Van Houten as teh tragic Jonker, whose poetry is inscribed in South Africa's history, as well as the flesh of those who carry it.

The trenches of South Africa in the 1960s, in the grip of apartheid—the equivalent of the American Civil War fought on foreign soil—continue to provide fertile material for movies fueled by the flames of morality, conscience and the struggle for human rights. Along the way, new heroes are discovered and old oversights corrected. The latest is Black Butterflies, a footnote to history about the rebellious, courageous and tragic life of South African poet Ingrid Jonker (triumphantly played by Carice van Houten, the rangy, riveting Dutch star who skyrocketed to world acclaim in Paul Verhoeven’s World War II saga, Black Book). She’s not the only person to defy the government and speak out against racism during apartheid, but her story is unique because the odds she faced to improve conditions and ameliorate the fate of the disgraced country she loved were overwhelming. As the daughter of Abraham Jonker, the powerful, mean-spirited minister of censorship, she had no one to turn to for approval. Understandably, she became an obsessive romantic with an intense passion for the kind of consuming love that always eluded her, further alienating her stern and reproachful father by moving through the bohemian literary circles of Cape Town, writing poetry from her heart, and sleeping with an assortment of other writers, all married and emotionally unattainable. Ingrid was not entirely likeable, and the movie makes no attempt to gild the lily. She had a talent for writing and a reckless spirit that antagonized critics and challenged conventions, but she was also an irresponsible mother with a child she often neglected, rejecting the security her husband offered for their daughter and eschewing respectability, while the baby slept on the floors of dirty hotel rooms. Tortured by the social injustice directed at black children while raising her own child in squalor, her priorities were screwy, yet she dragged both her baby and her typewriter around wherever she went, turning out so much memorable prose that her talent did not go unnoticed. Morose, tough-minded yet psychologically fragile, she was often compared, for obvious reasons, to her self-destructive contemporary American counterpart, Sylvia Plath. But she lived by her own rules, draining her lovers and enraging her father, who disagreed with her opposing political views that embarrassed him publicly and remained rife with frustration in his failed attempts to control her privately. Watching her squirm restlessly through the turbulence of the oppressive racist government he supported, he eventually drove her to a grim destiny with alcoholism and mental illness in an asylum in Amsterdam.

It’s not a pretty story, not always well served by an awkward narrative. But accomplished director Paula van der Oest, whose film Zus & Zo was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2003, fleshes out the shadows and conflicting mood swings that made Ingrid Jonger such a mercurial character. With her dark, sensitive but probing eyes and her arresting body language, you can’t take your off Ms. van Houten, who enlivens every scene, in contrast with the suffocating rigidity of Rutger Hauer as Abraham Jonker—cold, deeply prejudiced, convinced blacks are intellectually inferior and banning all their attempts to write truthfully about the experience of segregation. Mr. Hauer adds another laurel to his already esteemed reputation as the most versatile actor in the Dutch film industry. They are ably abetted by Ireland’s Liam Cunningham as novelist Jack Cope, the one great love of Ingrid’s life. While she was locked away in a mental hospital, he published her first book of poems, which her own father tried to censor before disowning her forever. The combination of acclaim and her own father’s terminal repudiation began a downward spiral that led to suicide. Rewards came late, but her prizes and accomplishments are not forgotten. Three decades after her death Nelson Mandela recited one of her poems in his first speech at the opening of the South African parliament in 1994. Today, there are Afrikaners who have her poems tattooed on their backs and others who swear she speaks to them from the grave. The title Black Butterflies is excerpted from her poem describing the bodies of black children littering an apartheid landscape after a massacre.

Neither another bland biopic about a self-destructive artist nor an historical scrapbook about a country in the grip of slavery, Black Butterflies is a dark, moving depiction of the life and death of a brave rebellious, idiosyncratic woman who made significant strides toward changing the world around her and paid a heavy toll for her passion. I found it immensely gratifying.

rreed@observer.com

BLACK BUTTERFLIES

Running TIME 100 minutes

Written by Greg Latter

Directed by Paula van der Oest

Starring Carice van Houten, Rutger Hauer and Liam Cunningham

3/4

Harris and Gugino. (Roundabout Theater Company)

It wouldn’t be accurate to label British-born Rosemary Harris “the first lady of the American theater” as long as Julie Harris (no relation) is still alive. But with all the other greats long departed, she’s pretty much in a class by herself. For a good example of just how rare her patrician yet persuasive ability can be in holding a restless audience spellbound in an otherwise painful and pedestrian play, all you have to do is get through the Roundabout revival of The Road to Mecca at the American Airlines Theater on West 42nd Street. For the record, it marks a celebration of her 60^th year as a Broadway star. Even as a baggy, arthritic old eccentric with shapeless gray hair clinging to worn sweaters better suited to a dust bin, she is positively divine, but she deserves a better vehicle.

This dreary fugue about independence of the mind and soul in South Africa is a crashing bore by Athol Fugard, the overrated, long-winded playwright whose debatable reputation as the most important voice in South African theater has been inflated beyond justification simply because he’s just about the only voice there is. He’s also prolific, grinding out one play after another without enchanting anyone except a small handful of critics. More proof: Many members of the audience around me at The Road to Mecca were lulled to sleep, with only the charms of Rosemary Harris and her lusty, capable costar, Carla Gugino, to keep them from snoring. They are the only two reasons to stay awake. There is also an arch, anesthesized third performance by the worthy but miscast Jim Dale that serves as a reminder of how good he’s been elsewhere. This time the focus is on Ms. Harris, playing the real-life Elizabeth Martins, an oddball recluse known as Miss Helen to her bewildered and suspicious neighbors in the Karoo village of New Bethesda on the eastern cape of South Africa. Here she provoked controversy and suspicion by creating an eccentric mecca of whimsical spirituality out of beer bottles, concrete and bailing wire, decorating her garden with some 300 sculptures of mermaids, camels, owls and Buddhas that make it now a national monument, luring curiosity seekers from every corner of the globe. This play, which takes place in 1974, was inspired by her suicide.

