Movies to Enjoy … With Our Permission

Movie Reviews - Combined image 600x389
By Robert Horton

Asked, given, denied, overlooked … there are so many ways permission plays out in cinema. Presenting, for your enjoyment and with your permission, three picks for your next movie night.

The 400 Blows (1959)

The theme of seeking — or being denied — permission is a common one in films about childhood. Until a certain age, children are at the mercy of a parent or teacher’s permission, and the wayward adolescent hero of this film has had enough of all that. Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, is the alter ego of director Francois Truffaut; in fact, the character and actor would appear in four subsequent Truffaut films. The fact that Truffaut was revisiting his own troubled past in The 400 Blows (1959) must account for how empathetic and clear-eyed this film is — the identification with a youthful point of view is passionate and complete, making this one of the cinema’s greatest films about childhood. Truffaut understood that the permission one seeks in youth is the permission to be one’s own self, a yearning that puzzles grown-ups when they forget the realities of being young.

The Color Purple (1985)

The 1985 film adaptation of Alice Walker’s much-loved novel is many things, but on one level it’s about a woman gaining permission to speak, and to smile. That woman is the much-abused Celie (played as an adult by Whoopi Goldberg), who’s been told all her life how ugly she is — thus her reluctance to break out in a smile. Celie’s passage is all about enduring a procession of hardships in order to finally be allowed to be herself. Goldberg’s uncanny presence (she’s almost in a silentmovie mode of performing) brings Celie to heartbreaking life, and there’s also strong work from Danny Glover, Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey. Watch the way director Steven Spielberg arranges this emotional subject matter around a series of formal elements: the writing of letters, the framing of people before windows and doorways, the redemptive power of song. Then just look at the opening and closing shots, rhyming images that trace an entire life’s journey in purely visual ways — another instance of The Color Purple conjuring the power of silent cinema.

Winter’s Bone (2010)

It is, incredibly, the 21st century; although from an initial glimpse at the backwoods world of Winter’s Bone (2010), you might be forgiven for assuming we are in a distant time. Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), who lives with a couple of younger siblings in a shack in the Missouri Ozarks, searches for her missing father; she’s about to lose the family farm if she can’t find him. What she discovers is a world of deeply-ingrained codes that have existed — outside the law — for generations, a world in which her own death would be a minor event in the community’s maintenance of those codes. Yet Ree plunges ahead anyway, breaking the rules and not asking for permission. Director Debra Granik told me Ree was like a truth-seeker from a traditional Western: “She’s warned; she’s told not to trespass or transgress, and she does so because she feels that it’s worth it. We called her a Western hero in a girl’s body.” She might just be the defining heroine from the last few years of movies.

About The Author

Robert comments on film for the Seattle Weekly and the Everett Herald, and he is Webmaster of The Crop Duster (roberthorton.wordpress.com). He is also a guest speaker for Smithsonian Journeys and Humanities Washington.