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.