→ April 2, 2013
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Richard Blais’ The Spence.

I have a new draft blog post up for Insiders on Clint Frazier, and the new episode of my Behind the Dish podcast is also up.

I had one of the best culinary experiences of my life at Richard Blais’ The Spence, located right near Georgia Tech’s campus (and, amusingly, very close to The Varsity). Chef Blais appeared with me on an episode of the Baseball Today podcast last year and we’ve kept in touch since then, so when I mentioned to him I was coming to Atlanta, he set up a tasting menu of sorts for me for Monday night. (I missed Richard by about a half an hour, but as I was walking out, I bumped into another former Top Chef contestant and fellow sports fan, Eli Kirshtein.)

Needless to say, this was a lot of food, but there wasn’t a mediocre dish among the set. The menu featured a lot of the playfulness that characterized Blais’ cooking on Top Chef, especially messing around with textures and presenting foods in unexpected forms, and the flavors were consistently balanced yet powerful.

I can’t even get to the menu items without mentioning the bread – parker house rolls, incredibly light, served with homemade coconut butter with flaked sea salt. I could have licked the board clean of the butter. It seemed foolish to eat bread when I knew a lot of food was coming, but I couldn’t let that butter leave the table alive.

The Spence’s menu has three main parts: Small starters, somewhat larger starters, and full entrees. I got two of the small starters, Blais’ take on oysters and “pearls” as well as fried olives stuffed with cheddarwurst. The oysters were absurd, in a citrus/cucumber juice/vermouth bath with little pearls of frozen horseradish and crème fraiche. (I’m doing most of this from memory, so my apologies if I get an ingredient wrong.) I’ve mentioned before that I’ve long had a fear of raw oysters, since Long Island had a major pollution problem when I was growing up there, but this is the second time I’ve had them at a high-end restaurant and I see the appeal now. The texture was perfect and there was plenty of acid to balance out the mellow saltiness of the mollusk, with those late bursts of heat as the horseradish pearls melted. It comes on a bed of smoked sea salt as well if you want more of a briny/salty flavor, although I thought the oysters were perfect as is. The fried green olives were very briny, so they balanced out the oysters well, although I concede green olives aren’t my favorite color (Kalamata uber alles).

Next up was the bone marrow, served with bread crumbs, finely diced tuna tartare (brunoise style), and two fried quail eggs, along with grilled bread to carry the load. I’ve never met a bone marrow dish I didn’t like, and this was perfectly cooked, just to the point where I could start to spread it on the bread but without losing its texture entirely, and the cold tuna, providing the fresh ocean flavor, gave little hints of contrast to the heavy, earthy flavor of the marrow. Quail eggs are very trendy right now – really all non-chicken eggs seem to be – and here their main advantage was that they fit perfectly on the marrow bone.

The dish that had me laughing out loud was a beet-cured kampachi crudo with freeze-dried horseradish and chicharrones – the kampachi was sliced thinly and shaped like roses on the plate, which worked beautifully with their pink flesh and with the surrounding leaves on the plate. I love crudo fish dishes, so this was right in my wheelhouse, and the beet cure just imparted a hint of flavor to the fish without masking the flavor of the fish itself. The horseradish was sprinkled on the plate like snow, so I would drag the fish in it a little (kind of like dipping your sashimi in soy sace), while the chicharrones, which looked like chunks of puffed rice, were too big to incorporate into the main bite. This was my favorite dish of the night, for what that’s worth.

Then came the pork terrine, another item I’ve learned to appreciate over the last year or so, served with a celery root jam, spicy mustard, and pickled zucchini, plus some more grilled bread. The jam was the star, sweet, lightly acidic, with a hint of spice – ginger, I think – with a texture like what you’d expect if you candied celery root and pureed it. It was a little tricky to assemble the dish with the pork, jam, mustard, and pickle all in one bite, but the balance of savory, sweet, tart, and spicy was spot on.

I got to try both of the pasta dishes, the english pea cavatappi with bacon, peas, and a little mint gremolata, as well as the squid-ink pasta with a pork meatball and a very light tomato/black pepper sauce. I could eat that cavatappi all day – I adore fresh English peas (even growing them in our backyard garden and shelling them with my daughter), which pair beautifully with cured pork, and the pasta just exploded with the flavor of the legumes. The squid-ink pasta was overshadowed a little by the perfect meatball on top, and the sauce was very black peppery, but it was perfectly al dente and I admit my inner kid thinks black pasta is very cool.

The one item I tried off the entrees section was the duck, which I would have ordered if I had had the choice anyway. It’s served sliced with blood orange slices, bok choy, and a puree that I believe contained both charred eggplant and a little chocolate. Duck, orange, and bitter greens is another classic combination, but the puree on the side was the twist, giving a smoky/bitter component that balanced the sweetness of the duck and the orange sauce. I did find the duck slices varied a little in how they were cooked, and since I’m an oddball who prefers his duck a little more cooked than most people do (I just don’t like meats cooked rare, because they taste “cold” to me), this worked out well as I could attack the more cooked slices first. I do want to know what they do with the duck legs though – could there be a confit dish coming on a future menu?

The server suggested the fried brussels sprouts side dish, which comes with fried green beans and a Thai vinagrette. The vegetables are fried plain, without breading, so they’re naturally sweet from all of the caramelized sugars on the exterior; the dressing is just lightly spicy and provides a dark, acidic note to balance out the sweetness.

Andrea Litvin, the Spence’s pastry chef, came out herself to deliver the dessert, the carrot cake, served in little cork-sized pieces with frozen dollops of crème fraiche, tiny meringes, violet leaves (from her own garden) and shaved drived carrot strips. It’s very typical of everything I ate at the Spence in that it looked unexpected, but there was a familiarity to the flavors when you got all of the components in a single bite. I don’t love carrot cake but this was moist and dense and not cloyingly sweet, and the frozen crème fraiche pastilles were amazing, a bright contrast to the richness of the cake. Litvin was also kind enough to answer some questions about making French macarons, my current bugbear in the kitchen as I can’t seem to get enough height on them. She’s up for the Food and Wine Best New Pastry Chef honor in the east region, and you can (and should!) vote for her here.

And finally, I nursed a cocktail through most the meal – the Sailor’s Crutch, containing dry gin, lemon juice, falernum syrup, and soda. I’m a dedicated rum drinker, but I could happily consume a Sailor’s Crutch a day and give up the demon spirit for a long time.

Full disclosure – they wouldn’t let me pay for the meal, and much of the staff came by to chat, so this was an extraordinary experience on many levels. I did see the prices, and I think it’s reasonable for the kind of food they’re serving, comparable to what I’d pay in Phoenix (at Citizen Public House or crudo) and less than I’d pay in New York or LA. Everything I had was wonderful, so I’d recommend it highly even if I had paid full fare.

I should also mention that I bought Blais’ new cookbook, Try This at Home: Recipes from My Head to Your Plate, about a month ago and have had great success with it so far. I need to try more recipes for a full review, but the sweet potato gnocchi were a big hit, even with my daughter who otherwise doesn’t like sweet potatoes.

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→ March 31, 2013
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Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

My last spring training dispatch, on Cubs prospect Pierce Johnson and Giants prospects Adalberto Mejia and Mac Williamson, went up this morning for Insiders.

B.S. Johnson was an avant-garde writer who wrote poetry, plays, and novels that earned minimal recognition during his brief lifetime – he killed himself in 1973 at age 40 – but have since acquired a substantial following among academics and fans of absurdist and post-modern fiction. I hadn’t heard of Johnson at all until finding a passage that discussed his works, specifically the use of metafictional techniques in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, in James Wood’s How Fiction Works about a year ago. Christie Malry is bizarre, a portrait of the sociopath as a young figment of the author’s imagination, an heir to James Joyce and Flann O’Brien and a forerunner of Jasper Fforde.

Christie Malry is an 18-year-old narcissist and malcontent who believes that the world is out to do him harm, even in such clearly impersonal acts as putting up a building where he might want to walk if the sidewalk were a little wider. His first job at a bank, which he takes to be closer to the money, bores him, but he eventually discovers accounting and the system of double-entry bookkeeping developed in the late 1400s by the Franciscan frier Luca Pacioli, whose book on the subject is quoted several times in Johnson’s work. Malry decides to create a general ledger of his life, counting assaults against him as debits and undertaking acts of terrorism against society, starting with hoax bomb threats and escalating from there, as a way of balancing the books.

Johnson’s approach to the book has the air of calculated carelessness, such as when he says that the death toll from Malry’s biggest attack was just over twenty thousand, because “this was the first figure that came to hand as it is roughly the number of words of which the novel consists so far.” Johnson engages in dialogues with Malry, and has other characters lament their own use as pawns in the novel to further the plot without any significant development – especially Malry’s mother, who tells her back story to explain some of Malry’s behavior and then dies because she has exhausted her purpose. The arbitrary values Malry assigns to various slights are much higher than the value he places on the death of another person, which is just over a pound a head. Malry’s girlfriend is only named the Shrike, the name of a family of birds often called “butcher birds” because they impale insects on plant spikes or thorns as a form of food storage.

Johnson’s suicide shortly after the book’s publication means we won’t get a full explanation of some of the thematic questions in the book, one of which, for me, revolves around the recurring element of food. Most of the scenes revolving around Malry and other characters eating depict it as merely an act of sustenance, but Malry’s accounting job for a firm that handles catering and mass-production of processed sweets, leading him to the idea of using poison as a weapon to balance the ledger, which, reflecting my own philosophy on the subject, struck me as an unsubtle jab at the unhealthfulness of processed foods.

The novel does have a serious theme beneath its absurdist surface. Malry’s actions reflect a general refusal to live in society – a repudiation of the social contract from someone who was given no choice about participating in it in the first place. In a world of limited choice, Malry makes one of the only choices he feels like he can make, and one of the only ways he can reject the existing order. He did not opt in, and he believes this is the only way he can opt out. Because he feels no empathy, and places no value on any life but his own, he has no compunction about the growing tolls of his “credits,” but even so discovers that he can never quite balance the ledger and even these acts of terror don’t remove him from the system. Is life meaningless? A zero-sum game? Or do we all end our days with a pile of bad debt that we must write off without ever balancing our books? Johnson avoids answers but shines while asking the questions.

Next up: Tom Rachman’s 2011 novel The Imperfectionists, recommended by a reader right after its publication, which so far has been nearly perfect.

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→ March 30, 2013
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The Grifters.

I’ve got a draft blog post up on Braden Shipley and Aaron Judge, as well as a post with predictions for the 2013 season.

Jim Thompson’s 1963 novel The Grifters is my first encounter with his work, a neo-noir novel that draws from the prose style of hard-boiled detective novels but brings it outside of the detective genre, instead focusing on the cons themselves with barely a shamus in sight. The three main characters are all tied together in simple ways, but Thompson develops them each so deeply that the result is like a modern, dark Greek tragedy, written by someone who read too much Raymond Chandler. (Note: One cannot read too much Chandler.)

Adapted into the 1990 film of the same name by Donald Westlake, The Grifters centers on Roy Dillon, a mid-20s artist of the “small con,” little tricks designed to yield up to $100 that won’t attract too much notice from the police. His indifferent, manipulative mother Lilly is herself involved with the mob, as she has been for years, now helping them rig the betting against longshots at the track. Roy avoids most lasting relationships, as part of the life of the grifter but also a consequence of a childhood with a sociopathic mother, yet ends up involved with Moira Langtry, who is also on the make but whose motives aren’t immediately clear. When one of Roy’s small cons leaves him nearly dead and in need of convalescence, his mother makes her move to reestablish herself in her son’s life – for her own purposes, of course.

Roy is the far more developed character in the book, working from an independent sense of morality, wary of his mother yet unable to fully sever ties with her, but Lilly is far more fascinating – the mother who’d eat her young and who only views others as tools for her own advancement. (It cracks me up that the actress who played Lilly in the film, Anjelica Houston, is now the voice of the overly sweet Queen Clarion in the new Tinker Bell movies.) We get Lilly and Roy’s backstory through flashback chapters intertwined with the present time, which tracks Roy’s injury and recovery, and which allows Lilly to introduce Roy to the seemingly innocent nurse Carol, an immigrant who is reluctant to discuss anything of her past.

