15 January 2008
The Resurfacing of LaGravanese and Nelson
)Published on January 15th, 2008 @ 01:37:06 pm, using 1024 words, 185 views
The new movie P.S. I love you brought a name back to my consciousness. Names get left behind according to the times. Especially names that have no direct bearing on your day-to-day life, names attributed to people you only know by name. Their buoyancy is intermittent and when they float up to the surface after a hiatus, out of the big blue that lies beneath the surface… well, it’s a nice surprise. It releases a sense of nostalgia (almost like hormones) which, when taken in the right dose, can bring a smile to your face. :)
Richard LaGravenese is the name in question here.
Back in ‘98, I watched an episode of Charlie Rose that featured an interview with LaGravenese, a screenwriter whose name I recognized mostly in connection to such adapted-to-the-screen films as The Horse Whisperer, Beloved and The Bridges of Madison County.
I remember that odd feeling of finally seeing a person whose name had been up until then unnaturally familiar all by itself, a name floating in your mind, connected to memorable lines, credit sequences and nothing else. That odd feeling of stacking up name against pre-conceived image against real image. An Ohhhhhhhhh-so-that’s-Richard-LaGravenese sort of moment. The man who turned Grand Central Station into a ballroom for that sweet, dreamlike waltz sequence in The Fisher King. That’s the guy… Huh.
I sat in front of the TV ten years ago and watched that interview. I watched it intently and identified with a lot of what was said. Another nice feeling, identifying…
You ever meet somebody… you meet at a party, you may never see them again but, you had this connection with them… this intense conversation… You feel like they saw you… like they saw who you were in a way that people who know us don’t, because they tend to keep us the way they need us? [20:45]
‘What is it about screenwriting? What does that give you?’ asked Charlie.
It’s an opportunity to… actually, at its most basic, it’s an opportunity to connect. Cause you write things that you’re feeling and you’re thinking and you hold them up and you’re sort of saying to everyone ‘Does anybody else understand this? Does anybody else feel this? Or get that?’ [24:40]
That’s how one makes one’s mark, I suppose. By prompting identification. By inviting others into the realm of who they are, no matter how deserted a realm it may seem. Hats off to Charlie Rose for his hand in facilitating that, in revealing people.
I identified so much with that interview I taped it. I taped it and went to see the movie. Living out loud, it was called. Small and captivating like two of its stars, Holly Hunter and Danny DeVito. Personal like a toothbrush or a secret or an inner life. Internalized like its protagonist, Judith Nelson, a woman who bowed her head, gave in to her fears and let the tide sweep her – instead of steering herself towards a chosen direction – and eventually disappeared below the surface into the eye of the storm of an identity crisis.
As much as a film about loneliness (as LaGravenese himself describes it) Living out loud is a film about the mistake of dressing in layers when the weather doesn’t call for it. The mistake of adding things to your life or even worse, allowing things to be added to it when they simply don’t belong there. The mistake of not establishing a territory of your own. Life doesn’t call for layers. Life calls for as much transparency, nakedness and true-to-selfness as one can muster. It calls for nontransferable dreams and goals that fulfilled or not, will serve to make up the backbone of it. People are like roads. They merely intersect. Being a loyal partner to the point of adopting dreams and goals in the name of a partnership (that is, in detriment of individuality) only forces you below the surface where the environment is likely to be foreign. Going below the surface while wearing layers will only help you drown. This was Judith Nelson’s lesson.
She and her experience both accompanied LaGravenese back to my consciousness. Heartbroken, struggling to find herself, in her little black dress, string of pearls, perfectly coifed do and all the possibilities left behind, I can’t help but identify with her again and again as she longs to be seen, learns to stand on her own and to look for a connection that doesn’t impose disadvantageous compromises.
To me, LaGravenese’s directorial debut is about the ups and downs of finding the right person when the right person is none other than yourself – as fully realized and self reliant an indivudual as one can teach oneself to be. Only then, everything else may fall into place. Only then will the chips have a better chance of falling where you’d like them to, instead of where they may. Only then will everything else have a better chance of coming to be.
Pat: We, we act like we know it all, you know, we got it all together, but we don’t know what’s going on half the time. We’re scared to death.
Judith: Of what?
Pat: Not finding it.
Judith: Finding what?
Pat: I don’t know. Our place, maybe. I mean, I’ve had moments, times when I love my wife and I knew that there was no other place that I should be. But, uh… those are moments and then they go. And when my daughter died, I thought I’d never have another one. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere… it starts to change.
Judith: Yeah… Here’s to finding more of them.
(Living out loud)
Well said. Here’s to finding more of them!
While keeping in mind…
Maybe all we have is seconds we see clearly.
(Living out loud)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Richard LaGravenese, Living out loud, writing, connecting, Charlie Rose, loneliness, seeing clearly, partnership, identifying, dreams, goals, individuality, The Fisher King, waltz, Grand Central Station, identity
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