Into the colorful but ramshackle set by Michael Yeargan, which serves as a shrine to Miss Helen’s art, comes her only friend, Elsa Barlow (the ravishing Ms. Gugino), a young British schoolteacher in Cape Town, who is alarmed by Miss Helen’s latest letter, confessing the crippled joints, clinical depression and suicidal thoughts of an erratic septugenarian who has given up on life. Elsa, a feminist and civil libertarian who faces disciplinary action with the Cape Town school board for her harsh criticism of South Africa’s bigoted politics and her own classroom rants defending racial equality, is on a humanitarian mission to motivate new creative impulses in her once-spirited, free-thinking elderly friend. Miss Helen is not the only thing in need of a transfusion. The play takes forever to come alive, but after brewing tea, having a good wash after her 800-mile drive from the city and lighting a stream of candles, Elsa pries from her friend the real reason for her despondence: Under the guise of protecting her from herself, the local religious busybodies of the church council have set a plan in motion to lock up Miss Helen in a retirement home. The pros and cons of such a surrender to the toxic minds of freedom of expression are debated until I, for one, felt a creeping paralysis coming on.

Act II is a tug of war for Miss Helen’s soul between a maddeningly precise fuddy-duddy from the church (Mr. Dale), who arrives with the dual purpose of appeasing and intimidating the old woman, and the politically progressive and infuriated Elsa, who already considers native old guard Afrikaners comparable to the bored, irrelevant characters in a Chekhov play. While the world goes up in a bonfire, they fight to hold on to a cherry orchard. Do the townsfolk want to save her their unconventional neighbor from herself—or save the community from her? The play drones on for another hour before Rosemary Harris finally speaks her own mind in a much-anticipated act of defiance that recaptures the spirit that made her different from the others in the first place. This showdown is too long coming, and when it does, her usual clarity and enunciation are surprisingly muted, thanks to the stagnant direction of Gordon Edelstein. In fact, everyone has trouble being heard clearly and distinctively past the third row of the orchestra. The play is too talky for its own good, and not all of the talk resonates until that final scene, when so many revelations pour out of all three characters that audience assimilation is frustrating.

For the most part, the acting still soars. Ms. Gugino has frittered away so much valuable time pursuing a film career in forgettable low-budget Hollywood rubble that we tend to forget how mesmerizing she’s been on the New York stage in plays by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. I will never forget her devastating performance as Marilyn Monroe in the Roundabout revival of After the Fall. She is also as ravishing as she is accomplished. As far as Ms. Harris goes, I yield to no man in my adulation, though I prefer her in sophisticated comedies by Noël Coward and powerhouse dramas like The Lion in Winter. Shuffling around by candlelight in her worn house slippers, clutching her battered elbows and losing her way in the throes of early dementia in a play as bloodless as The Road to Mecca, she’s still fascinating, but one hopes there are more rewarding roles waiting in the wings. This time she’s a barn thrush lost in a peacock garden.

rreed@observer.com

Actually, Dean explained, Oklahoma is a lot like New York. "But New Yorkers are quicker on their feet about cognitive dissonance."

Everyone picks a candidate according to his or her instincts but coastal types rationalize it better than others. "We're all values voters,” he said. Also, though, "I don't know when we're going to win Oklahoma."

The former Vermont governor, who recently announced he would stepping down as chair of the Democratic National Committee after a second successful election cycle, gave a brief speech and then fielded audience questions read by a moderator.

Most of his remarks addressed strategy, for example advising Democrats to declare their anti-poverty, pro-fairness values proudly. On matters of policy, he did what chairmen do, relentlessly plugging President-elect Barack Obama's plans.

Dean repeatedly praised "the great genius of this younger generation," meaning voters under 35. He said that his generation--baby boomers-- was "necessarily confrontational" in pushing for civil rights. But kids today, he said, "are more pragmatic" and able to find common ground. "We still have wisdom, we still have a role, but our children are onto something," he said.

Dean said that as the younger group ages it will stay Democratic because Republicans "totally don't get the unity message at all."

Dean then suggested that Obama might deal with the Bush administration's misbehavior ("particularly in disregarding constitutional provisions") by setting up "something like what's going on in South Africa, the truth and reconciliation."

(South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a body formed to hear grievances and testimony from victims—and, in some cases, former practitioners—of apartheid.)

What about Dean's own future in the post-Bush world?

"I have no idea what's in my future and that won't be determined by me," he said, to cheers.

Dean is known for his hyperactive streak, and last night's talk was sure to please his fans. "The last day of the campaign I spent in Arizona," he said, to show how serious he was about Democrats campaigning in every state – even the home of John McCain.

"A long shot!" he said, laughing.

The word is obviously loaded, as it echoes the South African regime that oppressed blacks, denying them many rights. Apartheid literally means separateness; and it's worth pointing out that the Israelis themselves call their forbidding wall, which goes well east of the Green Line, sometimes encircling Palestinian villages, a "separation fence." More importantly, if you've visited the Occupied Territories, apartheid seems a fair description of the isolation and abuse the Palestinians experience, and the denial of so many rights, including the freedom to move about, the freedom to seek employment. In this interview on Youtube, you can watch Avichai Sharon of Breaking the Silence describe how as an IDF soldier he used to confiscate Palestinians' cars for minor infractions and seize their keys and never return them, simply forget about them. There was a box of keys at his headquarters; no one had bothered to give them back. Jimmy Carter and a South African church leaderI met in Hebron both say that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is in some ways "worse" than apartheid.

Apartheid is now a general term (with of course a South African shadow). According to the U.N.'s description, it means denying a subject group of different ethnicity "basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

The journalists who are now piping the Israel lobby's objections should visit the Occupied Territories and report for themselves on the real conditions of the Palestinians.

