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Are you telling me there are dead people in my living room watching videos?
So this is not the movie review I was working on last night, but it's the one that seems most pertinent right now. I was talking about Alan Rickman with my mother. As far as I can tell, I saw him first as Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995); I started paying attention to him after Dogma (1999). That's a hot mess of a movie, but there was never anything wrong with Rickman in a Versace suit and a velvet hoodie, with majestically white-feathered wings, mumbling the fine print of the end of the world very quickly into a tequila glass. His saturnine voice was half the characterization of the world-weary Metatron, resignedly introducing itself with lines like "I'm as anatomically impaired as a Ken doll" and "Do you go around drenching everybody that comes into your room with flame-retardant chemicals?" My mother remembers him most vividly from Galaxy Quest (1999) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). My brother thought at once of the production of Noël Coward's Private Lives we saw on Broadway in 2002 and then remembered about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). My father, much to my surprise, thinks of him first as Severus Snape.
To my aunt, I suspect he will always be a cello-playing ghost, cranky, romantic, difficult, and deeply loved.
Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) is the movie my grandfather and my uncle and my aunt watched after my grandmother died in 1997, over and over again. I don't think I knew at the time. It came up about five years ago when my aunt was visiting from California; we were watching Law & Order: UK when she spotted Bill Paterson, was reminded of the movie, and next thing I knew we were watching a beautiful little short story of a movie starring Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, and some other people who are very talented but not important for the purposes of this review. The storyline is simple. A woman loses the man she loves, senselessly and suddenly; she grieves him out of the grave and back into her life and for a little while everything is miraculously restored; this is not the happy ending, however, but the first act, and so the rest of the film unravels the traditional difficulties of loving across the borders of life and death plus some new wrinkles unique to this couple. It's very low-key. Nothing in it is glossy. The protagonist has a job as an interpreter in a translation agency, advocating for clients like the documentary filmmaker who now works as a cleaner or the waiter who was a doctor in his home country; she meets a street magician, but he really works as a psychologist, doing art therapy with disabled children. The bills have gone into the red and there's a problem with rats in the kitchen. It is probably the most unsupernatural film I've ever seen about ghosts.
That the ghosts are real, by the way, as opposed to some literalization of the grieving process, is never actually in doubt, which is really refreshing. Stevenson's Nina doesn't need metaphors for grief; she has the real thing, heart-wrenching, life-wrecking, all but physically smothering her. The early portions of the film are a sharp, painfully convincing portrait of bereavement and depression rather than their usual cinematic shorthands. Nina doesn't mourn her lost love like a heroine of classic Hollywood or even some contemporary romances, with beautiful glycerine tears tracing the radiance of her suffering; her crying is messy, noisy, and furious, full of snot and self-laceration as she rages at Jamie (Rickman) for dying and herself for not being able to move on like every other healthy normal person in this healthy normal world full of healthy normal couples and their healthy normal babies, oh, God: "I'm so angry with him! I can't forgive him for not being here! I can't!" He died freakishly, of an infected throat; griping about his tonsils one moment, the next crashing out, flatlined, gone. She's been frozen ever since, barely even noticing that her new flat is falling to pieces around her or that her ability to interact with other people has dropped to a numb, time-clocking avoidance despite the concern of friends and coworkers and Nina's own efforts to keep working with her therapist. "I want the world to go away," she confesses; failing that ability, she seems to be doing her best to disappear from it.
