The Crucible - Noni, You Devil!

Pam writes:

It is always a good thing when two of our interests come together. In this case it is Winona Ryder and Rebecca Nurse  - one of the first victims of the Salem witch trials, and Pam's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.

In this movie, based on Arthur Miller's play of the same name, Our Winona plays Abigail Williams, the instigator of the witch hunt. Abigail is the ring leader of a group of several young women and girls who accuse their neighbors of dancing with the devil. Daniel Day-Lewis plays John Proctor, a former (married) lover of Abigail. Abigail accuses John's wife Elizabeth of witchcraft in the hopes of getting her out of the way. Elizabeth Lawrence plays Pam's ancestor.

Ryder is wonderful in this film. She shows a range of emotion, (some of which is pretense on Abigail's part). There are some historical inaccuracies in the film, but overall one gets the idea of how superstitious folks were, and how those superstitions played into their fears. We also get a pretty strong sense of the conditions of the jails, and the injustice of the the "justice system".

James adds:

A third interest in this film, of course, is geography, though the family connection and Winona involvement that Pam mentions are also crucial. The film was shot in at least six locations, though IMDb (as of this writing) lists only five. The one missing from IMDb is the most important, and is also the only one that is historically accurate.

GoogleMaps has changed, so the embedded version does not work well. Please explore this map in more detail, noting that the yellow markers are for memorial sites that are neither in the film nor in the original events. 

As with a lot of films -- especially those representing an earlier period in time -- a far-flung set of locations was needed to take advantage of places that have the appearance of a single location in an earlier age. Plimoth Plantation, for example, was carefully constructed in the 20th century to resemble a 17th-century settlement. And from what I can discern from online images, the harbor area of Shelburne, Nova Scotia resembles the harbor area of Salem, but perhaps without overhead wires.

The interesting geography here is that these great efforts are undertaken to maintain a geographic misconception about the events described. The trials were in Salem, but as with Bridgewater and many other Massachusetts towns, Salem was a much bigger town at the time. The entire witch-trial story took place in the part of the town where Rebecca Nurse resided, and which is now in Danvers.

See note above regarding this map.

Rebecca Nurse was among the more prosperous members of the community, and amazingly, her house and grounds remain intact, though all of the historic and commercial remembrances of the trial itself are in the harbor area that remains part of Salem. What IMDb fails to note is that much of The Crucible was actually filmed on her homestead, both in and around her house and in a meeting house built on the homestead specifically for the production.

All films require a great deal of planning, of course, but the planning for this one must have been extraordinary, creating an illusion that would work well for viewers who have not been to the various filming locations. Often we see characters moving almost seamlessly from Danvers to Plymouth to Ipswich, as if they were walking across a single lawn.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is both beautiful and profoundly moving, as it includes a memorial build by some of her other descendants. When we visited, our guide was a very young man who was very well versed and clearly conscientious about his role as an interpreter of the site. It is well worth a visit, or at least a Facebook "like" -- yes the Homestead has well over a thousand Facebook followers ...

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

Great Balls of Fire - Child Bride Noni

Pam writes: 
This film, from Our Winona's Heathers era, tells the story of Jerry Lee Lewis' (Dennis Quaid) marriage to his thirteen-year old cousin. Our Winona plays said cousin, Myra Brown. Displaying an amazing range of emotions from the naive smitten teenager, to the stunned bride, to the wealthy young wife who does not know what to do about all the media attention, we see Ryder in just the kind of role she was meant for. She and Quaid have a very natural chemistry as an unlikely couple who are both outraged by the media's attention to their marriage. The couple is so sympathetic, in fact, that viewers may find themselves at times confused about what to make of the media frenzy.

Watching this movie I wanted to turn away when I saw grown man Dennis Quaid bedding Ryder (who, although she was about 18 when the film was made, made a a very convincing 13-year old). The film focused only on a short period of Lewis' life - his rise to fame and fall from grace, which apparently all took place in the space of about a year. The film tells what appears to be a love story, and seems to set out to vindicate Lewis, so one would never guess that the marriage ended in divorce 13 years later. There is not even an epilogue indicating the fact that Lewis was married several more times following his divorce from his cousin. He is currently on his seventh marriage (the one to Brown being his third).