Then the door opened and a group of international volunteers came in. I heard European accents, and a tall black man with a tan haversack walked across the room and took the seat right beside me.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"South Africa," he said.

"Do you know about apartheid?"

"I lived through apartheid."

"How does this compare to apartheid?"

"In Johannesburg we had access to all the roads; they do not have that here," he said. "There were times we couldn't use the roads but those were exceptional occasions. We did not have these checkpoints. We carried papers but we were not constantly having to produce our papers as I have seen happens here. Our schools were inferior, but at least we could go to school. Many of these children are harassed on their way to school or are not allowed to get to schools. I have been here only three and a half weeks--but in my opinion, it is worse than apartheid."

"Worse than apartheid:" the words of Gosiame Choabi, an official of the South African Council of Churches.

I'm sure some people will seek to "contextualize" what Choabi said. They will talk about suicide bombers, or about the massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929, or the big picture of Arab dictatorships with no free speech that surround Israel, or the fact that apartheid was in every city across South Africa, not just occupied territories. All true. But they will never be able to explain away the conditions I saw for myself: the expulsion of Palestinians from the center of their second largest city to make room for a small group of religious nuts who have confiscated land and houses and buildings in the old city out of messianic beliefs, and the support for separation and confiscation and harassment through the government implementation of checkpoints and curfews and patrols and settlers-only highways, guarded by heavily-armed soldiers, roughly one soldier per settler.

When our group of 8 Jews, seven of them Israeli, walked around the ethnically-cleansed marketplace, the religious nuts threw rocks at us.

And if anyone wants to challenge this account, I will produce the Israeli woman who said that seeing this was as important for her as seeing Auschwitz. Or the young Israeli man who said that seeing a video in the Arab man's house of settler girls waiting in a line outside the Arab school to throw rocks at the Arab girls and kick them and beat them so that they would abandon the school building, which is near a settlement, made him so nauseous he wanted to run out of the place and vomit. And most of all I will produce our group's leader: Yehuda Shaul, burly and inspired and 23, who served again and again as a soldier in Hebron and in whom the Army produced a kind of soul murder, in which he was brought by degrees to shoot indiscriminately into Palestinian neighborhoods every night at dusk as a means of stopping the violence—a soul murder that Shaul is trying now to undo by leading weekly trips to the scene of his service and by collecting testimony of other soldiers as part of an organization called Breaking the Silence. What a Jew!

There are two obvious questions about what I saw. How does the grotesque treatment of Arabs impinge on Israeli society generally? How does it affect Arab attitudes?

As to Arab attitudes, the effect is devastating. Whatever anyone says about the Arab "street," I have had many conversations here with privileged Arabs and I can tell you that they feel Rage. Rage and despair. There is a Palestinian magazine trying to be like New York Magazine, called This Week in Palestine, a glossy magazine with ads, and every article in there is a description in English of inequity, and a statement of rage. Every article. Enough about the goddamn street; across the Middle East, yes, Arabs are stifled in traditional societies, but they are acutely well informed about the occupation. This is America's problem. It demonstrably played a part in Osama Bin Laden's twisted cosmology and it is resented by the Shiites of Iraq who would volunteer to be martyrs on behalf of Sunnis in Palestine. Marty Peretz and Alan Dershowitz like to talk about how little Israel's Arab neighbors have done for the Palestinians, beyond lip service. But remember that we didn't do much for the blacks of South Africa in a material way, didn't bring the children of Soweto into our homes; yet it was distant lip service by Americans, among them many angered middle-class blacks, that played a crucial role in transforming South Africa.

And what about Israeli society? How much awareness is there of what I saw? I asked the Israelis, and the young man who had wanted to vomit, Amnon Aaronsohn, 25, spoke with passion: "Israelis don't know about this, they don't want to know. And if you tell them about it, they say, Well there must be a good reason for it, and that is the end of it." The woman who had spoken of Auschwitz said, "The majority of Israelis think this is for their own security, the rhetoric is so forceful."

I said, "Well there is good reason for that, terrorism." But she, who has monitored checkpoints for the human rights group Machsomwatch, said that the separation and humiliation go so far beyond national security questions, and are a "bureaucratic torture, preventing schooling, health care, any ways of normal life."

I understood what Aaronsohn had told me, later, when I was on the beach in Tel Aviv. Israel is a beautiful country; and in many ways Israeli society is miraculous. It sprung up so quickly, to a European standard. But Israelis have generally blinded themselves to the apartheid in the back yard because if they did acknowledge it they would have to do something. This complacent blindering recalls the American south during the civil rights movement, or the founding fathers during slavery. They avoid the information. The newspapers say little about it, and I see that it is impolite to use the words "occupied territories." You hear the words administered territories, Palestinian areas, or Judea and Samaria.

And meantime their children at 18 are forced into the service of governing the Arabs and poking the old men at checkpoints, and asking them for their papers. Yehuda Shaul said that when you give a teenager a gun and power, it changes him, he is not ready for the moral gray area he enters, he is soon abusing people, as the horrific testimonies on the Breaking the Silence's website show.

Irreversible corruption. When will progressive Americans deal with the facts brought forward by brave Israelis, and address this tragedy that our government underwrites?

Wait a sec. An open mike at the U.N.? The entire security staff out of the building for a smoke following a terrorist threat? This all happens in the first 15 minutes. The credibility factor goes downhill from there. While you're scratching your head in a suspension of logic, you at least get to watch the lovely Nicole stalked, chased, threatened in the shower and on the verge of many perilous predicaments while speaking myriad languages. She does all of this, by the way, while trying to bring down an African demagogue who is guilty of mass genocide, and is on his way to New York to address the U.N. General Assembly and clear his name by promising democratic reforms and free elections.