So it makes sense that when Nina's grief and yearning perform their accidental rolling-of-the-stones trick, she gets the real Jamie, with his longish hair and his bohemian mustache and the long coat that he lives in like one of Wim Wenders' angels, not the idealized house-angel whose memory she's been using to remind herself to lock up before leaving the house and keep to the center of the road while walking home at night and whose cello supplied the silence in the classical duets she practiced, woundingly and deliberately, at the piano by herself. He really does play the cello beautifully, sliding from her memories into impossible, tangible reality as the music deepens between them; their reunion is as powerfully moving and as silly with in-jokes as Eurydike lifting Orpheus into the light or any pair of long-separated lovers renewing their private language. They play word games in bed, accuse passing clouds of looking like each other's mothers, belt out "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore," which is how I learned that Stevenson and Rickman can only sort of sing. He cradles her for hours against his chest, half-wrapped in the folds of his coat, in the kind of neck-cricking jumble of limbs that no one cares about when you can feel your lover's hair against your mouth, their arms roped around your back, both of you holding on so tightly, there's no room for the world to get between. And he is, in death, just as we come to realize he was in life, the kind of boyfriend who'll invite all his friends over—even the dead ones—to watch old movies on Nina's TV set every night until stupid o'clock in the morning and then look utterly nonplussed, with an optional quick-change into defensive sulking, when she finally blows a fuse after not being able to get to sleep without a roomful of strangers quoting Brief Encounter (1945) at her and tsk-tsking that she accidentally taped over Manhattan (1979). The problem with having Jamie in her life again isn't that he's a ghost, though it doesn't help.1 It's that he's Jamie. He loves her deeply. Their few conversations on the subject suggest that while Nina's devastating desire for Jamie was what brought him back, it wouldn't have worked if he had not also longed for her in whatever shadowy, not really comprehensible place the dead of this story come from and disappear to. "It was like standing behind a glass wall while everyone else got on with missing me." But he's exhausting to live with; it takes only a brief disagreement for his acerbic, deadpan wit to turn cutting or simply tiresome as he finds more in Nina's life to criticize than celebrate. It's cute when he wakes her by murmuring the lyrics to "Tangled Up in Blue." Not so much when he drips cold water on her. The flat is legitimately horrible, but that doesn't give him the right to rearrange the furniture and try to refinish the floors.2 "Was it like this before?" Nina asks, bewildered and shaken. The question goes unanswered, but it is a critical line. The dead are easy to love when they are gone, leaving only the best of their memories. The living, or at least the still present, are trickier. Perhaps the dead know this; it might be why they don't come back. The way Jamie looks at Nina, through a night-shadowed window as if, just for once, a weightless shade, he knows something.
I don't know if I can recommend watching this film in memory of Alan Rickman; it might be unbearable. It remains the only leading role in which I've seen Stevenson and it makes beautiful use of Pablo Neruda's "La Muerta." Members of my family watched it to grieve with and apparently it worked. Jamie isn't how Rickman will always look to me, but there are worse images, especially if you pair this one with Bach's "Sonata No. 3 for Cello and Piano." This ghost brought to you by my remembering backers at Patreon.
1. In a touch I really enjoy, Jamie can never get warm—he's dead, cold as the clay. He's aware that he's dead, of course, but he can't alter his own state, so he's always sneezing and grouching around the flat in winter scarves and cranking up the heat while Nina swelters in her bedroom, quite alive and endothermic and increasingly annoyed.
2. I think this movie got into the DNA of "The Boatman's Cure." It didn't occur to me until now. I wrote ghosts who carry their death-wounds like silver as far back as my first published story in 2001, but a dead man who doesn't look it, who can be touched as if he were alive, and who's just as difficult to deal with as any living person, I wonder.
To my aunt, I suspect he will always be a cello-playing ghost, cranky, romantic, difficult, and deeply loved.
Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) is the movie my grandfather and my uncle and my aunt watched after my grandmother died in 1997, over and over again. I don't think I knew at the time. It came up about five years ago when my aunt was visiting from California; we were watching Law & Order: UK when she spotted Bill Paterson, was reminded of the movie, and next thing I knew we were watching a beautiful little short story of a movie starring Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, and some other people who are very talented but not important for the purposes of this review. The storyline is simple. A woman loses the man she loves, senselessly and suddenly; she grieves him out of the grave and back into her life and for a little while everything is miraculously restored; this is not the happy ending, however, but the first act, and so the rest of the film unravels the traditional difficulties of loving across the borders of life and death plus some new wrinkles unique to this couple. It's very low-key. Nothing in it is glossy. The protagonist has a job as an interpreter in a translation agency, advocating for clients like the documentary filmmaker who now works as a cleaner or the waiter who was a doctor in his home country; she meets a street magician, but he really works as a psychologist, doing art therapy with disabled children. The bills have gone into the red and there's a problem with rats in the kitchen. It is probably the most unsupernatural film I've ever seen about ghosts.
That the ghosts are real, by the way, as opposed to some literalization of the grieving process, is never actually in doubt, which is really refreshing. Stevenson's Nina doesn't need metaphors for grief; she has the real thing, heart-wrenching, life-wrecking, all but physically smothering her. The early portions of the film are a sharp, painfully convincing portrait of bereavement and depression rather than their usual cinematic shorthands. Nina doesn't mourn her lost love like a heroine of classic Hollywood or even some contemporary romances, with beautiful glycerine tears tracing the radiance of her suffering; her crying is messy, noisy, and furious, full of snot and self-laceration as she rages at Jamie (Rickman) for dying and herself for not being able to move on like every other healthy normal person in this healthy normal world full of healthy normal couples and their healthy normal babies, oh, God: "I'm so angry with him! I can't forgive him for not being here! I can't!" He died freakishly, of an infected throat; griping about his tonsils one moment, the next crashing out, flatlined, gone. She's been frozen ever since, barely even noticing that her new flat is falling to pieces around her or that her ability to interact with other people has dropped to a numb, time-clocking avoidance despite the concern of friends and coworkers and Nina's own efforts to keep working with her therapist. "I want the world to go away," she confesses; failing that ability, she seems to be doing her best to disappear from it.