James adds:
I certainly shared Pam's aversion to the bedroom scenes, which would normally not be a problem in a Winona film! Even knowing that the actress was technically of age, the context was beyond creepy. I also wondered about the fact that all of the ire was directed at Lewis himself, and none of it at the institutions that legitimized his ongoing statutory rape. The church and state colluded in putting a sheen of legitimacy on a relationship that most agreed was transgressive in the extreme.

This film also explores the complex relationship Lewis had with another cousin - the Revered Jimmy Swaggart (played by Alec Baldwin, who also starred with Our Winona in Bettlejuice). It helps to explain the strong anti-rock crusades of the evangelical movement in the 1980s, which James encountered in Kansas City. A friend from church was a DJ at one of Swaggert's radio stations, and none of us could understand the extreme nature of the rules against rock music there. After viewing this film, it is easy to imagine that the famous preacher heard each rock song as a provocation from his more famous cousin.

Toward the end of the film, it occurred to me that although Quaid had to develop some piano skills for the shots that revealed his full arms (and, sometimes, legs) at the piano, a talented piano player was his double for many close-ups of the keyboard. "Who did they get for that?" I thought, not for a second imagining the answer: Jerry Lee Lewis himself was hammering the ivories in this film.

The film makers did not refrain from showing many of the deep flaws in his character, but his presence on the set surely tempered the overall tone.

Despite the high creepiness factor, this is an outstanding film, and among the best of Our Noni's performances.

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

Frankenweenie

There is no doubt that Our Winona's hey day was in the late 80s and early 90s playing roles as a precocious and angst-ridden teen (see Heathers, Mermaids, Girl Interrupted, Little Women, and Beetlejuice). We haven't seen real stellar work from her in the 21st century though.

The question then is how to take a 40-something Gen X star and and give her a teen role? The answer? Animation, of course. In Tim Burton's creepy, but not too scary film about a boy (Victor) who brings his dead dog back to life Our Winona plays the voice of Elsa, neighbor to Victor. Her part is not essential, and she has minimal contact with Victor.

While she did have an opportunity to reprise the teen-angst-y stuff, she really didn't shine here. Her role seemed superfluous. Overall it is a fun movie, although the ending is pure Disney fluff.

Final Verdict: Three Croquet Balls

Mr. Deeds

When this movie first came out in 2002 we were torn about watching it because as much as we enjoyed watching Winona Ryder films we really didn't like Adam Sandler's early goofball films. Eventually we succumbed, and only vaguely remembered having seen this before when we watched it again over the weekend - a typical rom-com with no surprises. Our Winona plays Babe Bennett, a tabloid television journalist who goes undercover as Pam Dawson (a school nurse) in order to get a story on Longfellow Deeds (Sandler), the unexpected heir to a multi-billion dollar fortune. Babe pretends to woo Deeds, then falls for him, is found out as a fraud, and the usual romantic comedy archetype ensues.

Final verdict: Three croquet balls:

1969

The year of the first moon landing Pam and James were five and six years old (respectively). James' recollection of the event was wondering who that guy "Roger" was that they kept talking about. Pam assumed it (the moon landing) was an annual event, and therefore, did not bother to watch it even though her parents called her to the television to see history being made. We were likewise almost completely unaware of the bigger political and social changes taking place during the 1960s  (e.g. Vietnam War protests, Civil Rights marches, the assassinations of Malcolm X and the Kennedys). This is not necessarily a bad thing; childhood should be a time of innocence. However, it does make things that actually did take place in our lifetime seem like ancient history to us. Watching movies like 1969 helps us to make sense of things we were only vaguely aware of at the time.

