Films with characters who show resilience
Characters facing a crisis make their way through with grace
As endings go, the one invented by Swedish director Lukas Moodysson for his gentle, unassuming comedy “Together” (2001) is just about perfect. It’s not a spoiler to share it: Already, the members of a 1975 commune have squabbled over everything from eating meat to owning a TV and the need for wearing underwear in the kitchen.
Their children, often the most mature people in the room, look on, mortified. One morning after the worst of the infighting has ended, everybody heads outside for a sloppy, impromptu soccer match under a light snowfall — adults and kids, women and men, socialists and materialists. In the chaos of the game, all is forgiven.
As if this scene weren’t sweet enough, Moodysson adds a little ABBA, the period-specific hit “SOS,” using its minor-key piano riff and lyrics as a counterpoint to the euphoria: “Where are those happy days? They seem so hard to find.” Neither Moodysson nor his producers could predict how this climax would play for audiences during the film’s American release — 10 days after Sept. 11. Arriving in theaters during that terrible moment, “Together” felt like a gift, a reminder of something precious.
Movies have an alchemical way of resonating with realworld traumas. The better ones somehow intuit an audience’s discomfort, absorbing the anxiety and replacing it with cool reserves of dignity.
During the coronavirus quarantine, we can cram our viewing binge lists with distractions (I certainly have): escapist romcoms, violent Scorsese beatdowns, even a post-apocalyptic nightmare or two. But thinking about Moodysson’s “Together” made me yearn for tales of resilience, for characters who have been where we are — or somewhere similar — and made their way through a crisis, not only surviving it but arriving at a kind of grace.
The gold standard for weathering-the-storm films is William Wyler’s “Mrs. Miniver” (1942), still reliable for exquisite pangs of British stiff-upper-lip resolve.
(It was, in fact, a Hollywood studio product, shot on the MGM lot.) While the plot is World War II-adjacent, it contains no soldiering. Instead, the story focuses on a fictional cozy English village on the outskirts of London and one affectionate upper-middle-class family whose oldest son, Vin, an Oxford student, enlists in the Royal Air Force.
“Mrs. Miniver” will wreck you, incrementally, with every subtle expression of worry flicking across the face of the matriarch, Kay Miniver (Greer Garson, in one of the most psychologically acute performances of the 1940s).
At the beginning of the film, Kay seems almost distracted — she’s got her mind on buying that fancy hat in the city, which she does. But watch how Wyler lingers on that frilly extravagance, now propped on her bedpost.
With the sound of bombers getting closer every day, will there be time for hats, time for gardening contests and prizewinning roses? Will Kay be left with anything at all?
Sacrifices big and small make up the film’s progression to a larger sense of commonality. “Cleo From 5 to 7” (1962), the effervescent French Left Bank classic by Agnès Varda, follows a similar trajectory, even if it begins in a more lovably neurotic, self-absorbed place. The glamorous title character (Corinne Marchand) — a Parisian singer with a cool loft, a team of songwriters and several rambunctious kittens — is consumed with foreboding, nervously awaiting the results of a cancer test.
She takes to the streets, Varda’s documentary eye capturing the pulse of a flirty city that barely registers on her. (Cleo is as glum as someone can be in a polka-dot dress.) Marchand’s huggable creation, always checking herself in the mirror, exists to be seen.
She even goes to a hat store, trying to get her mind off things. It doesn’t work.
None of it helps, until magically, a shift happens. It’s the first day of summer, a good listener tells her in the park. (He’s also very handsome.) What begins as a distraction becomes something deeper. Varda’s masterpiece is often viewed through a feminist prism, Cleo evolving out of a coquettish, maleimposed persona to a more grounded conception of self. But in her awakening, we’re also watching the ultimate film about coping. “Today, everything amazes me,” she says, reborn, eyes shining.
How we carry on is just as important as carrying on itself, maybe even more so. For surviving in style, you can’t beat the impossibly suave Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), concierge of Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014). A dazzling breakthrough for Anderson, his most politically charged film is set at a pinkhued historical crossroads: an elegant 1932 Europe of confectionary treats, secret camaraderie and poetryciting pleasures, all of it increasingly under siege from the clownish forces of fascism. (It’s a Europe that’s only slightly fantasized.)
The core battle, however, is a defense of what Gustave, doused in cologne and charming fastidiousness, calls the “faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” (Anderson loves the line so much, he deploys it twice.) This is a film expressly about preservation: of hospitality, manners, pride in a job well done. If “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is laced with sadness, it’s because Gustave’s delicate world is already disappearing before he even realizes it.
Take it as a warning. It’s not too soon to consider what kind of “new normal” we’d like to emerge into, post-pandemic. In his scrappy “Shoplifters” (2018), informed by reallife accounts of Japan’s recession woes, director Hirokazu Kore-eda shows us, with shattering clarity, how quickly an abandoned child or wounded laborer can slip through the social safety net and become disposable. The movie’s central clan, squatters unrelated by blood, are a makeshift family, gaming the system where they can.
Existence is dicey for them. Still, the film is valuable as a window onto resourcefulness and compassion — even joy, the right of every human being. ABBA wouldn’t be entirely out of place: “Where are those happy days? They seem so hard to find.”
They’ll be back, as will the movies. Let’s hope they rise to the occasion.