Thompson had to have been at least somewhat thinking in terms of Greek tragedies, especially Oedipus, when writing The Grifters, as the elements are too obvious for this to have been inadvertent. The incestuous undertone to Lilly and Roy’s relationship becomes clearer the more we watch the two interact, especially since sex is Lilly’s primary way of manipulating men, either to get what she wants or to get out of trouble. The three elements Aristotle identified as critical to the tragic plot – reversals of fortune, recognition, and suffering by one or more protagonists – are all present, especially in the two-part conclusion, the second half of which even surprised me. Greek tragedies often come across today as pedantic and dull, but Thompson uses both the plot and taut syntax to keep the tension high from the hit Roy takes the stomach in the first chapter to that final confrontation that lays everyone’s motives bare.

The style and subject matter reminded me of Chandler and Hammett, as well as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which I read in February, but the strongest resemblance was to James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss. Crumley’s novel is more violent and has less of the classical elements of The Grifters, but I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that Thompson had influenced Crumley’s work, especially since Crumley was in college and graduate school when two of Thompson’s most significant works, this novel and Pop. 1280 were first published.

Next up: B.S. Johnson’s manic metafictional absurdist novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

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→ March 22, 2013
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

I’ve got a fantasy-themed post up today, answering questions from ESPN.com’s fantasy editors about divisive players for fantasy owners in 2013.

I hadn’t heard of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down until I encountered a reference to it in Alison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, in which she mentions it as one of her four favorite narrative non-fiction titles. I wasn’t sure how compelling the story of a Hmong girl with severe epilepsy who got caught in the cultural divide between her family and the American doctors who treated her would be as a 300-page novel, but Spirit is so thoroughly researched and so perfectly balanced that it turned out to be as engrossing as any non-fiction book I have ever read.

Lia Lee is the Hmong girl at the center of the book, born with a terrible case of epilepsy that caused massive grand mal seizures, one of which led to irreversible brain damage when she was four that left her in a vegetative state for the remainder of her life. (She died in September of 2012, shortly after the book was reissued for its 15th anniversary.) The conflict at the heart of the book swirls around Lia in the time between her birth and that neurological catastrophe; in those four-odd years, the doctors tried an increasingly aggressive course of treatment that Lia’s parents didn’t fully understand and with which they didn’t entirely comply, while also pursuing traditional Hmong treatments (what many of us would consider “woo”) along with or sometimes in place of what the doctors prescribed. This clash of cultures, exacerbated by a then-unbridgeable language gap and socioeconomic factors, led one doctor to accuse Lia’s parents of child abuse for their passive refusal to administer the prescribed medications, after which she was taken from them and placed in foster care for about a year. Not long after she was returned to the custody of her parents – with full support from the foster family that took her in – she suffered the massive seizure that effectively ended her life, although she remained in that vegetative state for fifteen years beyond it.

The phrase in the book’s title is the translation of the three-word Hmong phrase that refers to the disease we know as epilepsy, as the Hmong don’t have an exact word for it. In Hmong culture, many diseases and disorders we know to have clear physical causes are treated as ailments of the soul; Lia’s parents believed that the seizures were the result of one of her sisters slamming a door, which scared Lia’s soul out of her body, after which they had to try to coax it back in using methods like animal sacrifice. Fadiman’s greatest trick in this book is providing total balance between the two sides of the debate – it would be far too easy to paint the Lees, and the Hmong in general, as animist twits believing in superstitious nonsense that modern science should have killed off a few centuries ago. Fadiman never questions the scientific reality of epilepsy, but gives credence to the Lees’ beliefs as they affected their own perspective on Lia’s illness, treatment, and the final catastrophe, while also extrapolating from that to discuss the Hmong experience with the United States in general, from their time in the CIA’s secret army in Laos to their resettlement here starting in the late 1970s. The only real villain here is our government, which was happy to sacrifice thousands of Hmong men but did little to take care of this oppressed minority after the communist Pathet Lao overthrow the country’s monarchy and began a genocidal campaign that wiped out up to a quarter of the country’s Hmong population. (Laos remains one of the world’s only communist states, and, not coincidentally, is also extremely poor.) These detours into the history of the Hmong and their experience as immigrants to the U.S. add some needed context to the story; the Hmong left behind not just their homeland but their entire way of life, which revolved around self-sufficience through agriculture and the broad support networks of extended families (called “clans”), and then were resettled into unfriendly environments ranging from Minneapolis to Merced, California, where Lia’s parents lived. Fadiman touches briefly on a deep sense of betrayal among the older generation of Hmong, who felt that they were promised things by the U.S. for their aid during the war(s) against the communists and received very little of what was pledged.

Fadiman began writing the book as a magazine article that was never published, starting her research in the late 1980s almost a decade before the book’s initial release in 1997. In addition to reviewing 400,000 pages of medical records, she went back and spoke to as many of the principals involved in Lia’s care as she could, including the main doctors who treated her, the social worker who was most heavily involved with the Lees, and the Lees themselves, becoming so involved that Lia’s mother, Foua, began to refer to Fadiman as one of her “daughters.” (Including Lia, Foua had nine surviving biological children, most of whom went on to attend college in the United States and to find jobs and incomes that evaded their parents’ generation after the migration.) The book came out at a time when the idea of holistic medicine was still viewed as a concept from the fringes, never taught in schools and barely practiced in hospitals (according to Fadiman’s accounts). Since then, it has become more popular in academia and in practice, with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down a part of the process of teaching doctors to view the patient as a whole rather than strictly the disease or disorder. Yet I think the book’s core lesson goes beyond medicine; while many of you will read the book as I did, with an inherent bias towards the doctors who employed sound science while banging their heads against the wall of parents who refused to follow the regiment of pills that might have saved their daughter’s brain, Fadiman does a tremendous job of showing us how and why the Lees distrusted and feared American doctors and Western medicine, a gap that the doctors should, in hindsight, have worked harder to close.

