This Is Not A War Story

The new Talia Lugacy drama.

This Is Not a War Story is lying right from the title card, and that’s okay. It is most definitely a war story, even if all of its stories of war take place off screen and in the past through occasional remanences.

But if This Is Not a War Story is low on pyrotechnics, it’s big on emotional implosion with an eye firmly on the cost of war. Not just the death or destruction or even the wounded among the soldiers and civilians on both sides, but the survivors who seem to come back hale and hearty.

A quiet, reserved character study, the film wants to make sure no one forgets the invisible wounds that have been left to fester for so long.

The most counterintuitively glaring of those wounds are the ones recently-discharged Isabelle Casale (director/star Talia Lugacy) is clearly carrying around. At odds with her family and everyone around her, war has exacerbated Isabelle’s anti-social attributes to the point she can barely look at anyone much less express what she’s feeling.

Her deep well of pain and solitude meets its match in the empathy of Will (Sam Adegoke) who runs a rehab group specifically for veterans with PTSD issues. Even as he draws Isabelle out of her shell, Will’s own issues begin to creep up on him again until no one is sure who is saving who anymore.

At its best, This Is Not a War Story is a quietly-enthralling character study in pain that dives into the heart of the unspeakable and comes out the other side. That is largely due to the work Lugacy is doing on both sides of the lens. As actor and director she is firmly in the ‘less is more’ camp, producing an Isabelle who is clearly defined in her trauma even as she will only talk about it in circles.

By the end she is so well defined a half slouch or a punch to the arm speak volumes even if she can’t. Lugacy the director is similarly reserved, matching her characters’ feelings of isolation with long silent stretches of them in their chosen environments by turns fidgeting and peaceful.

She has a strong on-screen partner in Adegoke, who sets himself the unenviable task of drawing Isabelle out of her shell and reminding her she has permission to be alive. It works because Will has his own pain to deal with which is slowly pulled from him as Isabelle’s.

It would have been easy to make him an all-knowing figure of wisdom who could give Isabelle just the answers she needs when she needs them, but as he himself reminds her he doesn’t know everything. He may not know anything, his own frustrations sending him off to a mountain retreat where nothing can get to him including his newest protégé.

But his presence as character and actor creates the space for catharsis. Adegoke and Lugacy have real onscreen chemistry, all the more prevalent for how few words they share until Isabelle finally tracks him down in the proactive moment she’s had in years.

All of this works because This Is Not a War Story is very good at pretending it’s not a war story when it really is, wrapping itself in the pain of its leads which could as easily be about a lost family member or sudden shock as about war and death.

Every so often it does remind us what it is, usually through brief mouthpiece who can speak diatribes about the American war machine and what it has done in different countries, the confusion of war and occupation and the realization that one may not be the hero they had been told they were. That’s all well and good, but when someone says it out loud, just like that, among otherwise very subtle shades of character and dialogue, the dichotomy is a bit much.

But it doesn’t happen that often. And it can’t cover up a sterling bit of both character work and deep thematic relevance from artist on the rise. This Is Not a War Story is definitely a war story, and it’s more than okay.

THIS IS NOT A WAR STORY REVIEW SCORE: 7/10

Acoustic Pictures‘ This Is Not a War Story was directed by Talia Lugacy and stars Sam Adegoke, Danny Ramirez, and Frances Fisher. The film was executive produced by Rosario Dawson.

Night People

In this series, I look back at some fantastic hidden gems which have been lost over the years and deserve to be rediscovered. We’ll kick things off with Night People, which opened in theaters in March of 1954.

If you ask a hundred different people what Gregory Peck‘s best role was, probably ninety percent would say Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. If you asked Peck, he would probably have said Lt. Col. Steve Van Dyke in Night People (buy at Amazon). And he may not be wrong. A terse, lean Cold War thriller, Night People brims with sharp dialogue and complex characters stuck on either side of a (not yet literal) wall of ideology and pragmatism.

In the early days of the Cold War, allies turned enemies and enemies turned allies were all ensconced uncomfortably together in the ruins of Berlin as the city (and country) were being rebuilt. While things seemed professional and steady on the surface, just below it the betrayal and spycraft were the order of the day and it was left to men like Col. Van Dyke (Peck), the Army’s head of intelligence for the United States sector, to keep things sorted. Things like a ne’er-do-well corporal suddenly disappearing into the Russian sector one night who also happens to be the son of a powerful industrialist. Which sticks Van Dyke with the thankless job of getting the corporal back without upsetting the delicate balance of alliances which post-war Berlin had become or losing any of his own agents in the process.

It’s the sort of thankless job which would make a person ask why anyone would do it. Rather than spend a great amount of time agonizing over that question, Night People simply offers us Van Dyke. Completely cognizant of the personal stakes involved, more so than his superiors, he doesn’t take any of the requirements of the job home with him. In the middle of the tensest situations where he has done all he could do, he takes the time to wonder about football season because there’s nothing else to do, so why worry about it? For Van Dyke it’s all just a job.