Here are some important things to know about this film:

1. Our Winona makes a fetching hippie.
2. Winona Ryder and Robert Downey, Jr. are completely believable as siblings.
3. This is likely to make a person fondly remember losing her virginity to the boy next door (or the boy a few blocks away, as the case may be).
4. It has an exceptional soundtrack.
5. This movie is especially thought-provoking if you have also recently watched Lee Daniels' The Butler and a few episodes from the first season of All in the Family
6. The movie takes place in Maryland, which is a real place (in fact it is the magical place where James and Pam met and fell in love). There is no Collough County (or whatever it was called) there though. 

Final Verdict:

Four Croquet Balls

Square Dance

We rewatched Square Dance, which is only the second of 51 items currently on Our Noni's filmography. Released in 1987, just a year after her debut in Lucas, this film is where she really began to earn her chops as an actress. This status is revealed in the opening credits, where she is given third billing, even though she is the film's central character. Top billing would be another year away, in 1988's Heathers.

As former Texans, one thing we appreciated about the film was the variety of subtle ways in which its Texas setting was signified. In some ways, it could have taken place any where in the South, but chicken-fried steak, ordinary men with extraordinary hats, and other clues put the rural scenes deep -- as they say -- in the heart of Texas. The urban scenes were in Fort Worth, where subtlety is not required.

Just as she begins to come of age as an actress, this is a particular kind of coming-of-age film. There is a complicated love interest in the person of Rob Lowe, and there is something about her hair and glasses. But the real growing up takes place in the ways Gemma understands the adults in her life.

We have been doing some writing about the Bechdel Test lately -- the rather low threshold for a pro-female film being two named, female characters having a conversation that is not about a man. This film fails by that measure, but the dysfunction of Juanelle's "romances" seems to be precisely the point of the film, and her daughter seems to learn from the abundant negative examples.

A subplot of this film revolves around the complicated, transgressive relationships both young Gemma and her grandfather have with a local black man, Beecham, which put me very much in mind of the Ballad of Curtis Loew, which I found myself humming throughout the film.

Final verdict:
Three croquet balls

How to Make an American Quilt - Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

I've (Pam) been having a hard time enjoying movies lately because I've learned about the Bechdel Test. A seemingly simple enough test to pass (does the movie have a conversation between two named female characters about something other than guys?) turns out to be remarkably difficult for Hollywood. Most movies fail miserably, and even those that pass, might just barely. A movie like Chasing Papi  -a movie that features three scantily clad women feuding over a man for the first 75 minutes - technically passes  because the last five minutes shows them talking to each other 6 months later about how great their lives are with him out of the picture, but we can hardly call this an empowering film. I found the test actually rather hard to apply to How to Make an American Quilt. Certainly a woman-centered film with a feminist perspective, but even with eight strong women characters, was there ever a conversation that wasn't, ultimately, about men?

I believe this was my fourth viewing of this 1995 feature. Our Winona plays Finn, a recently engaged young woman who is working on finishing her Master's thesis. She spends the summer with her grandmother (Ellen Burstyn), and great aunt (Anne Bancroft) in order to complete the project without the distraction of her cute-as-a-bug fiance, Sam. The other women in her grandmother's quilting bee, Anna (Maya Angelou); Marianna (Alfre Woodard); Sophia (Lois Smith); Em (Jean Simmons); and Constance (Kate Nelligan) share their personal stories of  love, loss, rejection, and redemption while they create a quilt. I always liked this movie. Our Winona gives a strong performance, as do the other actors, in this lovely story. And I think perhaps it ultimately does pass the Bechdel test because Anna's story, while including male characters, is really about the love for her daughter. Let's let this one slide.

James adds: I enjoyed rewatching the film, the characters are strong and interesting, the cinematography is lush. It includes frequent flashbacks between characters in late middle-age and their youth. As with other films that do this, I gave up "following" the film pretty early on, and treated it more as a dream -- an enjoyable dream that carries the viewer back and forth across decades.

Since learning about the Bechdel test, it has certainly influenced how I view and enjoy films, such as the Chasing Papi mentioned above. Honestly, though, I did not think to apply it to this film until Pam mentioned it at the end. I believe most people would see this as a "chick flick," making it all the more interesting to realize how much time these terrific women spend talking about men.

A strong performance by Our Noni.
Final Verdict: Four coquet balls.