Fadiman writes at an extremely high level, never talking down to the reader and avoiding inserting herself too much into the story. I did notice a few odd word choices – referring to one person as having an “exiguous crewcut,” or the frequent use of “hegira” to describe the Hmong’s exodus from Laos, an accurate word that I’d never seen before – but otherwise the book was extremely readable and moved as quickly as any novel, especially in the intense, often heartbreaking depictions of Lia’s neurological crises. Even when you know the eventual outcome is tragic, Fadiman manages to infuse the situations with tension through precision, painful passages of details that put me in the room with Lia, her doctors, and her bewildered parents. In some ways, it’s a terrible story, but one that needed a wide telling like this to help us all expand our cross-cultural understanding.

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→ March 12, 2013
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Blood, Bones & Butter.

A little admin stuff first – my new weekly podcast for ESPN, Behind the Dish, debuted today, featuring an interview with Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and a conversation with fellow writer Joe Sheehan. I appreciate the support of all of you who listened to Baseball Today and mourned its end, so I hope you’ll tune in to the new show. It should be up on iTunes today (there’s a technical problem on their end, I’m told). Spread the word.

Also, I have new posts for Insiders on Jeff Samardzija, David Holmberg, and other Cubs and Dbacks and on Yordano Ventura, Brandon Belt, Tyler Skaggs, and more.

–

Gabrielle Hamilton is a self-taught and, in her words, “reluctant,” chef who achieved great acclaim for her tiny New York restaurant Prune and the honest, rustic fare she has served there for the past fourteen years, eventually winning the James Beard Award as NYC’s best chef in 2001. Her brilliantly written memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is a masterpiece of the memoir genre, a perfect emulsion of food writing and autobiography that will make your mouth water with descriptions of food yet never shies away from critical introspection.

One central thread, Hamilton’s own relationship with food and, by extension, how much that relationship tied to her relationships with friends and family, runs through the entire book, but rather than giving a single story, Hamilton splits her memoir into a sort of triptych: one section on her childhood and adolescence, one on her stop-and-go path into a career in food (with a detour to Michigan for a master’s in creative writing), and one on her unfulfilling marriage to an Italian doctor, Michele. Food is everywhere in the book, yet the book isn’t about food. It is about Hamilton’s peculiar life, with her passion for cooking a recurring character in every episode.

Hamilton’s path to culinary stardom was accidental, but also extremely odd, not something you’d ever recommend to a would-be chef. Her offbeat family imploded when her French-born mother suddenly demanded a divorce from Gabrielle’s set-designer/artist father, ushering in a period when Gabrielle was largely left without parental supervision, a tragicomic setup that led her both into the kind of libertine behavior you’d expect from a 13-year-old without adults around and into a lifetime of extreme self-reliance. She began working in restaurants and bars, as a dishwasher or a server, and eventually working insane hours for catering outfits in New York, learning how to cook as she went rather than at culinary school. Her disdain for fussy, pretentious food gives her an opportunity for some hilarious rants; her own culinary ethos is about as far from a “chef’s tasting menu” as you can get. Instead, she waxes more romantic when describing an Italian sandwich she purchased at a pork shop in Brooklyn (unnamed, sadly) or the fresh seasonal vegetables she finds during annual visits to her mother-in-law in Rome and Puglia. Even in the final section, which details her latent disaffection with her marriage, one that wasn’t founded on love and never grew into anything more than friendly co-parenting, Hamilton still uses food as the foundation for the exploration of her own emotions.

While Hamilton infuses nearly every page with her passion for food, it’s her clear yet highly evocative writing style that sets Blood, Bones & Butter apart. She can express so much in just a few sentences, as in this passage, describing the scene at a coffee place in Grand Central Station:

I hate hating women but double-skim half-decaf vanilla latte embarrasses me. I ordered a plain filtered coffee, as if I were apologizing on behalf of my gender, and when I dug through my heavy purse to pay for it I discovered in my bag a diaper, a resealable jar of apricot puree, and one of Marco’s socks, which had somehow in the general loss of boundary and private real estate that is Motherhood, made its way in there.

That second sentence there is a thing of beauty, its odd punctuation contributing to its sense of barely contained chaos, all while we get Hamilton’s scorn for overly prissy fake coffee drinks and her exasperation at the loss of self that comes with the addition of one or more kids. When Hamilton describes her experiences in catering kitchens, or takes you through Michele’s family estate in Italy, or talks about the large family meals that bookend the story – the giant lamb roasts her father organized when she was a kid, and the family meal with her now ex-in-laws that appears in the epilogue-cum-“reader’s guide” – you can hear the sizzle of the meat as it cooks. If she’s as good of a chef as she is of a writer, Prune must be amazing.

One stray thought on the book: in a passage about women’s roles and struggles in a professional kitchen, Hamilton offers this thought:

If anything, I have come to love the men who also feel that the kitchen is abetter place when women are allowed to work in it, the men who feel that if any part of society is abused, that it demeans the rest of society.

Emphasis mine there, because that summarizes quite nicely why I will block people on Twitter who use the r-word, or a gay-bashing epithet like the word for a bundle of sticks, and it explains why I find team nicknames like Indians or Braves or that odious one that plays football in Washington so offensive. Intent to demean is not required for something to demean. Simply creating a division that sets one part of the population as “other” is demeaning. We do not name sports teams after Italians or Jews or African-Americans, after lesbians or Sikhs or the disabled, yet we think nothing of naming sports teams after Native Americans, or using words that are obvious proxies for them. (Would you see the implicit racism in a sports team called the Atlanta Slaves?) Hamilton’s praise for men who want women in their kitchens and treated as equals says much about her character, and what kind of co-worker and boss she must be, especially in an industry that often adulates alpha males with domineering personalities.

Next up: Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians, which I reviewed that August.

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→ February 17, 2013
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Les Misérables (film).

The 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables has been savaged by some critics, and even its positive reviews were often less than glowing, but I don’t get it at all. It’s the wildly successful and very well-received stage musical, on the big screen, with real settings and backdrops, and great performances of great songs. (Roger Ebert seemed to dislike the movie in part because it’s not a faithful adaptation of the book, but that was never the intent – it’s an adaptation of the musical, an almost straight one with one short song added and virtually nothing else.) Musicals are not to everyone’s tastes, and you have to enter them willing to have people sing much or all of their dialogue at you for two-plus hours, but if you respect the musical film as its own art form, Les Misérables is among the best.