Sean Penn and his sidekick, Catherine Keener, are the Secret Service team assigned to protect visiting dignitaries (thus explaining why the traffic is always clogged within a 10-block radius of the East River when the U.N. is in session). Now they find they have to keep an eye on the attractive blond interpreter, too. With at least three different groups of terrorists vowing to knock her off, this is a girl who spells trouble in 20 different languages. Under investigation herself (she used to be a gun-toting South African rebel whose hatred of the visiting dictator is well documented) and used by the Secret Service as bait to lure the terrorists out in the open, she's in double jeopardy, and there's a knife or a machine gun during every New York minute, including a take on the shower scene from Psycho. The movie maintains a certain tension as long as it's about a pretty girl in trouble in broad daylight. But when all of the terrorists arrive at cross purposes, killing each other for different causes, incoherence reigns. Then there's the army of tangential characters-a French photographer with the names of all of the people massacred in South Africa, a doctor who works in an AIDS hospice, Ms. Kidman's murdered brother-and an intense showdown between all of the conspirators trying to assassinate each other on a crowded bus in Brooklyn. By the time Mr. Penn ends up pointing a gun at Ms. Kidman while she points another gun at the head of the African dictator-again in a top-security room at the U.N. with no metal detectors-you will have no choice but to surrender all claims to reason and wonder who does Nicole Kidman's hair.

Under such daunting circumstances, The Interpreter is slick. The script, by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank and Steven Zaillian, contains some arresting talk about global corruption, the death of diplomacy and the hopelessness of political idealism. And the two stars knock themselves sideways to breathe life into cardboard clichés. Working with a South African accent that sometimes gets in her way, Ms. Kidman is cool, courageous and all about the power of words. Mr. Penn is such a resourceful actor that even though he's playing a stock role, he invests it with emotional minutiae that forms fascinating conflicts; he's all about rules and fists, but the loss of his wife in a car accident with another man has driven him to fear, loneliness and a state of cynicism that is the opposite of the girl's optimism. His disillusionment and her hope for world peace make interesting counterparts. Unfortunately, the film makes nothing of their budding mutual attachment and leaves them stranger than when they met.

At the press screening I attended, the critics were standing around in groups trying to figure out what they had just seen. None of it, we were forced to concede, made much sense. What The Interpreter needs is an interpreter.

Hellhouse

The Amityville Horror marks a cheesy return visit to Long Island's most famous haunted house. If you were unlucky enough to suffer through the lousy 1979 version with Margot Kidder and the pre-Barbra James Brolin, you know the story about a creepy old house at 112 Ocean Avenue where a 23-year-old wacko claimed voices from his TV test pattern told him to climb the stairs and butcher his entire family in their beds with a shotgun. One year later, a nice couple named George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house with their dog and three kids after buying it for a bargain-basement price. About that basement: Even the realtor refused to descend those stairs. "Houses don't kill people," said Mr. Lutz bravely, "people kill people." In the 28 days before they fled the house paralyzed with fright, their daughter bonded with an imaginary playmate who drove her to dangle from the roof, blood poured through the water faucets, Mr. Lutz chopped the dog to tartare, the priest who arrived to bless and sanctify the house with holy water was attacked by killer insects, and every Lutz met the face of Satan in the gateway to hell. It makes a good yarn, even if it seems more predictable than frightening.

Trouble is, times have changed. Yes, a violent tragedy in 1974 did put Amityville on the map and tourists with digital cameras still do drive-bys, looking for photo ops. But the facts about the Lutz family have been hugely contested and disproved since the 1970's, and the prime market value of the remodeled Dutch Colonial with the inviting dormers at 112 Ocean Avenue is considered anything but low-end real estate. Sigh. Today, even the ghouls have inflated price tags.

Hollywood must be desperate. They're recycling schlock from the bottom halves of old double features, even crummy TV shows. What's next, The Fog and House of Wax? Actually, they're both on the way. But for now, let's get Amityville out of the way. In the remake, hunky, camera-ready Ryan Reynolds proves he's got acting chops as well as six-pack abs. His George Lutz has humor as well as strangeness, and his fetish for chopping wood using a hatchet with a mind of its own gets the audience going every time. Melissa George's Kathy Lutz is distracting eye candy. After Mr. Reynolds floats nude in a blood-soaked bathtub, she's the only one who actually suggests they move out. A few lines get laughs, but the horror is standard fare, without a shred of innovation. Mr. Reynolds is too much like a refugee from a Men's Health cover to be believable as an ordinary daddy with mortgage payments and muffler repairs, and by the time he gets around to chasing the children through the house with an ax, dazed and simpering moronically and hypnotized by ghosts, you wonder how many times everyone has rented The Shining with Jack Nicholson. This may not be a good movie, but it's a pretty persuasive ad for homeowner's insurance.

Do Go to God

The only real horror on movie screens this week is weirdo director Todd Solondz's obscenely juvenile Palindromes, a noxious pretense about a 13-year-old girl named Aviva who wants to get pregnant and will endure any outrage, no matter how humiliating, to give birth. Aviva is played by eight different people, including a boy, an obese black girl and 43-year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh. Aviva practices with dolls and baby bottles and soiled diapers, but her mother (Ellen Barkin) drags her off to the doctor who performs her abortion. Aviva runs away from home in the back of a cross-country 16-wheeler with a truck driver who rapes her and abandons her in a roadside coffee shop. In one sordid chapter after another, the different Avivas, who come in all sizes and colors, pass themselves off as Henrietta, the name of Aviva's aborted fetus. This hapless child makes a pit stop in the house of a religious nut named Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk) who collects tortured and maimed orphans, claiming her parents were killed in the attacks of 9/11. For amusement, the children visit a garbage dump where a nearby abortion clinic dumps the bloody fetuses and give the blood-soaked plastic bags a Christian burial. Before she can escape Mama Sunshine, she meets up again with her white-trash truck-driving felon lover who, posing as her father, takes her back to New Jersey to aid him in his mission to blow up the abortion clinic run by the doctor who was hired by Aviva's mother in the first place. Ironies never cease, but in this movie you find yourself praying that the projector will.

