The Verdict

As much as I would love for this to be my review of the marvelous Sidney Lumet film, The Verdict (1982), starring Paul Newman in top form as down-on-his-luck public attorney (and sometime ambulance chaser) Frank Galvin, it is not. That laudatory review will have to wait for another day. Instead, what I want to present to you, dear reader, is a possibly fate-sealing verdict from the source of my financial support for the past decade. It may yet be the end of me. And, looking back over the calamitous decade that commenced when I left my sister in Anchorage, Alaska and flew to the Philippines, how could I not see this coming? 

(In the months leading up to his death in 1966, Lenny Bruce would introduce to his comedy act, much to the displeasure of his audience, the humorless details of the legal actions being taken against him. I hope I'm not beginning to sound like poor Lenny.)

The letter from the VA Debt Management Center arrived, via email from a family member (I'm using an address in the States as my "home of record"). Mailed on November 19,(*) the Monday before Thanksgiving, it wasn't delivered until November 26, and I have until December 19 to reply or they will go ahead with what they are threatening to do. The letter states:

The Department of Veterans Affairs recently sent you a letter explaining that your entitlement to Compensation and Pension benefits had changed. As a result, you were paid $XXXX.XX more than you were entitled to receive. Since you are currently receiving VA benefits, we pkan to withhold $(the full amount of my monthly benefits) until the amount you were overpaid is recouped. The withholding is scheduled to begin on February 2019.

So at least my Christmas table won't be bare. But what sort of cheer can come from the prospect of the end of the world come February? But the VA shone a light at the end of the tunnel. In a paragraph that opens with the words What are your options?, it reads:

PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Pay the debt.

or PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Set up a payment plan.
... if the recoupment plan above causes undue financial hardship, you can request an extended monthly recoupment plan with a financial status report.

or PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Request a waiver or dispute the debt
If you cannot repay the debt as proposed on the front of this letter, we will work with you to set up a reasonable repayment plan.

Then the letter closes with the obligatory - and somewhat hypocritical - words, "Thank you for your service to our country." (I can hear my father interjecting "Blow it out your ass!")

So I went to an internet café, printed out the forms (VA form 5655 Financial Status Report), and filled them out. 

While going over my financial statement, detailing my expenses against my income, I had to be brutally honest. The amount of my expenses matched that of my income. I have been criticized in the past (by my dear sister) for not saving what little money I have left after I kept the wolf from my door. My excuse is always the same. When you live without everything but what you need to survive, you watch the commercials on TV that scream at you for not buying some crap you don't need but which they insist is the only thing that will make your happiness complete, and you're an American and born & bred in a culture of instant gratification, and the result is you live in perpetual frustration. So when you discover there's an extra ten bucks in your pocket after the bills are paid, the very last thing you think of doing is putting the money away for a rainy day. Because it's always raining here. Maybe the next flood is coming and we don't know it?

My request for a waiver had to be made in writing. So I enclosed a letter with my financial report, once again telling the story that I've had to tell dozens of times. I last told the story on November 18 (see Thankless).

So, I'm in great danger of not only being stranded in a foreign country, which is how I've been living for eleven years, but of being stranded here without any financial support. And it gets worse. The VA may not believe me. For years I have tried to convince my friends of the seriousness and desperation of my predicament. I gave them some glimpses of what livibg in the Sticks is like - the typhoons, earthquakes, and floods, the incessant power failures, the inescapable heat, the bugs. But I failed. All of my skills as a writer that I brought to bear on the task of convincing them that I desperately want to get out of here have miserably failed. They don't believe me. They regard my being here as purely voluntary, and they don't believe that I really want to leave. I managed to convince only one of them that I needed help in acquiring a replacement passport, and he helped me over the relatively minor hurdle of getting to the embassy in Manila, paying the fee, and returning. That was in 2016. But once I had the passport, he told me that I then had the liberty to stay or leave. But, of course, I did not. I still have to find the wherewithal to pay for the ten years' worth of visas that I never got, as well as a plane ticket home to somewhere in the States I could expect someone to take me in. But I guess he didn't believe that, either. 

Suppose the VA does the same - suppose they don't believe that I'm stranded here. If none of my friends believed me, why should the VA?