Peck’s Van Dyke is a refutation of the modern Hollywood protagonist. He has no backstory or hidden concerns. Beyond his job and the fact that he’s had some sort of relationship with his East German source Hoffy, nothing else is ever known about him. He is exactly what he appears to be, appearing specifically for the story he is built for and then disappearing again, unchanged beyond completing the problem immediately before him.

The closest modern version is a David Mamet lead where internal needs are the proverbial iceberg we only ever get hints at. And none of it is missed. He is, both as a character and a performance, complete without need for greater complication. It’s obvious in his grim approach to grim work and his occasional retreat to sarcasm why the role appealed so much to Peck. In a career of forthright men, Van Dyke may be the most forthright of all while facing the greatest stakes with the potential for World War III (or at least a great loss of position in the Cold War) flowing from any mistake he may make.

In some ways, he might not seem too out of place in a film noir, a genre Peck never spent much time in. The closest he ever came was Hitchcock’s Spellbound — though Hitchcock never really did noir (even if the overlap between Hitchcock noir is large) — and Cape Fear a decade later. In that sense, Night People is probably the most film noir film Peck ever really made. And yet, like Van Dyke, it frequently seems like a refutation of film noir, which at this point was largely on its way out.

It doesn’t seem like that on the surface. Alongside Van Dyke’s stoic, sarcastic take on the people he comes across is a twisty, ever changing chameleon of a plot which requires a flow chart to keep complete track of. [This is a good thing]. While the core goal never changes — returning the wayward corporal — the reasons for his capture and the different groups it affects grows and changes as Van Dyke dives further and further into the mess below the surface.

It’s the sort of crackerjack plotting Hollywood has usually excelled at and in the hands of career filmmaker Nunnally Johnson (best known for his adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath) that’s exactly what you get. Every scene reveals character and plot and does so with the kind of off-handedly poetic tough guy dialogue that Ben Hecht and the Coen Bros. made their careers out of. That’s a small thing either, it’s the main thing. Great roles make for great performances and Van Dyke is a great role nor is he the only one. Bjork’s Hoffmeir doesn’t outshine Van Dyke because she can’t, she flits in and out in order to propel the plot along and shine light on Van Dyke as he must quickly process years of deceit and make on the fly tactical decisions regardless of his personal feelings. It’s no accident Night People’s one and only Oscar nomination in 1954 was for Best Original Screenplay (one of three Johnson accumulated in his career).

[It’s tempting to say too that it was and is horrible overlooked, but the reality is films nominated for Screenplay and Film Editing far and away outlast most of their peers in staying power].

What it gains in masterful wordsmith at first glance it seems to lose in a muddle of commercially focused visual choices. In an extreme contrast to its title, Night People is so bright and colorful it seems like it always takes place in the bright light of day, even at night.

Coming in the mid-50s, the choice of Cinemascope made sense as studios battled television for eyeballs. For the viewer it presents a visual feast of Berlin (with much of the film shot on location) combined with lush color slowly transitioning from Technicolor to the less vibrant Eastman color. Cinematographer Charles Clarke (another one of those quiet professionals who just went about his job but isn’t highly celebrated despite his skill) not only makes full use of the new wider format but keeps as much of the bright primary colors of Technicolor as possible in the final print. Yet again, Night People goes against the film noir grain. Yes, there were a handful of films which did similar — Leave Her to Heaven, Niagara — but it’s still so rare that it sticks out when it occurs.

The days are glorious blues and the nights are glorious purples and more importantly everyone is carefully uniformed from Van Dyke’s immaculately pressed green to the blue of the British and the Robin’s Egg of Hoffy’s suit (her own sort of uniform). In a world of greys, everyone is carefully color coded.

The bright look seems at first a misnomer. Night People’s noir like story cries out for black and white as the different sides wade around in moral turpitude.

Instead the dirty deeds are all done out in the open, in the bright light of day and Technicolor. The bright color reflects the upstanding, unflinching and unfailing forthrightness of Van Dyke (even as he double crosses and double deals) slamming into the grimy darkness of noir. The lack of self-doubt, the lack of shadows or grey scale (even when there were shadows) is a, knowingly or not, counter point to film noir suggesting nothing is black and white or grey unless we let ourselves view events that way and to view them that way is a sort of weakness which does not reflect reality or tell us anything about it. The world isn’t what we make of it, it simply is what it is and we must survive in it.

It’s a point of view which is hardly foreign to Johnson’s heroes, intentionally or not. An auteur who spent most of his career in the studio system of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, Johnson’s hand is frequently covered over by the needs of the studios he worked for making artistic design harder to separate. Is Night People’s expansive look reflective of a desire to refute grimy crime film or a commercial need to combat television? Is its professional, stalwart hero the reflection of a purely professional filmmaker or the end result of a studio’s idea of what a post-War audience could handle?

This may be why it is largely forgotten. It so strenuously goes against the grain of what the modern view of films of its type should be it is overlooked in favor of films which don’t.

Either way, Night People is a film of change, sneaking into the post-War / Cold War culture of the ’50s where American optimism still lived but was beginning to be tinged with paranoia and cynicism before the inevitable break of the ’60s. It’s not quite ahead of its time but may have benefitted more from having appeared later when decisions about audience appetites had more latitude. Instead it is a film in transition, slowly, cautiously moving studios from the requirements of the Hays Code to the wilds of the New Wave. Or maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe Night People is just the work of expert craftsman doing their jobs and no deeper than that.