An alleged "comedy" about pedophilia, child promiscuity, born-again Christians and nihilism, Palindromes is as amusing as lung cancer. Casting so many different people in the same role is a conceit as pretentious as the film's title, but it's simultaneously at odds with the film's theme-that nobody ever changes, no matter how many superficial changes they pretend to embrace. "You can have a sex change," said Mr. Solondz in his Q. and A. session after Palindromes was booed at the Toronto International Film Festival, "but you remain the same person inside." Busting taboos and shocking his audiences senseless for the sheer sake of controversy, this is the filmmaker responsible for the disgusting scene in Happiness where the boy masturbates, the dog feasts on the remains, then licks everyone in the mouth at the Thanksgiving dinner table. A seriously sick sister, if you ask me. Palindromes is Lolita remade by John Waters. "Palindrome" is a word or phrase that is spelled the same, backwards or forwards, like Anna, Ulu or, of course, Aviva. Uproariously insisting that he's one of the few filmmakers today who can be called "a true original," the delusional Mr. Solondz raised eyebrows in Toronto declaring that although there are many famous directors and films in the past, he has never been influenced by any of them. One only hopes future filmmakers will feel the same way about him.

1) What is your favorite matzoh?

2) Which do you prefer: hamentaschen or macaroons?

3) Why did Mr. Manischewitz begin making wine?

4) What are the Ten Plagues in your life?

-Sparrow

Bonus Material from the 40th Anniversary Edition DVD

"Then somebody walked in," Kerik says. "I don't remember who. In fact, I don't remember much about that moment other than hearing these words: 'We have a problem with the domestic. It appears the Social Security number is registered to somebody else.' Suddenly I could hear my heart pounding in my head,' Kerik says, 'and I wanted to take the fucking gun off the desk and shoot him."

- New York magazine, April 4, 2005

INT. BANK-NIGHT

DAWES, Sr., DAWES, Jr. and DIRECTORS are seated around long mahogany table. BANKS enters, approaches, removes bowler hat.

DAWES, Sr.

Banks, do you have any notion why we have asked you here this evening?

BANKS

Well, sir, I-

DAWES, Sr.

Yes, Banks?

BANKS

I did have some notion that you-

DAWES, Sr.

Go on, Banks.

BANKS

That you might-that I might be considered-that you might be considering me-

DAWES, Sr.

For a promotion, Banks?

BANKS

No, sir-that is to say, yes, sir.

DAWES, Sr.

( looks meaningfully at DIRECTORS, then back at BANKS)

Banks, we've had our eye on you for some time. Your habits have been regular, your performance exemplary, your loyalty to the firm unquestioned.

BANKS

Thank you, sir. Thank you very much indeed.

DAWES, Sr.

Therefore, Banks, we have indeed been considering you for a position of great responsibility: to wit, Banks, the position of-

( coughs, wheezes. DAWES, Jr. slaps him on back)

-Director of Homeland Securities.

BANKS

Why, Mr. Dawes, sir, I am most gratified-

DAWES, Sr.

Not so fast, Banks. Not so fast.

BANKS

Sir?

DAWES, Sr.

Over the course of this week, Banks, certain facts have been brought to our attention.

BANKS

Facts, sir?

DAWES, Sr.

Certain allegations, Banks. We have been informed that, for the past six months, you have had in your employ a nanny who is not a legal resident of this scepter'd isle. Who is present in England's green and, and-

DAWES, Jr.

Pleasant, father.

DAWES, Sr.

-and pleasant land without the knowledge or leave of the relevant authorities.

BANKS is astonished. Looks about at DIRECTORS; they are stony-faced. He gathers himself together.

BANKS

With all due respect, sir, the charge is perfect poppycock. Miss Poppins-Mary Poppins is her name-Miss Poppins is as British as, as tea and crumpets! As boiled baby and spotted dick! Why-she is as British as bad teeth!

PAN across faces of DAWES, Sr. and DIRECTORS, each with identical, dentally lamentable forced smile, or rather grimace.

BANKS

Excuse me, sir, I did not intend-

DAWES, Sr.

Never mind, Banks.

BANKS

Indeed, sir, I most expressly advertised in The Times for a British nanny. I remember the precise words I employed.

( begins to sing)

A British nanny must be a general! The future empire lies within her hands! And so-

DAWES, Sr.

That will do, Banks.

BANKS

I am very sorry, sir.

DAWES, Sr.

Banks, we would all very much like to believe your-

(coughs, wheezes. DAWES, Jr. strikes him on the back, twice)

-your song and dance-

(looks expectantly at DIRECTORS, who look blank; then, as one, they break into uproarious laughter)

-if I may use that expression. But the evidence contradicts it.

BANKS

Evidence, sir?

DAWES, Sr. waves his hand;

DAWES, Jr. empties contents of large briefcase onto table.

DAWES, Sr.

You see before you the sworn affidavits of 17 nannies-British nannies, Banks-who were turned away from your door.

BANKS

Turned away?

DAWES, Sr.

Blown away, to be exact. By a gust of wind of dubious meteorological origin. A gust produced, they allege, by a wind machine supplied by an American manufacturer.

BANKS

Wind machine! Sir, this is prepos-

DAWES, Sr.

They further allege that, as they took their involuntary leave, they witnessed the said Poppins descending from the sky, attached to-

(coughs, wheezes. DAWES, Jr. strikes him on the back with an umbrella)

-an umbrella, in a transparent effort to enter Albion without the notice of customs and immigration officers.

BANKS

Of all the-

DAWES, Sr.

