Gotham Diary:
Modern Calamities
30 January 2014
At the bank yesterday, I slipped my card in and out of the ATM machine at the right-hand rear of the ground floor. I asked for a certain amount of money, and I typed in my PIN. Much to my unpleasant surprise, the screen announced that it did not recognize my card, and urged me to contact customer service.
Really! I decided to try another ATM. This time, the process netted me the desired oodles. After I tucked the receipt into my wallet and pulled on my glove, I strolled over to the greeter who stands by the door welcoming customer and directing their inquiries. I told her about the malfunctioning ATM, pointing it out specifically. She said that another customer had had that problem, and, with vast vagueness as to time, she added that she would inform the branch manager.
Later, I scolded myself for not climbing the stairs and telling the manager myself. It’s a very rude shock, especially for an older person living a settled life, to hear that one’s bank card doesn’t work, and it ought never to be transmitted in error — certainly not more than once. Naughtibank!
Earlier, I read of a ghoulish movie that’s showing at the Film Forum, Charlie Victor Romeo in 3-D. In this claustral film, a troupe of actors impersonates the crews of doomed flights, the script transcribed from “black boxes” recovered from the wreckage of crashed planes. Nothing is seen of the passengers. In the Times, A O Scott wrote,
A few of the scenes begin with playful banter, and even a hint of flirtation between a pilot and a flight attendant. As things go wrong, the language is dominated by a mixture of technological jargon (heavy on numbers and abbreviations) and profanity. Jaws clench, beads of sweat appear on brows, and breathing accelerates.
You might have a similar reaction. Whether you will find it pleasant, cathartic, thrilling or just dreadful is another question. After the third chapter of this 80-minute movie, my screening companion, a somewhat nervous flier, excused herself and went to wait for me in the Film Forum lobby. It was not only duty that prevented me from joining her, but also a morbid fascination with catastrophe.
Just dreadful. It’s just dreadful to know that this movie exists.
***
Especially on a day when Kathleen was flying.
For about half an hour in the early evening, my body was a septic tank of cortisol. Kathleen wasn’t answering her phone. She was at the airport in Miami, waiting for a delayed flight. It had probably been a mistake for me to watch Random Hearts while working in the kitchen before making myself an early dinner.
Random Hearts, which I haven’t seen in a long time, has aged very well. I think that that’s testimony to the skill of its director, the late Sidney Pollack. When the movie came out, fifteen years ago, it had an old-fashioned feel, and not in a good sense. Harrison Ford was a tad too old for the role of a hard-hitting Internal Affairs sergeant, and Kristin Scott Thomas seemed cautious in her first “American” role. (Her accent was much improved when she made The Walker some years later. In Random Hearts, she says “scare” and “care” in a way that, while not sounding at all British, doesn’t sound quite right. The French would say that elle venait de nulle part.) The unlikely romance between the cop and the congresswoman was almost swamped by its catastrophic premise. (Their spouses were having an affair, and died in a plane crash on their way to a tryst in Miami.) The Washington setting, replete with campaign managers and their sausage grinders, was too highly seasoned to serve as a backdrop. As a title, Random Hearts was blandly uninformative.
These defects, such as they were, appear to have died with the novelty of Pollack’s film. Ford looks, if not young, then not too-old, and Scott Thomas is at her prettiest, and possibly her sweetest. There is in her performance a touch of little-girl gracefulness that makes a change from her trademark tart, sometimes swaggering, sophistication. Together, the stars create a convincing and affecting instance of what might be grossly called grief sex. They’re bereft and outraged in different ways, but, they are bereft and outraged, and they are further united as the victims of the same infidelity. He wants to know what the guilty lovers’ plans were, and also (being a detective) what was the last thing about his wife that he knew to be true. She is angry at being denied the satisfaction of getting a divorce. He wants to visit the scenes of the illicit liaison; she doesn’t, but she learns from him that this might be evasion on her part. When you’ve been made a fool of, you ought to want very badly to know the how and the why.
The movie does not ask you to judge the long-term prospects of a romance between two people from such very different milieux. In many subtle ways, it minimizes the difference; for example, the two homes, one in the northwest quadrant of Washington, the other somewhere in New Hampshire, seem to have been designed and lighted by the same eye (which of course they were, but that’s usually to be hidden). The congresswoman has a flat in Washington that is, clearly, not home. I was never very sure of just what the cheating wife’s job at Saks entailed, but she was no blue-collar housewife. The cop has a shack in the country near Chesapeake Bay; when the congresswoman pays a visit, she seems perfectly comfortable. If these people are ill-matched, it’s not for economic reasons.
Instead, Random Hearts, which like a certain legendary movie ends at the airport, allows you to indulge your fancy. In the last exchange of dialogue, the cop says, “How would it be if I called you up sometime and asked you to go out to see a movie.” The congresswoman drops her forehead onto his chest. Then she looks him in straight the eye with the film’s first full blast of Kristin Scott Thomas’s alluring ambivalence. “Wouldn’t that be something,” she deadpans, grinning slyly. Then she turns away and, without looking back, walks off to catch her plane. In the final shot, Harrison Ford is smiling. We’ll always have DC.
Kathleen got home more or less in due course. Tired and a bit cross, but utterly intact.
***
Morbid fascination with catastrophe. Needless to say, this phrase, which seems to signal moral depravity when connected to a movie about plane crashes, pretty much sums up the attraction of Stranger by the Lake.