anything intimate about his life. Yet working next to the simpleton all day, throwing dirt on dead people in erratic rhythm with him, had generated a bond that Francis found strange. Rudy, a friend for about two weeks, now seemed to Francis a fellow traveler on a journey to a nameless destination in another country. He was simple, hopeless and lost, as lost as Francis himself, though somewhat younger, dying of cancer, afloat in ignorance, weighted with stupidity, inane, sheeplike, and given to fits of weeping over his lostness; and yet there was something in him that buoyed Francis’s spirit. They were both questing for the behavior that was proper to their station and their unutterable dreams. They both knew intimately the etiquette, the taboos, the protocol of bums. By their talk to each other they understood that they shared a belief in the brotherhood of the desolate; yet in the scars of their eyes they confirmed that no such fraternity had ever existed, that the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. They loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he’s just a bum, but who ain’t? 

The novel plays out in a world somewhere in between Francis’s memories and his alcoholic visions (a number of dead men from his past show up at unexpected moments) and the cold, hard actuality of a second-rate Depression-era city. So it’s something of a jolt to see the places, shot in Albany itself, by the light of day. Real old buildings and old houses with real yards – an inhabited world. But inhabited on two planes: the world above where people work and go to church and send their kids to school; and the world below where people spend all day looking for their next bottle, whatever food they can cadge, and a place to sleep without freezing to death. The film opens on the last day of October. 

Giving substance to Kennedy’s imagined world was considerably helped by Jack Nicholson as Francis Phelan and Meryl Streep as Helen Archer. In fact, the film is worthy of preservation for their performances alone. What left audiences scratching their heads was why two of the best actors in Hollywood forsook all of their glamor to play a pair of destitute alcoholics on the bum in Albany, New York in 1938? But simply watching these two gifted and intelligent actors is incalculably rewarding. 

We see them apart for much of the film – Francis looking for her and Helen always trying – and failing – to get away from him. These scenes are splendid enough, but it is when they are onscreen together that the film comes closest to coming alive, and these scenes occupy the center of the film. Francis and Helen learn that someone they once knew, Oscar Reo, now operates a bar, and when they show up at the bar where Oscar (Fred Gwynn) is crooning “I Love You Like I Never Loved Before,” Oscar hears that Helen used to be a singer and everyone persuades her to take the stage and sing a song. She climbs unsteadily one step up to the stage and sings “He’s Me Pal.” 

He's me pal 

There ain't nobody else I can see 

I know he's dead tough 

But his love is no bluff 

He'd share his last dollar with me 

We see and hear her sing it the way she imagines it and the way it is: the contrast is dramatic and sad. It’s Meryl Streep’s voice and its beauty, even when her voice breaks at the end, tells the story of Helen's training and her pride, but also of how far down she has fallen, and it’s heartbreaking. She climbs down to scattered polite applause and Francis gives her a big kiss (his hat obscures their faces – the shot used for the movie poster). 

Later in the night they get into an argument in an alley. Nicholson brutally grabs her and threatens to punch her, throws a sandwich in her face, and only stops when she asks, in a stubborn, exhausted voice, “Are you gonna hit me now?” Nicholson hugs her and declares his love for her, and it is a shattering moment. 

Apart in their separate wanderings around Albany, Nicholson and Streep show us just how desperate they really are. Francis is there to reconnect, after twenty-two years, with his family. Helen, with her stomach tumor, is looking for a place to die. Francis’s reunion with his family is even less convincing, I thought, in the film than it was in the novel. Annie, his wife (Carroll Baker), is never more than two-dimensional. And his reconciliation with his two children, now grown, comes about far too patly. 

Streep gives Helen an accompaniment of whimpers. She uses money she’s hidden from Nicholson in her bra to check into a hotel and pays for two nights, “in case I don’t die tonight.” Alone in the room, she doubles up in pain and sits down. For the first time in the film, she takes off her red hat and we see her beautiful blonde hair. She takes what used to be called a “whore’s bath” – standing in front of a basin of water - and puts on her blue kimono. Nicholson finds her later that night, dressed in that kimono, dead on the floor beside her bed, her hair fanned out across her pale face. 

While making the film, Tom Waits, who plays Rudy, met William Kennedy who told him something he saw when he was a boy scrawled on a bridge by some hobos: “Life is an empty cup.” Together, Waits and Kennedy wrote the lyrics to a song that’s sung in the movie by – you guessed it – a bum. 

Poor little lamb, now his fleece is all cold 

Wakes up in the morning alone 

Poor little lamb knows what's coming 

Life is an empty cup 

So let's go on a bummer this summer 

Where we won't have to be afraid 

The world will be on a hummer, boys 

And we'll laugh and we'll drink lemonade 

To no one's surprise, and probably to the satisfaction of many, Ironweed bombed.