Moreover, Banks, we have made inquiries of the Home Office, Scotland Yard and all other relevant bodies, and not one, Banks, not one man jack of them-

(coughs, wheezes. DAWES, Jr. breaks chair over his head)

-is able to find any record of a Mary Poppins having been born, naturalized, christened, baptized, confirmed, registered, matriculated, schooled, graduated, betrothed, wedded, divorced, impressed, impounded, interred-

(moves mouth as if chewing, no sound emerges; resumes)

-arrested, incarcerated, legally employed-

(looks meaningfully at Banks)

-entered upon the tax rolls or poor rolls, or otherwise brought to the attention of His Majesty's government or that of any parish, village, city, bailiwick, shire or other jurisdiction in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or the Isles of Guernsey, Jersey, Man or Wight.

BANKS

But surely-

DAWES, Sr.

If this were not enough, we have received intelligence from an extremely well-placed source that, in her entry from the upper atmosphere, the said Poppins spirited into the country a number of contraband items, among them a floor lamp, a coat tree, a full-length mirror and a house plant of exotic species, in a carpetbag with a false bottom. It is further alleged-

(wheezes)

-by the same well-situated witnesses, that the said Poppins lately traveled to a foreign country and back again to this blessed plot, this realm, this England, by means -

(coughs, wheezes. DAWES, Jr. gestures toward ceiling; large bank safe is lowered on winch to position roughly five feet above DAWES, Sr.'s head, then released)

-of a secret underground passage, its entrance cunningly marked with a chalk drawing upon the pavement, once again eluding customs and immigration authorities.

BANKS

Chalk drawing! Secret passage! Surely, sir, you cannot-

DAWES, Sr.

Silence, Banks! That the country to which she traveled was not within the borders of the United Kingdom is established beyond doubt by such particulars as penguins waiting on tables, carousel horses taking part in a fox hunt and, most conclusive of all-

(pauses for effect)

- a sky almost entirely devoid of clouds.

(shocked murmurs from DIRECTORS)

While we cannot be certain of the identity of the country visited, which we presume to be the Poppins woman's country of origin, a consultation by cable with our various branches overseas leads us to believe that it was the Union of South Africa. We draw this conclusion on the basis of the phrase "super-callused fragile mystic with extra halitosis"-

BANKS

Superca-

DAWES, Sr.

-which we take to be a coded reference to the notorious anarchist and rabble-rouser, Mr. Mohandas K. Gandhi.

BANKS

(seems about to say something, thinks better of it. Then:)

May I ask, sir, what person or persons might be the source of this mendacious, calumnious and patently absurd report?

DAWES, Sr.

You may ask, Banks.

(coughs)

You may well ask.

(wheezes)

Well may you ask. The signatures, Banks, are as plain as the nose on my face.

DAWES, Jr. holds up the document for BANKS' inspection.

BANKS

(taken aback)

Jane and Michael -

DAWES, Sr.

Banks, Banks ….

BANKS

(with a defeated sigh)

- Banks.

DAWES, Sr.

Banks, do you know when this bank was established?

BANKS

(brightening)

Why, yes, sir. On the third of June, 1723, by Wesley Militant Dawes, your illustrious ancestor, sir.

DAWES, Sr.

That is correct, Banks. From that day to this, the Dawes Tomes Mousely Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank has enjoyed a sterling reputation. Officers of this bank have been found guilty of tax fraud, embezzlement, bribery of high public officials, sodomy, grave robbery-

Head nodding, DAWES, Sr. lapses into muttering, then silence; appears to be dozing.

DAWES, Jr.

Father?

DAWES, Sr.

(wakes with a start)

-sodomy-did I mention sodomy?-grave robbery and war crimes, but not once-not once, Banks, in 187 years-of hiring an illegal nanny.

BANKS is silent, eyes downcast.

DAWES, Sr.

It pains me to do this, Banks, but the reputation of the firm must be placed above-above-

(coughs, wheezes. Coughs again; wheezes again. DAWES, Jr. places tactical nuclear device under DAWES, Sr.'s chair, detonates it)

-private sensibilities. Banks, your umbrella.

DRUM ROLL

-Evan Eisenberg

Marco Masotti made partner at one of the top New York City law firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, at the age of 32. That may be reason enough for his colleagues in the infested waters of corporate law to take to the shark cage.

But the 35-year-old Mr. Masotti-who has presided over the creation of more than $16 billion in private investment funds and cut deals on behalf of industry behemoths like Brown Brothers Harriman, the Wicks Group, Carlyle Asset Management and AIG-is also chair of his own New York City Bar Association committee. That allows him to weigh in on the big and controversial matters of his industry, like the S.E.C.'s new regulations for hedge funds.

"A committee of the city bar is listened to, and therefore Marco is," said Robert Hirsh, the founding partner of Paul Weiss' private investment-funds division. "And what was obvious once he began [the committee] was that all of the major lawyers in this practice wanted to be on it: It's a Who's Who of people in our business."

Mr. Masotti wasn't always destined for the corporate towers of midtown Manhattan. Growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, the son of an Italian toolmaker and a South African mother, he marched against the regime. As he tells it, the only reason he decided to head to the U.S. in 1991 was to study at the University of Virginia Law School, learn the secrets of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and then bring them back to South Africa.

But after a year on a Fulbright scholarship, he fell in love with a New York–bound J.D., now his wife, Tracy, and followed her to New York, where he took a job at Paul Weiss. Before long, he found his negotiating talents eclipsing his interest in full-time do-gooding.

Mr. Masotti wondered if he "sold out," but generally consoled himself that a "corporate career will breed contacts and resources that will allow me to one day make a meaningful difference in the area of human rights." His background may explain why he's chairman of the board of Shared Interest, a nonprofit group that provides loan guarantees to small businesses in his native South Africa.

"I'm working constantly," Mr. Masotti said, his lanky body scrunched into a chair. Behind him sat framed photos of his three kids, ages 1, 4 and 6 years old; to his right, a picture of himself with Nelson Mandela and Sheila Sisulu, South Africa's U.S. ambassador, smiling broadly.