I have seen the musical, twice, the last time in 1993, and enjoyed it tremendously. The show opened in London in 1985 to generally negative reviews, and 27 years later is still playing in the West End, with the show set to return to Broadway next year for its third run on top of the over 7000 performances already enacted. It won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, when it debuted in 1987. And, in my experience, it’s one of the great “love-to-hate” works in the creative arts of my lifetime, where there’s a certain inexplicable pride in disliking something so popular. I’m not in that camp; despite the two-decade gap, I still remembered all of the songs and probably half of the words. But I liked the music, and like it even more today because it has a veneer of nostalgia for me; if you don’t like the music, you’re going to really dislike the film – and the play.

The story centers on the French convict Jean Valjean, who did 19 years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread and evading arrest. He gains his freedom at the start of the film, undergoes a transformation when a priest takes pity on him, and devotes his life to doing good for the less fortunate, becoming a successful businessman who employs many workers from the margins of French society. He encounters a prostitute, Fantine, who is ill and being harassed by a john; when Valjean discovers that Fantine was sacked from his factory, he resolves to help her and to raise her daughter, Cosette, who is in the “care” of the comically crooked Thenardiers. Through each stage of Valjean’s life, he is pursued by the policeman Javert, a cold, heartless man who sees no room for mercy within the law, a pursuit that repeatedly puts Valjean into situations where he must choose between sacrifice and self-preservation. The film’s climax revolves around the failed student revolutions of 1832, where the teenaged Cosette falls in love with the student leader Marius, who is friendly with the Thenardiers’ daughter, Eponine; her love for Marius remains unrequited as the tables from her childhood are turned. The ill-fated revolution puts Marius in harm’s way, during which Valjean manages to save him and have one final encounter with Javert.

Director Tom Hooper made the semi-controversial decision to have his actors sing live on the set rather than dubbing studio versions of the songs on to the film afterwards, but the move gives the film a tremendous rawness suited to the time and themes of the movie, and also avoids the always-jarring shift from live audio to studio recordings. (They do this at least once an episode on Top Chef with Padma, and it always sounds wrong.) The move also allows Hugh Jackman to show off an immense singing voice in a performance that could have carried the movie on its own; while Daniel Day-Lewis is considered the lock for Best Actor for Lincoln, I don’t think his role was as difficult as Jackman’s nor was his performance as huge. Les Misérables is over the top, by design, and Jackman has to fill space to meet those requirements. He does, without fail, aging 20 years from the movie’s start to finish while his character undergoes the most significant changes of any in the film.

Anne Hathaway has received much-deserved praise for her turn as Fantine in a supporting role – she’s dead before the halfway point, sorry – and a performance of the musical’s best-known song, “I Dreamed a Dream,” that should leave audiences in the fetal position. (You might also know that song as the coming-out tune for the Scottish singer Susan Boyle.) Hathaway’s was just the most notable of several supporting performances in Les Misérables, however, as the narrative seems to have focused on her and Jackman while ripping Russell Crowe (more on him in a moment) and ignoring everyone else. Helena Bonham-Carter appears as herself Mme. Thenardier, with Sacha Baron Cohen as her husband and the two of them chewing the scenery as the film’s main comic relief, the thieving, amoral, unhygienic inkeepers who scheme right up to the end of the film. Eponine, whose “On My Own” is another heartbreaking ballad (it’s actually a pretty tragic story for most of the characters), gets a tremendous rendition by the Manx singer Samantha Barks in her first film role, although she’d played the character on the stage for several months before the film was made. TV actor Aaron Tveit usurps Marius (played by Eddie Redmayne) in several scenes as the even more fervent revolutionary Enjolras, with Tveit commanding the camera more easily despite the same silly foppish hairstyle as his fellow tourists.

Crowe has been hammered for his mediocre singing in the film, somewhat unfairly – he’s the worst, yes, because someone has to be, but his poor singing didn’t detract from the film at all, and his performance as Javert was cold because Javert is cold, a pre-Terminator of sorts who sees only black and white. I thought Amanda Seyfried, while as pretty as ever, was just as weak a link and also not a particularly strong singer, but she’s received none of the same wrath as far as I can see. Cosette is the worst-written of the major characters in the musical as well – Eponine, as the tragic figure, is much more interesting and gets that one knockout song, while Cosette just flutters along, gets the boy she wants, and they live happily ever after.

Seeing the stage musical brought to life with real sets and closer views of the action was a thrill, since I saw the play from the cheap seats, but the cinematography in the film version was a real weakness, remarked on even in many positive reviews I’ve seen. I noticed it most during two of the film’s chase sequences involving Javert and Valjean, as well as the advance of the French soldiers when they begin their assault on the student barricades – the camerawork was shaky, uneven, and often angled oddly, while we are treated to far more closeups than we ever needed, especially of wide-open mouths going all fortissimo on us. That said, Hooper and company were up to the challenge of presenting ensemble numbers sung by characters in different locations, easy to do on the stage (you only have so much room) but harder on film, such as in “One Day More,” which could easily become a confused mess but holds together just enough to get us to the finish.

What may bother critics who disliked the film is its inherent populist feel. The songs are all written to move the viewer emotionally – tragic numbers, rousing numbers, comic numbers, even the cloying “Castle on a Cloud” sung by the neglected child Cosette. The story has a strong theme of redemption, with many references to God and religion, as did the original novel, with attendant themes of charity, equality, and respect for one’s fellow man (and woman), along with condemnation of the abuse of authority, of justice without mercy, and of concentration of power. The film wants you to feel something, lots of somethings, but so did Hugo, even if he did it without soaring harmonies and repeated melody lines. It’s neither right- nor left-wing, but it is pointed, and mixes hope with tragedy in unequal portions. You’ll have a song or two (or five) stuck in your head, but I think Jackman’s performance alone will prove just as memorable, as will the film as a whole.

–

That concludes my run through the Best Picture nominees, as I’ve seen all but Amour and am choosing to skip that one. It has no chance to win, apparently, but I’d still vote for Zero Dark Thirty for Best Picture, with Ang Lee my choice for Best Director for Life of Pi. I have only seen three nominees in each of the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories, but I’d vote for Jackman and Hathaway, respectively. I’m hoping to see at least one or two more nominated performances before the awards are handed out next Sunday.

