Change will do you good
This much is true: Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet auteur whose pioneering works “Strike,” “The Battleship Potemkin” and “October” influenced film language, came to Hollywood in 1929 but was never able to get a project off the ground, and so he traveled south of the border to make “Que Viva Mexico!”
After shooting 30 to 50 hours of footage, the money dried up and Eisenstein was called back to the Soviet Union. Various versions of the film have trickled out over the years, but for its director, it remained an unfinished picture.
Director Peter Greenaway takes those facts and spins his own version of the tale in his audacious, visually arresting “Eisenstein in Guanajuato.” Not merely a stranger in a strange land, Eisenstein (Elmer Bäck) arrives in Mexico sexually repressed and with other issues that have not prevented artistic fulfillment but have made for a sterile and lonely personal life. In a new environment, surrounded by new people, inhibitions start to dissolve.
Traveling away from the familiar works its magic on Eisenstein, at least in Greenaway’s telling. That’s often true of life, of course. See more of the world; change perspective. But it’s been a recurring theme in the movies. Heck, the romantic comedy was more or less built on the theme, with 1934’s “It Happened One Night” offering a blueprint of the bickering couple who start with mutual contempt, only to fall in love.
And while the arguing part might be the only essential for the great bulk of the genre, Frank Capra’s particular genius in that early screwball comedy was throwing heiress Claudette Colbert and reporter Clark Gable together on the road. In that environment, away from family and friends, they could get over themselves and find each other.
More than half a century later, the road would work similar magic on Tom Cruise in Barry Levinson’s “Rain Man” (1988), when a change in perspective goes a long way toward helping a lost man regain his soul. As Charlie Babbitt, Cruise is a monster of a man, an ambitious, avaricious car dealer whose only motivation in taking charge of Raymond (Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman), the autistic older brother he never even knew he had, is to get his hands on their father’s $3 million estate.
But a strange thing happens to Charlie as they travel across the country: He discovers that he is capable of change, as he grows closer to his sibling.
Family is at the heart of Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” (2013), which begins with aged Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) trying to walk to Nebraska from Montana to collect a sweepstakes prize before his son David (Will Forte) takes charge of the journey. It’s not a long trip and it’s one that eventually reunites the entire Grant clan, but it’s a special moment in the relationship between Woody and David.
They have never gotten along, and David is resentful of the position his father has put him in now, but returning to the town they once lived in, visiting with his dad’s old friends and his brothers and their families, and just spending time with the old man, David begins to see his dad differently, altering their relationship.
For Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) in Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), the world is first rocked not by a change in location, just by the addition of Brian Slade’s ( Jonathan Rhys Meyers) glam rock into his drab suburban existence. Arthur doesn’t have to travel farther than the local record shop to effect change, although eventually he moves to London, freeing himself from his repressive environ-
ment.
And sometimes transformation occurs when it is least expected. Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill is perfectly content living the bachelor’s life in Manhattan at the start of Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959). But then a case of mistaken identity sends him on the run from the law and from people trying to kill him, travels that take him to Chicago, a deserted cornfield, and finally to the stone faces dotting Mount Rushmore. At the end of his ordeal, Roger seems much like his old, unflappable self — except, with Eva Marie Saint by his side, one has the feeling he’s not such a confirmed bachelor anymore.
There are countless more examples, of course, of big epiphanies and small. From a film director ( Joel McCrea) yearning to be taken more seriously and learning a lesson when the hobo’s life suddenly becomes real in Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) to Audrey Hepburn’s bookstore clerk not merely visiting Paris but also changing up her whole existence in becoming a model in “Funny Face” (1957) to a teenager (Liam James) finding himself by taking a job at a water park while vacationing in a resort community in “The Way, Way Back” (2013), and back to Eisenstein’s adventures in “Eisenstein in Guanajuato,” there is a lesson there: Change your world, change your life.