If his work seems like a jumble of killer instinct and do-gooder ethos, it all makes sense to him. He creates hedge funds, funds of funds, buyout funds, venture-capital funds and distressed funds on behalf of banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other clients so they can turn around and orchestrate leveraged buyouts. Or, he said, launch a development project in Africa. Or create a new technology company. Each fund is an elaborate web of dozens, if not hundreds, of investors from around the globe. Mr. Masotti has to shepherd all these investors toward a final, lucrative deal. "It's diplomacy through and through," he said. "In many ways, the lawyer is the driver of these pools of capital, and these pools are in many ways the drivers of the American economy."

These funds "are the structures that you run your business on for a decade a more," said Glenn August, co-founder and president of specialist asset managers Oak Hill Advisors, for which Mr. Masotti has helped raise more than $4 billion. Mr. August said he believed Mr. Masotti would "become one of a handful of leading lawyers that large clients look to for advice, like a Marty Lipton or Joe Flom or Felix Rohatyn."

- Lizzy Ratner

"We must forget the past," Nelson Mandela once said, hoping that a new South Africa would emerge vengeance-free from its crippling history of apartheid. Eric Foner, a distinguished historian at Columbia University, hears that and cringes. Though he praises Mr. Mandela for his forgiving spirit, Mr. Foner insists that "we can forget the past, but the past, most assuredly, will not forget us." He reminds us of Marx's gloomy assessment-that the past "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"-and warns that unless history is dealt with conscientiously, as something "literally present in all we do" (as James Baldwin once wrote), the meaning of contemporary events gets flattened out, decontextualized and dangerously subject to whatever forces might profit by its manipulation. This danger looms especially large in the United States, where history seems increasingly silent or invisible-not just because of our vaunted tendency to "look forward" and "move on," but because our educational system hasn't figured out how to animate history for the new generation (which slanged the word "history" into a synonym for irrelevance), and because the saturations of mass media crowd the past right out of consciousness.

In Who Owns History?, a book of nine essays, most of which originated as lectures delivered to various audiences from 1983 till 2001, Mr. Foner finds himself embattled on many fronts. As a public historian-he's emerged in the last decade from his position as a greatly respected scholar on slavery and Reconstruction to speak to a broader audience about notions of liberty and equality-his job has been to infuse public discourse with a historical awareness that does more than boost patriotic fervor or serve up the past as exciting adventure drained of ideological content. Hence his painstaking critique, in this volume, of Ken Burns' Civil War TV series, which wowed the public but essentially cast the war, Mr. Foner says, as "a family quarrel among white Americans, and [celebrated] the road to reunion without considering the price paid for national reconciliation-the abandonment of the ideal of racial justice." As a leftist, Mr. Foner has had to fight off the wave of conservative revisionism that crested with Reagan and has soaked and besotted American thinking ever since with, among other things, anti-immigrant legislation, canon-war cheerleading that hails America and Western Civ über alles, and federal judges bent on implementing the Constitution's "original intent." (Mr. Foner recalls Thurgood Marshall's saying that given its slavery provisions-e.g., Article I, Section II and Article IV, Section II-not all Americans think the Constitution's "original intent" particularly benign.) And as a historian coming out of the old left-his father, also a historian, was blacklisted in the late 40's, and W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson were family friends-Mr. Foner has had to position himself carefully vis-à-vis the new postmodern history, negotiating between the old-left desire for a unified narrative and the new "social history" which, while giving voice to previously suppressed groups and honoring their differences, tends to atomize their stories and render the past a historical Tower of Babel.

The essays range wide, beginning with "My Life as a Historian," a personal narrative that presents a vivid picture of the influences that shaped Mr. Foner as a historian, including his mother, who stormed into his grade-school classroom to complain to the teacher about the sugar-coated way slavery was being taught. "What difference does it make," the teacher rejoined, "what we teach them about slavery?" A seminal moment: Mr. Foner has devoted his life to making an engagement with the history of slavery a "difference" that matters in our conceptions of American identity. The essay goes on to show how Mr. Foner's early activism in the civil-rights movement dovetailed with his scholarly interests in the Reconstruction, and how the blacklisting of family members (his mother and uncle were also targeted) in the 1940's prepared him for the social revolution of the coming decades. "I did not have to wait until the 1960's to discover the yawning gap that separated America's professed ideals, and its self-confident claim to be a land of liberty, from its social and political reality."

Other essays explore Mr. Foner's relationship with his mentor, Richard Hofstadter, or pose the question "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" (Short answer: Ask not for a viable socialist party in the U.S., which won't happen here, but for an egalitarian social-democratic movement that doesn't require revolution.) A pair of essays investigate the ways that post-Soviet Russia and post-apartheid South Africa, in the midst of forging new national identities, are forced to rethink their pasts. Russia, Mr. Foner finds, is in danger of embracing a nostalgic view of the czarist past as a way to distance itself from its 20th-century totalitarian legacy, while South Africa seems all too eager to forget history in its drive toward national reconciliation.

It is this concern with the nexus between past and present, between our interpretations of history and our contemporary notions of national identity, that animates the book's three strongest essays. Here Mr. Foner is on familiar ground, examining how American ideals of liberty and equality remain inextricably tangled with the enduring legacy of slavery, the Civil War and the betrayals that came at the end of the Reconstruction era. In "Who Is an American?", Mr. Foner frustrates the conservative demand in the 1990's for a patriotic definition of American identity by showing how supposed universal principles of liberty and equality "have been historically constructed on the basis of difference and exclusion." He reminds us that Crevecouer answered his famous question "What then is the American, the new man?" this way: "He is either a European, or the descendant of a European"-odd, Mr. Foner notes, since at the time "fully one fifth of the population … consisted of Africans and their descendants." In "Blacks and the U.S. Constitution," Mr. Foner summarizes the "long, complex constitutional history of African Americans," showing that that history, far from moving inevitably toward the golden telos of equality, is filled with crises and backsliding, especially in our own era, when the Supreme Court seems to "have entered a second Redemption-as the restoration of white supremacy was called in the late nineteenth-century South." We now have a court, Mr. Foner says, with an "undisguised lack of sympathy for efforts to undo the effects of racism." And in "American Freedom in a Global Age," Mr. Foner shows how "the relationship between globalization and freedom may be the most pressing political and social problem of the twenty-first century"-not because of terrorism (the essay was written pre-9/11), but because emerging global institutions like the World Bank, the I.M.F. and the NAFTA tribunals are quietly stripping nation-states and their citizens of their sovereignty while encouraging the equation of freedom with "the free market," personal liberty with the ability to pick out anything one wants at Wal-Mart.