The upcoming Christmas has the potential of being the most precious holiday for at least the past decade - and all the more precious for potentially being the last. I will try and reflect some of its emotion in my upcoming posts.


* It was dated November 18, a Sunday, which was almost certainly a clerical error. Government employees (like Catholic prostitutes) never work on Sundays.

The Greatest Living American Film Director

I have always thought that, for any fledgling American film director with enough talent and brains, the horizons must seem limitless. On film, the country and its history are virtually unexplored in any imaginative sense, and abstracting from the American experience some semblance of life as it is lived has hardly even been tried, let alone achieved. What few authentic depictions of the American scene that have made it to film are, sadly, almost invariably about criminals. And while there will always be an attraction to the people who break laws and - another American fixation - who get away with it, there is a filmmaker who has chosen to explore the other side. Not just crime, but its consequences, the thankless and too often fruitless pursuit of justice, when it can be found, by people accustomed to seeing justice cheated or perverted.

For more than twenty years a consensus has been building among film critics regarding the position of Martin Scorsese atop the always very short list of great American film directors. But, for me, Scorsese will always be the second best American film director as long as Sidney Lumet is alive and kicking.

After working in television, much of it live, from 1951, Lumet, who turns 85 today, made his feature debut with 12 Angry Men in 1957. It had all of the ingredients of his later work: a controversial subject handled fearlessly, telling people truths they didn't want to hear; powerful acting, this time from a once in a lifetime ensemble cast, and confidence in a less than happy ending. Lumet's theme was the fragility of justice, over prejudice, stereotypes, and all short cuts to the truth about human beings who are poor, underprivileged, and Puerto Rican - the ethnicity of ethics, long before To Kill a Mockingbird made a big deal out of it.

From the beginning he was distinguished as an actors' director. His work, for example, with Sean Connery definitely demonstrated that he was too good to be wasted on James Bond.(1) He proved that Sharon Stone could be a genuine actress when she felt like it in Gloria (1999). And as recently as 2006 he proved that he could make a slab of meat, Vin Diesel, act, in Find Me Guilty. But the films for which Lumet will be remembered are all about crime and punishment: Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict (1982), and Q & A (1990). The first, third, and last of these films form a kind of trilogy on a favorite theme of Lumet's: policing the police. In all three a young, principled cop struggles against his corrupt fellow cops, in Serpico and Prince of the City, and against one powerful, dirty cop in Q & A.

Lumet never, thank goodness, developed a "style" that he imposed on all of his material. For this he doesn't get high marks from the auteurists. But what makes so much of his work truly distinctive is how it always manages to rise above genre. Even his whodunits are paradigms: Murder on the Orient Express (1974) is easily the best film based on Agatha Christie, even if Peter Ustinov was a better Poirot than Albert Finney. Lumet made the most of Paddy Chayefsky's overblown script for Network (1976). And he even managed to make his film of Equus (1977), Peter Shaffer's preposterous love letter to insanity, as good as it could've been.

Of course, the fate of a commercial film director who is as versatile as Lumet is to occasionally find himself marking time with material that is beneath him. And in a career spanning five decades and nearly fifty films, Lumet might well have balked at certain projects. Fail-Safe (1964) was intended to be an intelligent look at the nightmare of nuclear war, but it was completely overshadowed by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, released earlier the same year and with which it bears an uncanny resemblance. Luckily, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970) has been forgotten, since it was based on one of Tennessee Williams' terrible late plays. I don't suppose anyone short of Rene Clair in his prime could've redeemed The Wiz (1978) from being moribund.

Besides returning to TV for awhile in 2001, Lumet has directed two more feature films, is in production with another, tentatively titled Getting Out, and, as I write this, has another film "in development". I see from his credits at the Internet Movie Database (2) that Martin Scorsese isn't slowing down either. Scorsese's finally winning an Oscar for Best Director for his overrated The Departed (2006) has perhaps given him some kind of vindication. Lumet was nominated four times, but never won. He was given one of those odious "honorary"Oscars in 2005, which is usually a kiss of death (Robert Altman). But Scorsese had better not plan on retiring any time soon. Lumet obviously won't.




(1) In The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Offense (1972), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Family Business (1989)
(2) http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000217/