When Legends Fail

Flipping through channels last night I fell on Legends of the Fall, a very odd movie to say the least. It was based on Jim Harrison's novella from a few years before. It wasn't one of Harrison's best efforts as he seemed to be setting All My Sons during WWI with the patriarch of the family (Anthony Hopikins) oddly resembling Teddy Roosevelt. A woman (Julia Ormond) gets caught between the three sons (Adrian Quinn, Brad Pitt and Henry Thomas). You really feel sorry for her in the end. But, probably the most incongruent part of the film is that it was told from the point of view of one of the old Indian workers on Ludlow's ranch, projecting an iconic family portrait

Many of the scenes looked like something out of a Ralph Lauren commercials, extolling a mythic Americana that never existed. Brad Pitt even did his best to reprise Jeremiah Johnson as he goes on a "vision quest" to try to restore his balance. The film followed pretty closely on the heels of A River Runs Through It, which made Pitt a Hollywood sensation, oft compared to a young Robert Redford. Whereas the previous movie held together pretty well, this one started to crumble apart almost from the start.

I wasn't sure what Harrison was after in the book either. It was part of trio of novellas contained under one title, and I guess some Hollywood producer felt it could be shaped into a movie pretty easily. They had already made an abysmal version of his novel, Wolf, literally making the lead character into a werewolf, whereas the story was a about a young man searching who identified himself with the wolves of the upper peninsula of Michigan, retracing home ground. At least this time they stuck more closely to the story. There was also a 1990 movie, Revenge, based on one of the novellas in this collection but I never saw it. Pretty much mano-a-mano stuff.

Sundog was my personal favorite of Harrison, which fortunately hasn't yet been made into a movie that I know of.

Comments

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog