A Dog of Flanders
This kind of sincerity doesn't suit the current filmgoing/filmmaking climate?note how insensitive the reviews have been (see below)?but A Dog of Flanders is satisfying in ways Hollywood movies rarely are anymore. The more Hollywood courts sensation-hungry teens, the more it continues to drive adults away. (The new Outside Providence is actually a fairly serious tale about father-son empathy, though the ads distort its sensitivity to look like another American Pie gross-out.) Movies' current emphasis on physical gratification and financial reward obviously isn't satisfying enough. Yet the atmosphere may be too cynical to accept how naturally A Dog of Flanders expresses Nello's aspirations. He meets Michel LaGrande (Jon Voight), an art instructor whose encouragement sees Nello through clashes with a cruel landlord, the corrupt art council sponsoring a Junior Rubens competition and the harried, quick-to-blame farmer who banishes him from seeing his daughter Aloise (Madyline Sweeten), Nello's only friend. Observing the bitter, exploitative habits in the grown-up, professional worlds of 19th-century labor, the church and high culture amounts to a revelation. Yes, jaded adults more than children could learn a lot from this movie.
A Dog of Flanders' source is an 1872 novel by the Flemish writer Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramee). It was last filmed in 1959 by producer Robert B. Radnitz, who specialized in intelligent, morally grounded family stories that transcended their genres just as the child protagonists rose above their impoverished circumstances?most notably in the Appalachian Party of Five prototype Where the Lilies Bloom and Martin Ritt's Sounder. While A Dog of Flanders isn't quite in Sounder's class?the actors' accents are wonky, director Kevin Brodie makes clunky transitions, devaluing the high quality of Walther van den Ende's tactile photography?it does so much right that you forgive its flaws. Brodie doesn't hold an image of Aloise following a funeral cortege long enough for its impact to sink in, and a vision of morning light also flashes by. Imagine how a more felicitous, emotion-based director like Ritt, Spielberg or Peter Chelsom (The Mighty) might have turned Nello's experiences into a tapestry. Yet Brodie invests the movie with something uncommon?care. He gets the grandfather's death scene right: Jack Warden's splotchy-faced anguish against a windowsill gets next to you; the texture and lighting suggest Flemish painting made real.
Sticking to the issues of social survival and personal communication, Brodie displays rare ethical boldness. It starts out with a scene of struggle and misery (Nello's mother carrying him through a snow storm) that intentionally evokes the opening of David Lean's Oliver Twist and sets the stage for some of Dickens' reformist empathy. Yet there's a lot of God talk among the characters, which might seem pious except that it is a consistent part of the film's Christian behavioral scheme. Nello isn't simply a sacrificial lamb, he's part of a wider view of human yearning and hardship. His example informs our understanding of the farmer's preoccupied middle-class indifference ("You are not my responsibility!" he shouts at Nello); the blacksmith's (Bruce McGill) endured loneliness and kindness; LaGrande's lofty compassion; and the film's eventual father and son reunion.
Eschewing secular humanism, the film concludes with a series of events that can be understood as simultaneously social and spiritual critiques. Nello finally enters the church where a great Rubens hangs away from public view and its eventual unveiling reveals him to himself. It's an epiphany. Rubens' art speaks to him?it is the filmmakers' proposition that art must have a moral purpose; it's what staves off oblivion. Nello learns from the painting of Christ being deposed from the cross that a society without compassion is lost, that true happiness comes not from possessions or positions but what is within. When Nello regrets never knowing his mother, he is told, "Know yourself, you'll know her"?as profound a line as any in recent cinema. These insights come as part of the instinctive humanity Nello showed to the abandoned pup, but also from his grandfather's moral teachings ("Never hate!") and the expediency of art.
Because all that's easy to forget these days, A Dog of Flanders is a refreshing reminder. Out of step with fashion, A Dog of Flanders' serious conviction has genuine strength and surprise. Its combination of spirituality and politics recalls the paradoxical motto on the Housemartin's tough and lovely first album: "Take Jesus. Take Marx. Take Hope."
Williamson's formula has profitably flattered teen narcissism and gullibility, but in Teaching Mrs. Tingle he goes in for satirical jibes at recent moral decrepitude. "What's right anymore?" Leigh Ann asks the homicidal hunk. When someone suggests telling the truth, Leigh Ann knows "It won't work!" This Clintonian cynicism is William Bennett's worst nightmare complete with a whiny white-girl music track that makes it everyone's. Williamson's plot recycles Nine to Five's revenge comedy as a high school fantasy on sex and scholarship, but like all exploitation movies (and unlike Nine to Five) it's a distraction from genuine social crisis. The real social problem is not that teachers are mean but that they (and our education system) are not teaching. So Williamson uses a pandering, shifting moral tone?Lesley Ann Warren enacts Leigh Ann's mother as if playing high tragedy, while Helen Mirren gives Mrs. Tingle icy cruelty often backed by a delirious Mrs. Gulch music theme. In postmodernism's confusion, any gimmick can be used to sucker and divert youth audiences.
Revenge served cold-blooded loses its moral justification. Leigh Ann and Mrs. Tingle's face-to-face confrontation is bogus. Student swings with Jealousy, but Teacher lays her out with Fear. Mrs. Tingle threatens Leigh Ann with a working-class future like her mother's ("You'll wear that [waitress] tag so well"). Capitalizing on teens' terror of social ignominy, Williamson takes it all the way to life failure, class fear. Another student (son to one of Mrs. Tingle's own high school classmates) is told his father also "had the words 'no future' chiseled on his forehead." But though Mrs. Tingle speaks with Brit affectation, no sense of the punk idea No Future is suggested by that insult?that's ancient history to today's teen audience, anyway. Instead, there are running gags on Alanis Morissette's malapropisms in "Ironic"?as if teachers only taught grammar.
Teaching Mrs. Tingle neglects the social resonance that distinguishes A Dog of Flanders or the credible sense of absurdity remembered from My So-Called Life's believably frightening handcuffed-to-the-bed episode. Williamson's craft (no one's eyes are lit well) is as gummy as his morality. He falsifies the perils of youth worship and the confusion of youth narcissism that makes Oshima's almost 40-year-old film still relevant.
Made in response to Rebel Without a Cause (the primal teen angst film), Cruel Story of Youth's self-consciousness about pop thrills and generational alienation shows in its lurid, widescreen sensuality. But it's mainly a political inquiry into Japan's postwar malaise, including student activism and apathy. The key scene plays Makoto and Kiyoshi's abortion clinic sentimentality against the overheard pathos of Makoto's elder sister and Dr. Akimoto, former lovers representing the previous generation. Oshima compares passion to regret, tragic history to tragic naivete. "We vented our rage against society by demonstrating, but what we did got as twisted as the world," the doctor says. Then he rues, "Your sister and her kind, by contrast, indulge every desire to express their rage against the world. Maybe they'll win. Eventually failures like this abortion racket, if accumulated, will destroy them and their relation with one another."
Oshima's moral and political good sense doesn't pander. He sees no generation as better off than another and wisely views the dilemmas of youth through the complexes of a world they didn't make. A Dog of Flanders is equally farsighted; even without the sexual urgency that made Cruel Story influential (see Purple Rain), its connection between youthful yearning and social opportunity is important to understand and uphold. Williamson doesn't bother to. Whether out of ignorance or evil makes no difference; he has made youth movies crude and?next to A Dog of Flanders?soulless.