So it makes sense that when Nina's grief and yearning perform their accidental rolling-of-the-stones trick, she gets the real Jamie, with his longish hair and his bohemian mustache and the long coat that he lives in like one of Wim Wenders' angels, not the idealized house-angel whose memory she's been using to remind herself to lock up before leaving the house and keep to the center of the road while walking home at night and whose cello supplied the silence in the classical duets she practiced, woundingly and deliberately, at the piano by herself. He really does play the cello beautifully, sliding from her memories into impossible, tangible reality as the music deepens between them; their reunion is as powerfully moving and as silly with in-jokes as Eurydike lifting Orpheus into the light or any pair of long-separated lovers renewing their private language. They play word games in bed, accuse passing clouds of looking like each other's mothers, belt out "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore," which is how I learned that Stevenson and Rickman can only sort of sing. He cradles her for hours against his chest, half-wrapped in the folds of his coat, in the kind of neck-cricking jumble of limbs that no one cares about when you can feel your lover's hair against your mouth, their arms roped around your back, both of you holding on so tightly, there's no room for the world to get between. And he is, in death, just as we come to realize he was in life, the kind of boyfriend who'll invite all his friends over—even the dead ones—to watch old movies on Nina's TV set every night until stupid o'clock in the morning and then look utterly nonplussed, with an optional quick-change into defensive sulking, when she finally blows a fuse after not being able to get to sleep without a roomful of strangers quoting Brief Encounter (1945) at her and tsk-tsking that she accidentally taped over Manhattan (1979). The problem with having Jamie in her life again isn't that he's a ghost, though it doesn't help.1 It's that he's Jamie. He loves her deeply. Their few conversations on the subject suggest that while Nina's devastating desire for Jamie was what brought him back, it wouldn't have worked if he had not also longed for her in whatever shadowy, not really comprehensible place the dead of this story come from and disappear to. "It was like standing behind a glass wall while everyone else got on with missing me." But he's exhausting to live with; it takes only a brief disagreement for his acerbic, deadpan wit to turn cutting or simply tiresome as he finds more in Nina's life to criticize than celebrate. It's cute when he wakes her by murmuring the lyrics to "Tangled Up in Blue." Not so much when he drips cold water on her. The flat is legitimately horrible, but that doesn't give him the right to rearrange the furniture and try to refinish the floors.2 "Was it like this before?" Nina asks, bewildered and shaken. The question goes unanswered, but it is a critical line. The dead are easy to love when they are gone, leaving only the best of their memories. The living, or at least the still present, are trickier. Perhaps the dead know this; it might be why they don't come back. The way Jamie looks at Nina, through a night-shadowed window as if, just for once, a weightless shade, he knows something.
I don't know if I can recommend watching this film in memory of Alan Rickman; it might be unbearable. It remains the only leading role in which I've seen Stevenson and it makes beautiful use of Pablo Neruda's "La Muerta." Members of my family watched it to grieve with and apparently it worked. Jamie isn't how Rickman will always look to me, but there are worse images, especially if you pair this one with Bach's "Sonata No. 3 for Cello and Piano." This ghost brought to you by my remembering backers at Patreon.
1. In a touch I really enjoy, Jamie can never get warm—he's dead, cold as the clay. He's aware that he's dead, of course, but he can't alter his own state, so he's always sneezing and grouching around the flat in winter scarves and cranking up the heat while Nina swelters in her bedroom, quite alive and endothermic and increasingly annoyed.
2. I think this movie got into the DNA of "The Boatman's Cure." It didn't occur to me until now. I wrote ghosts who carry their death-wounds like silver as far back as my first published story in 2001, but a dead man who doesn't look it, who can be touched as if he were alive, and who's just as difficult to deal with as any living person, I wonder.
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It feels like a break in time. They can't be dead—I just saw them in a movie the other night. How can you just have been reading their latest book and now it's the last one?
This was less difficult when all the actors I really liked had been dead for decades. On the other hand, Gene Kelly disappeared from the world when I was in high school and that was right out.
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Bowie just released an album! How can he possibly go? Doesn't he want to hear what people think?
(and then a robed figure looks over and says IT'S NOT AS IF YOU GET TO FILL OUT A FORM WITH YOUR PREFERRED TIME, YOU KNOW.)