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→ February 16, 2013
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The Machine.

I broke two of my reading guidelines when tackling Joe Posnanski’s The Machine, his 20010 book about the remarkable 1975 Cincinnati Reds, focusing on their larger-than-life personalities as much as he does on the way they steamrolled through the National League. The first rule is that I almost never read baseball books. Baseball is work; reading is pleasure. When work invades pleasure, it becomes work. So I keep them separate as much as possible. The second rule is that I try not to read books written by people I know, especially if I count them as friends (as I do Joe), because then if I don’t like the book, I am faced with the difficult task of keeping my mouth shut, which, as many of you surely realize, is not something at which I am particularly skilled.

The good news is that I liked The Machine quite a bit – not as much as I loved The Soul of Baseball, which isn’t really a baseball book anyway, just a book about some people who played the game, but that’s an absurdly high standard. I won’t pretend to give The Machine an objective review, so I’ll focus on why I would recommend it.

I turned two during the 1975 season and have no memories of the Big Red Machine other than my parents telling me about those teams (including their dismantling of the Yankees in the 1976 World Series) when I was first becoming a baseball fan about five or six years later. Posnanski does a good job of keeping readers in the flow of the season, which started slowly for the Reds but turned into a romp that didn’t end until they faced the Red Sox in October, while also weaving in short but telling anecdotes about the team’s central personalities – primarily Rose, Anderson, Morgan, and Bench, and if you need their first names, well, you’re probably not the target audience here anyway.

Posnanski does a good job of humanizing Rose and Morgan, both of whom needed it for obvious yet totally unrelated reasons, while somewhat demythologizing Johnny Bench, who was one of baseball’s last true Hollywood stars, although he’s now better remembered for Krylon commercials and his gigantic hands. (Truckasaurus.) Rose doesn’t come off as sympathetic, just as pathologically driven; you won’t forgive his transgressions, but you can at least somewhat understand how he reached that bottom. Morgan, meanwhile, comes off as the cerebral player we all thought he was, given his stat lines, but that he did his best as an announcer to convince us that he wasn’t. (Disclaimer: I’ve never met Joe Morgan, and have no idea what he’s like as a person or as a student of the game.) Anderson, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion, and Ken Griffey (Sr.) don’t get quite the same treatment, although I found the quiet rage of Griffey, still evident in contemporary quotes within the book, more reminiscent of Barry Bonds than of Ken Griffey, Jr., who had more of a reputation in baseball circles as an idler and a bit of a diva.

The Machine kicks into high gear at the end of the book when the nobody-respects-us Red Sox reach the Series and finally give the Reds the test they didn’t have all season. Those games were dramatic and come off as such on the pages, especially the epic Game 6, which Posnanski evokes through quotes and stories, including Rose’s boundless enthusiasm for what he correctly identified at the time as one of the greatest games in baseball history.

Posnanski mentions the team’s ethnic makeup and players’ obliviousness to it a few times during the book, but I wonder if that was truly a coming of age for MLB players post-Civil Rights Movement or just a function of winning breeding good chemistry. Was it unusual at the time to have a lineup – and the book is mostly about the lineup – that was so racially balanced? Did contemporary news sources see it as a big deal? In 1960, it would have been, and in 1980 it would scarcely have been noticed. I don’t know where 1975 fell on that continuum.

Posnanski’s writing has always spoken to me and, as you’d expect, the book absolutely flies – I knocked it off on a weekend trip to LA earlier this month. The friend who gave me this as a gift made a damn good call.

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→ January 29, 2013
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Safety Not Guaranteed.

The 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed takes a famous ad from someone looking for a companion on a time-travel expedition – claiming he’s “only” done it once before – and builds it into a cute, clever story about quirky characters in search of something more than what they’ve gotten out of life, all for different yet interconnected reasons. At about 80 minutes of actual content, it’s briskly paced with smart and witty dialogue, and sets up so well that the ultimate question of whether the time travelers actually travel in time becomes irrelevant. Call it a movie rule: If the story is crafted properly, and the characters are well developed, then the film’s ending doesn’t matter.

(UPDATE: It’s the iTunes $0.99 Movie of the Week as an HD rental. So you really have no excuse.)

Safety stars Aubrey Plaza, better known as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, as Darius, a recent college graduate in an unglamorous, unpaid internship for an alternative weekly paper in Seattle. Bored with basically everything life has thrown her and in a persistent depression since her mom died eight years earlier, Darius volunteers to go with the cocky staff writer Jeff to investigate the man behind the time-travel ad (which, in reality, appeared in Backwoods Home magazine in 1997 as a joke by a staff member), with Jeff figuring he’ll get a portrait of a harmless crazy person … except that Jeff really just wants to go hook up with an old girlfriend, with Darius and fellow intern Arnau, the film’s one stock character, doing all of the work.

The man who placed the ad, Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass, turns out to be completely earnest about the endeavor, definitely harmless, mostly a goofball, but also quite real – at home with his weirdness, with one exception I won’t spoil, totally focussed on this time-travel project so he can go back and prevent one thing from happening. He’s living in the present so that he can relive the past, with an intensity that resonates with the aimless Darius, who poses as a potential partner for Kenneth, going through “training” with him while Jeff hooks up with his ex and Arnau … does nothing all day, apparently, because they never finished writing his character.

Duplass’ character should be the centerpiece as the amiable dork whose passion for his project just sucks you into the story, but Plaza owns every scene she’s in, especially the ones she shares with Duplass, where she plays a character within a character, trying to manipulate Kenneth just to the point where he’ll accept her as a potential partner, but never with the contempt Jeff shows in his own abortive attempts to get the gig. Plaza’s character on Parks has morphed from the satiricial I-hate-everything girl to a more nuanced, more conflicted I-hate-that-I-like-things woman (and wife!) who appears to be hiding her inner Darius – a woman looking to just enjoy the present instead of feeling like the time is out of joint. April pretends she’s not sweet; Darius is sweet (but not saccharine) and wants someone, the right someone, to notice it. Kenneth is a little slow on the uptake there, since he is pretty locked in to the whole time-travel thing, but their relationship feels far more organic for how slowly it develops.