Historians, Eric Hobsbawm once said, "are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow citizens wish to forget." Mr. Foner takes this vocation seriously, repeatedly challenging the complacencies that allow the "yawning gap" between American ideals and American reality.

Cornel Bonca is the books editor for OC Weekly and teaches literature at California State University, Fullerton.

Yet with the new post-apartheid South Africa, Mr. Fugard feels as if the past– his past–has been made redundant. "I suppose maybe the word would be rejection that I, as a white man, presumed to write and give voice to the black reality in South Africa," he told The Times . And when I read that bleak statement, I thought reluctantly that his loneliness as he approaches 70 was horribly inevitable. What use a mere playwright from the past in the midst of the convulsive new South Africa?

Fat consolation to Mr. Fugard, of course. But aren't all playwrights, even the best of them, cruelly put out to pasture sooner or later, to be treated like fossils in a dusty museum? Theater has always played cruel victim to fashion. Each generation of playwrights is always replaced by the next (until it comes back into fashion). For the mature dramatist to keep writing–to keep going against all the odds, to risk the whim of public deference or disdain–strikes me as heroic. Talent can fade. But the great dramatist doesn't lose his talent, exactly. He loses his audience.

Is this–God forbid–what has happened to Athol Fugard, whose creative height and international reputation were forged in the heat of apartheid? His last two plays have been in the minor key of personal fable, as if Mr. Fugard were still finding his feet. Valley Song , written in spare simplicity when he was 63, was a tender poem of longed-for rebirth, with Mr. Fugard acting the role of a grisly old storyteller in his own play. "You see," the storyteller explained with transparent honesty, "the truth is that I am not as brave about change as I would like to be."

But his last play, The Captain's Tiger , faltered so badly that it was as if he were now in exile from himself. The slender, even ponderous play that was little more than a sketchy anecdote prompted the uncomfortable question, What place does this dramatist have? What does the old warrior do when the long battle against apartheid has been won?

His troubled new play at the Second Stage Theatre, Sorrows and Rejoicings , which Mr. Fugard has also directed, goes in search of the answers. It tells the story of Dawid Olivier, a white liberal poet who returns home to die in post-apartheid South Africa after 16 lost years of political exile in London. "I would have survived solitary confinement at home," Dawid says to his wife about the slow alcoholic death of his life in England. "I won't survive freedom here."

The action takes place just after Dawid's funeral in his beloved, flybown region of Karoo, where the three women in his life have gathered in the house he returned to just before his death. The estranged English wife, Allison, the devoted mistress and black servant, Marta, and the angry mixed-race illegitimate daughter, Rebecca, struggle to come to terms with each other and the memory of Dawid.

As is often the case with Mr. Fugard even in his best work, the approach is unpretentiously anecdotal, the symbolism tending to be laid on (the table in the Karoo living room that's shone, we're told, with Marta's tears). But though the undecorative clarity of his storytelling remains powerful, the writing can prove dispiriting by his own high standards. "Deep down inside," Allison confides wanly, "I already knew that I was going to have to fight to keep his love … and I wasn't sure I would win." In such ways, the confessionals drift uneasily into melodrama: "No, Marta. You had as much to give him as I ever did, maybe even more."

Dawid appears in flashbacks, but I'm afraid the unreal tone of his overwrought dialogue –"Time, Marta. Time is a hungry rat and it's been gnawing away at me"–isn't helped by John Glover's messianic performance. Charlayne Woodard, Judith Light and Marcy Harriell make strong contributions, but I felt it wasn't until Ms. Harriell's belated explosion as the illegitimate Rebecca that Mr. Fugard's elegy to South Africa's savage past and unknown future began to take flight. And when the dramatist took wing again in the closing moments of the play, when life held texture and love and meaning and unquenchable hope for the poet, the outcome was ecstatic and beautiful.

But Sorrows and Rejoicings isn't really about the new South Africa, but the old. It's about the apocalyptic past rather than the present. It's a fugue for an exiled poet without a cause, without a sense of his own posterity. Whatever the biographical details, the piece at its agonized heart is about Mr. Fugard.

At one point, Dawid quotes a poem by Ovid:

I fear I'm not the man I was,

And I was little even then.

Long suffering dulls the sharpest wit:

There's no edge left to tongue or pen .

Is this what Mr. Fugard feels about himself? Or the burnt-out poet of the play? I pray the latter. For his proud legacy must surely be more secure than he believes. When I was at college in England, Athol Fugard was the dramatist an entire generation looked to in the midst of England's shameful role in South Africa's apartheid. Later, when I came to know South African expatriates, he was the artist of integrity and compassion who spoke to us. And when his great plays came to America, he spoke to a country riven by its own racism and injustice. "Social injustice is man-made and can be unmade by men," he wrote in Master Harold . Who would ever forget him?

And today? Perhaps he's like the artist in his play The Road to Mecca . Its heroine is an old sculptress who must create art even if no one ever sees it. Some think she's deranged and ought to be retired. But she still knows things! And she'll never stop. There's no choice, Mr. Fugard is saying. The artist creates because he must, while yearning for the light to shine from native skies.