Finding Blessings in
Our Detours
In 1960 adapted for the screen
from Dore Schary’s, Tony-winning Broadway play, Sunrise
at Campobello, starring
Ralph Bellamy and Greer Garson as Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, is a
classic film as enduring, elegant, and engaging as its principle characters. Crippled for life by poliomyelitis, the film
focuses on FDRs courageous battle against the disease as well as his political
foes, its time sequence several years before his initial run for the White
House. Its name taken from Campobello, a summer home of the
Roosevelt family, it was there that FDR was stricken with the illness.
Two
of my forthcoming books: Guardians and Other Angels and “I Received Your Letter…” are set during the
Great Depression and World War II, and since he was one of the principles of
those eras, my research has given me enough of a working knowledge of FDR to
recognize that embedded within Sunrise at
Campobello is an important aspect of the man that is so subtly represented
in the film that it is otherwise easy to miss, an aspect that is widely
considered the ground of his greatness.
Among the many
other appealing attributes of FDR was his charm, his enthusiasm, his total
engagement in his life, but there was another side of him that was
off-putting. He was arrogant and
shallow, at least until the poliomyelitis pulled him down several pegs, until
it humbled him, until it grew him into an empathetic and a multi-dimensional
human being of the sort required in the leader of his nation, the central
figure charged with guiding it through the worst era of its history.
He says it
himself in the film. FDR and Eleanor are
sitting side by side on a sofa in their home.
They engage in a small debate over which one of them got the better deal
in their choices of a marriage partner.
He says he did. She says she
did. Seizing their poignant moment of
true confessions, he tells Eleanor that during the course of his illness, he
had experienced an epiphany, one that revealed to him his deficiencies of
character, and that furthermore would have gone unrecognized absent his being
crippled. Simply and sincerely he
expresses gratitude for the setback that steered him onto a new and better destiny.
Carrying a heavy theme in a
light-hearted package wrapped in his signature style is Woody Allen’s 2011
masterpiece, Midnight in Paris, a film
worth viewing time and again. Layered
with incisive messages that strike you close to home and stab you in the heart,
nevertheless it is such fun to watch contemporary performers show up in cameos
as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; Cole Porter; Hemingway; Faulkner; Picasso; T. S.
Elliott; Matisse; Dali; Lautrec; Man Ray; Degas; Gauguin; Gertrude Stein, among
others.
Another
coming-of-age story, a young and highly successful Hollywood scriptwriter nursing
his dream to write novels, portrayed in a parody of Woody Allen by Owen Wilson,
is stricken with “Golden-age thinking,” the romantic but erroneous notion that
a life in another time would be better than ones actual life. Accompanied on a trip to Paris by the
mean-spirited and condescending trio of her parents and his fiancée, played
true-to-character by lovely Rachel McAdams, the complete incompatibility of the
pair unravels as the writer jumps through hoops to extricate himself from
McAdams and her entourage to pursue his private love-affair with Paris.
Wandering the
city streets alone one night, in a clever time-warp, the writer is transported
to Paris of the 1920s where he hobnobs with famous literary and artist figures
of that age. Even Gertrude Stein, flawlessly
played by Kathy Bates, agrees to read and critique the unfinished manuscript of
his novel. Convinced that he is finally
in the time and place where he belongs, he indulges his fantasy to the hilt and
becomes infatuated with beautiful Marion Cotillard’s Adrianna, the legendary mistress
at one point of Braque, then of Modigliani, followed by Picasso, then Hemingway.
Discontent with
her own era, Adrianna entices the writer into traveling even further back in
time with her to the turn of the century where in an encounter with Degas and
Gauguin, the great Impressionist painters express their desire to have lived in
the time of the Renaissance. Surrounded
by such pervasive discontentment, the writer has an epiphany. He realizes that everyone’s present time,
throughout the whole of time, was and is a little unsatisfying because life
always has been, always is, and always will be a little unsatisfying, and if he
is ever going to write anything worthwhile, he has to get rid of his illusions.
He
breaks up with the nasty fiancée, decides to stay in Paris and follow his dream
of writing novels, hooks up with a lovely and companionable French woman, and at
the end of the film, side by side they walk in the rain into a blissful
future.
The
primary message I got from both of these films is that we have to try to find
blessings in our detours—to make use of them somehow for they just might lead
us to better circumstances.
Upon reading Ted Waterfield’s
poems in my introductory posting on this site, “He Has As Many Gods As Stars”, my good buddy and master gardener, George
Zonders, who turned me on to Midnight in Paris, also turned me onto Ogden
Nash’s enduring poem, “Spring is Sprung.”
This is George’s version of it:
Spring is sprung
The grass is riz
I know where
The birdiez iz
Enjoy these first days of spring! And thanks for the poem, George.
Linda is the author of the
soon-to-be-released novel, Guardians and
Other Angels, published by Saga Books. She
is also the co-author with Debra Shiveley Welch of the suspense novel, Jesus Gandhi Oma
Mae Adams also published by Saga Books, and available at Amazon.com and Barnes &
Noble.com.
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