Duplass delivers a strong showing as Kenneth, playing the goofball as a serious goofball, not a wacko or a mentally ill or unstable person, just someone who’s looking backwards because what he sees forwards doesn’t give him much hope. Jake Johnson is appropriately annoying as the man-child Jeff, himself still unable to let go of a failed, long-dead relationship, yet aware enough of it that he can counsel Darius and especially Arnau to enjoy their early-20s primes. Both men are having midlife crises that don’t involve buying Porsches (which they can’t afford) or leaving wives (which they don’t have), instead doing, well, other somewhat stupid things, or doing smart things and screwing them up because they haven’t grown up enough yet. Arnau’s subplot is the one thread that comes through as an afterthought, and his best part in the film is his reaction in the final scene.

The conclusion is ambiguous, because Derek Connolly’s script handles the the Kenneth and Darius storyline so well that it doesn’t actually matter whether they get to travel back in time. Connolly even manages to sidestep the myriad reasons why time travel is impossible, simply having Kenneth treat it as real and moving forward from there, with its feasibility tangential to the main plot. He also granted Darius most of the film’s great lines, largely in response to Kenneth’s sincere nuttiness, with their dialogues, unusually thoughtful and long for a contemporary film, making up most of Safety Not Guaranteed‘s best moments. The movie only showed on a few hundred screens last year – I’m not even sure where it played near me, or exactly when – and made just over $4 million at the box office, which is a shame given how sweet and funny it is, without ever talking down to us (except with Arnau, a little). Perhaps it’s Aubrey Plaza’s curse to star in great vehicles that mainstream audiences just don’t watch.

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→ January 27, 2013
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Life of Pi.

Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi was 97th on the last ranking I did of my top 100 novels, a brilliant book that employs multiple literary techniques to tell a story that may or not be a powerful fable, or a commentary on the enduring nature of faith, or a testament to our capacity to handle tragedy and face unimaginable adversity. Or maybe none of the above. It also seemed like the story itself was written to be adapted into a movie, yet its details would make it almost impossible to film.

Computer graphics software has advanced so quickly in the ten years since the book was released that Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) managed not just to film the book, but to do so without making any major modifications to or sacrifices from the original text. The film is wonderful because the book is wonderful; the film is gorgeous because of Lee, and because of technology, but it’s a great film because of the strength of the underlying story and the performance of Suraj Sharma, who plays the teenaged Pi.

The story of Pi, born Piscine Molitor Patel, begins in Pondicherry, India, where his father runs the local zoo, as a business rather than for any affection for the animals. Pi’s given name causes him obvious problems at school, after which he adopts the nickname “Pi” while also developing an affinity for the number itself. The same exploratory spirit leads Pi, raised in the Hindu tradition by his mother, to also follow Christianity and Islam, something given longer treatment in the book, with more humor involved as well; in the film, it’s primarily a source of strife between Pi and his secular father. Pi and his father also clash over the zoo’s recent acquisition, a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, which Pi views as a fellow creature with a soul but Pi’s father sees as a soulless carnivore that would eat Pi as soon as look at him.

When economic and political circumstances in India change, Pi’s father decides to sell the zoo’s animals to North American zoos and move the family to Canada, booking passage for all of them on a Japanese freighter across the Pacific. In a massive thunderstorm, the freighter sinks, leaving Pi alone on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and Richard Parker, beginning a 227-day odyssey of survival on the ocean where Richard Parker, having dispatched the other three non-human passengers on their modest vessel, and Pi eventually come to a detente, albeit one where Pi does all the work in exchange for what may be a tacit agreement that Richard Parker will not eat him. They eventually encounter a mysterious floating island before eventually hitting the shore of Mexico, after which Pi tells his story to the Japanese insurance company investigators who want to know why the ship sank.

The film’s biggest change from the book is a narrative device that has the adult Pi telling his life story to an unnamed writer who was sent to Pi by Pi’s uncle, who said that the writer would hear a story that would make him believe in God. Pi is lightly dismissive of the promise, but tells his story just the same, with quite limited narration overall, as Lee lets the bulk of the story on the lifeboat unfold on its own.

That decision means that Sharma must carry a large portion of the film by himself, with no interaction with another human (and, to be fair, not even with another creature, as nearly all of the tiger’s scenes involve a CG version, not a real feline). His performance is remarkable as he must convince us he’s resourceful, terrified, grieving, and devious, without the benefit of real dialogue, although Pi does attempt to engage Richard Parker in conversation on a few occasions. The only real help Sharma receives is from the stunning visuals in the film, mostly wide shots of the open ocean, as well as two significant storms and the aforementioned island that stands as one of the most incredible aspects of Pi’s story. I saw Life of Pi in 3-D, which usually seems to me as more gimmicky than useful, but Lee made excellent use of it to convey Pi’s isolation on the open water or the sheer size of the sinking freighter, only engaging in a little special effects-turbation as he does when a whale flips over Pi’s boat (which was actually pretty cool, just not entirely necessary).

The film ends with a twist as the adult Pi concludes his story, one taken directly from the book as well that casts some doubt on what Pi’s tale actually means, and what Martel may have been trying to tell us, if anything at all. I thought the novel was a touch more ambiguous, but the film’s conclusion has the same effect of opening up a panoply of questions not just about what’s in the film, but about the nature of faith, of human psychology, of evil, and the nature of truth. Pi is a classic, if flawed, hero, whose emotional maturation over the 227 days sits in inverse proportion to his physical deterioration due to exposure and malnutrition. He speaks to the Writer, and the audience, with the wisdom of a teacher, but a teacher who is wise from experience, not just because he has a foreign accent. Lee’s use of this device to replace the first-person narration of the book might be the best decision he made on the film, one of many good choices from casting to effects to angles that bring us into the lifeboat between man and tiger that make his work here as good as any director’s in 2012 except Kathryn Bigelow’s for Zero Dark Thirty.

If you haven’t read Life of Pi, I’d recommend doing that before or after seeing the film, as it’s a quick and totally engrossing read that gives a little more depth to portion of the story that comes before the lifeboat, and also spends more time following Pi’s survival planning in his first few weeks alone. The film may have dragged for me in the middle just because I knew almost everything that was to come, but I still enjoyed the craftsmanship in it, including Sharma’s performance.