In that sense, Night People reflects the men who made it; quiet, knowledgeable professionals who eschew melodrama and personality dysfunction in favor of just doing their jobs to the best of their ability. It’s that very simplicity, masking complexity, which makes it great.

Starring Gregory Peck, Broderick Crawford, Anita Bjork, Rita Gam, Walter Abel, Buddy Ebsen; written by Nunnally Johnson, Jed Harris, Tom Reed; produced and directed by Nunnally Johnson.

South Mountain

Review of Hilary Brougher’s South Mountain.

Somewhere, on the side of a mountain in the Appalachians, a family is gathering for its annual celebration. Somewhere, a family is falling apart. Somewhere, the classic reactions and responses to unconscionable betrayal are turned on their heads. Somewhere, people act out their lives in a fashion both impossible to identify with and unmistakably human. South Mountain is both a hauntingly unique story of heart break and heart mending, and a classic staple of the character drama form.

The gathering is that of Lila (Talia Balsam) and Edgar (Scott Cohen), a middle-aged married couple celebrating their latest fourth of July with their teenage children and old friends. One of them, however, knows a life-breaking secret which will slowly but surely coming spilling out over the next month and change.

Edgar has fathered a child with another woman and though Lila initially does not want to embrace the standard reaction to such news, it soon becomes clearly inevitable what must be done. As slowly as news of the Edgar’s actions spilled out, so do the reactions filled with denial and acceptance and wrapped around visits from friends and family stuck within their own preoccupations.

South Mountain is a low-budget, character-oriented independent film. That isn’t a pejorative or a warning, any more than stating that a film is a big-budget action movie or a Blumhouse horror project. It’s simply a spoken announcement of the type of film involved invoking an unspoken aside that certain cliché’s of the genre will be involved. It’s worth repeating that cliché’s also aren’t de facto negatives.

It’s just that familiarity brings both contempt and comfort and it’s a constant reminder that we’ve been this way before. Not that being unique and different is a perfect antidote to those problems, but it’s also not an issue South Mountain spends a lot of time debating. To paraphrase Dune, “the forms must be obeyed.” Well, maybe not must, but they certainly will be.

There are long, silent, all encompassing shots of nature with human beings occasionally wandering through. There are long, under played conversations about past and present emotions with plot details left to be filled in behind the scenes. There is a direct, intentional attempt to avoid obvious dramatic fireworks, focusing instead of the slow, long-term reactions to such changes. In fact, that’s pretty much all South Mountain is: a reaction. A reaction to hurt, a reaction to pain, a reaction to history, a reaction happiness, a reaction to life.

A lot of that is dependent on the skill of the actors as the minimalism of the story and the visuals leaves us with only the people to hang on to. And that is a responsibility mostly on Balsam’s shoulders as Cohen (and to an extent most of the characters) floats in and out of Lila’s life, just enough to bring up memories of love and pain and let us see how plainly they appear on Balsam’s face. And her face is just about the only place we’ll ever get to see that deeper truth writer/director Hilary Brougher seems to be going for, because everything else is just so intentionally low core.

It’s not mumblecore, no one speaks near enough for that (or for it to be accused of resembling a play, though it shares some elements with theatrical drama), but it’s similarly low key to the degree the casual viewer may wonder just how much any of this matters to the people living through it.

Not everything needs wild plot gyrations and South Mountain would feel false with them. But it’s impossible to erase the feeling that something has happened, and we missed it. There was a moment where the world changed and we were looking the other way and what’s left is regret or acceptance. Or both. Brougher wants us to see why both are not so much needed as inevitable, with much to recommend and condemn them.

And she does it skillfully, never yanking the bandage off or going for visceral thrill. Even the most melodramatic moments — the reveal of Edgar’s infidelity — are approached from the side, growing in scope until they are impossible to ignore. Similar to the way we slowly learn that a phone call Edgar is having is with the woman giving birth to his child, we learn bits and bits and bits about Edgar and Lila’s long history with its ups and downs, creating more and more context for Lila’s reactions and her long delay of accepting how life has changed. It works better in theory than it does in practice – it truly does need a few more layers of dialogue and just speech, of opening of the characters inner lives to invest an audience fully in their lives.

But once the forms are observed and seen through, there is real meat on South Mountain’s bones. Brougher’s touch is so delicate it is almost invisible, which denies Mountain the forward momentum it desperately needs. But just sit back and let it wash over you like a cleansing rain and its depths with be revealed in the aftermath.

South Mountain Review Score: 7/10

Written and directed by Hilary Brougher, Breaking Glass Pictures‘ South Mountain stars Talia Balsam as Lila, Scott Cohen as Edgar, Andrus Nichols as Gigi, Michael Oberholtzer as Jonah, Macaulee Cassaday as Sam, Midori Francis as Emme, Naian González as Dara, Isis Masoud as Gemma, Guthrie Mass as Jake, and Violet Rea as Charlotte.