This is the sixth Best Picture nominee I’ve seen, and I’d place it clearly behind Zero Dark Thirty but comfortably above Silver Linings Playbook (fifth) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (last). I’d also favor Lee over the directors of those latter two films for Best Director, but haven’t seen Lincoln (yet) or Amour (might skip that one entirely). Life of Pi will probably crush a few of the technical awards, but the absence of Sharma from the Best Actor category is disappointing, given how strong his work was and how much the film depended on him to perform at that level. I’ve only seen one of the five films represented in the Best Actor category, though, so I can’t say whether he was jobbed or just squeezed out in a strong year.

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→ January 16, 2013
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Zero Dark Thirty.

The wildly overblown controversy over torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty has, unfortunately, taken over much of the discussion about the film itself, which is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship that takes a script (by Mark Boal) with a barebones plot and an ending that everyone in the audience already knows and turns it into a gripping account of a manhunt and for a government’s willingness to let one end justify many sordid means.

The film itself unfolds like a series rather than a single movie, almost like the kind of multi-episode story arc you’d find on British television over a full season of 240 minutes. Zero Dark Thirty compresses its story into about 135 minutes, the last third dedicated to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, with the first third melding the needle-in-a-haystack search for information with various Islamic terrorist attacks on the west and some unstinting depictions of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” generally known by people with functioning brains as “torture,” by the CIA of terrorist detainees. It boasts the tension of a thriller despite having the plot no more complex than that of a detective story: Maya, a CIA analyst played skilfully by Jessica Chastain as a sort of Carrie Mathiesen without the crazy, latches on to a new bit of information from one of those detainees and refuses to let it go, even though years of false starts and dead ends, because she believes that what detainees aren’t saying is often as telling as what they are.

Maya’s obsession with this detail, the name of a man whom she believes has substantial direct access to the big foozle himself, leads to some slightly predictable clashes with bosses and colleagues, one played by a surprisingly lifeless Kyle Chandler, but also emphasizes her isolation from nearly everyone she works with except for those who share her particular ardor for this clue. She eventually puts together just enough convincing evidence and just enough of a threat to her boss to put a surveillance team on the finally-located target, which leads to one of the film’s best scenes, where four operatives drive around a hostile city tracking the target’s cell phone to try to identify him in person – something that could be as dull as a butter knife but is filmed and paced to layer tension on top of it.

Bigelow’s other method of infusing tension into a story that, at its core, is a slow chase down a paper trail, is to use reality to punctuate the fits and starts of Maya’s search efforts. The film opens with a black screen and recordings of 911 calls from victims of the September 11th attacks, and the story eventually weaves in the London and Madrid attacks, the Islamabad Marriott bombing, and the suicide attack on the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. Such detours provide context for the increased emphasis within the CIA’s unit looking for bin Laden/al-Qaeda on finding targets to kill, as well as creating some of the moral ambiguity that might be upsetting the film’s critics – if al-Qaeda continues to launch attacks, does that justify using unethical or unconscionable means to try to stop them?

The final third of the film, in which two choppers full of Navy SEALs (including Chris “Bert Macklin” Pratt and Joel Edgerton) raid bin Laden’s compound in the middle of the night, should have been more than enough to earn Bigelow a Best Director nod. Filmed with minimal light, often through the perspective of the SEALs’ night-vision goggles, and almost entirely from a ground-level view that further obscures the audience’s vision, it still refuses to take sides – even though the audience knows the target is worthy of this effort to execute him – and makes superb use of silence to put the audience into the house with the SEALs, while playing the actual killing of bin Laden in a deliberate, understated manner that seems so un-Hollywood it’s hard to believe this was an American film.

The claims around Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of CIA-direct torture seem to contradict themselves: The film advocates torture, it fails to condemn torture, and it shows torture as useless. Certainly the last point has value – the critical revelation from a tortured detainee comes not as he’s being waterboarded or stuffed in a box that would cramp a small child’s body, but as he’s being fed a normal Middle Eastern meal while Maya and her “I-vuz-just-following-orders” colleague Dan trick him into thinking he’s already told them key details but has forgotten about it. I see no argument that the film supports the use of torture, since it shows such techniques quite brutally and has examples of information derived from torture as unreliable. Adding condemnation is largely unnecessary; if you can watch the torture scenes without flinching or averting your eyes, you might be a sociopath. Watching a grown man beg for mercy, or the deterioration in his face over multiple scenes, is repulsive enough. Bigelow doesn’t need to turn this into a finger-wagging morality play because the truth itself mocks us for our own indifference.

Boal’s script runs the story like a documentary without interviews, as if we’re watching action in real time, with so much emphasis on the central storyline that we are spared subplots or any real investment in characters beyond Maya. That means that some talented actors appear in very limited roles, such as the CIA station chief, Jessica, played by Jennifer Ehle, looking more like a bewigged Meryl Streep than Elizabeth Bennet; or Edgerton and Pratt, who get a few moments of seriousness and a few of clowning before setting off on the climactic raid. I’m usually a strong advocate of character development in films, especially ones of this length, but there is so much to the underlying story and its unfurling is so masterful that any digressions to give us more on the characters would have like punching pinholes in a garden hose. Perhaps the script’s worst moment comes when Jessica tries to grill Maya over her personal life, including lack of friends (really? not a single one?) or disinterest in office hookups (“I don’t want to be the girl that fucks,” a throwaway phrase ironic given Maya’s later deployment of profanity that marks one of the film’s best lines).

I don’t understand how Bigelow ended up on the outside of the Best Director Oscar nominations, and I’m not enough of an expert on film direction to offer more than an amateur’s “I don’t get it” on the subject. Zero Dark Thirty is superb almost start to finish, definitely the strongest of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, with Chastain a worthy Best Actress nominee, although I’d still lean toward Jennifer Lawrence for her work with a more complex role in Silver Linings Playbook. To the credit of Boal, Bigelow, and Chastain, however, they turned a marvelous trick with her character: They’ve built a strong, smart, desexualized female protagonist who ends up pretty damn sexy just by being awesome.

On the same subject, two books earn a number of mentions in articles about the Zero Dark Thirty non-troversy: Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden and the pseudonymous SEAL team member Mark Owen’s No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden. I’ve never read either book.

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