This post originally appeared on RogerEbert.com 11 December, 2013 http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/on-jamie-private-school-girl

Many of the guys I know who concede to the merits of “Ja’mie: Private School Girl” do so falteringly, as though they stand to lose something by that admission. Critic Phil Dyess-Nugent of The AV Club tells us he can’t take Ja’mie, the heroine of “Ja’mie: Private School Girl,” imported from Australia and now playing in the United States on HBO, for more than six minutes. Such distaste is to be expected. This is a program that, to a degree, humiliates men; they are manipulated, waxed of their body hair, and expressed in “dick pics”—of which Ja’mie has compiled an album. Thus far, however, the show’s critics, most of whom happen to be men, do little to engage with the significance of its star and creator Chris Lilley becoming Ja’mie, a girl who reflects chauvinist criticism and is also its poster child.

Drag was once a common sight in vaudeville and in TV comedy derived from it. It has become a rarity on TV and in film, and when we do see it, it’s often coupled with a social critique or an inspirational message. In the popular incarnations of “Tootsie” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” for instance, the male protagonists become older women out of some necessity, and learn the double standards faced by women while retaining their perspective. Ja’mie, however, is not that kind of character. She’s a teenaged girl who is incidentally played by a member of the opposite sex, and the TV character she most resembles is probably Eric Cartman of “South Park.”

This series and Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated satire have at least one other quality in common: their brand of comedy invites viewers to think the show is celebrating behavior that it’s actually mocking or exposing. If a series is about racism or sexism, it is not inherently racist or sexist. If a man puts on a dress and gives a curious impression of a teenaged girl, we can be torn as to where to focus our attention. I can forget, for the most part, that the character is a man in a school dress; I can also appreciate the accuracy with which he captures a feminine side of the teen experience. To say I know this girl is not to say that I’m her friend, but that recognition certainly makes me laugh. This shock of recognition carries over to the things Ja’mie says. She’s funny because she is ridiculous, not because she is racist. Lilley, who does dominate the screen time—this is the Ja’mie show—reminds us that outside of her insular clique, she is simply a loudmouth and a bore.

Ja’mie is a character caught in the push-pull of rebellion versus a desire to be worshipped. Her life is a performance, a big show that betrays an underlying difficulty with intimacy. Yes, she is racist and, yes, her views of women are misogynistic, though she admits, for example, that she doesn’t understand why she hates the girls who board on the school grounds. She can only call them fat or lesbians, when it is obvious that Erin, a boarder, poses a threat to Ja’mie’s chances of winning the Hillford medal. Add in her contempt of Asians—the students she feels are academically superior to her—and it’s clear Ja’mie suffers from a need to be the best at everything, a competitive conflict which she masks with bigotry and bullying, and which echo a masculine reductionism in the face of challenge.

The trouble with Ja’mie is that she, a teenaged girl, should identify so thoroughly with male chauvinism, and despite her socio-economic advantage and attending the best girls school in Sydney, be so poorly educated. She is one of the most complex women on Australian television, featured in a series constructed and contained within an active—and often aggressive—feminine gaze. Where Chris Lilley is an exceptional impersonator of women, Ja’mie, unfortunately, can impersonate men just as well.

Her lasciviousness, her laughable provocations, her inert childishness betray a profound discomfort with sex. When she gets in a scrape with the vice principal of her school, she flirts with him; she nibbles her father’s shoulder by way of persuasion; she exposes herself to boys, but can’t quite manage a kiss; she boasts an album of “dick pics” but is repelled by Mitchell’s erection and dishonest about her experiences with him; she hates lesbians, but is perhaps somewhat ambivalent about her own sexuality. She calls it a ‘bi-sexual phase’, but we can’t be sure what it really is.

In the final episode, in a scene that showcases the pathos that we have come to expect from Lilley, Ja’mie voices her true regard for her father. It’s a demoralizing insight, meant to console her defeated mother. Jhyll has something to learn from her daughter, who adds ‘nobody f—s with me and gets away with it.’ When Ja’mie challenges her school’s dismissal of her, based on the emergence of a scandalous YouTube video of her and a Ugandan boy, Kwami, the challenge is self-serving: revenge for a wounded ego. However, for the first time in the show, Ja’mie’s outrage is not misdirected. Hillford Girls Grammar School officials do not debate with Ja’mie over any of her bigoted slurs, and not even in defense of Erin, another Hillford girl who bears the brunt of them. The school’s criticism is of inappropriate language and sexually suggestive behavior, and their interests are not in educating girls on race and gender or punishing them for bullying, but in upholding the institution’s reputation as Sydney’s best girls’ school.

Ja’mie’s revenge, a defiant act that will get her expelled, is a brilliant example of her potential, her ability to organize, her writing of her own history, her ‘learning to be me’, a few steps toward freedom. Through Lilley, we get an impression of how men create women, but he can also create a woman’s viewpoint. Women dominate “Ja’mie: Private School Girl.” Women’s interests and concerns are the center of its conflict. The construction of female gaze is radical, revolutionary. Through naïve, troublesome Ja’mie, we learn that young women are not simply what our culture has made of them.

This post originally appeared on RogerEbert.com on 4 November, 2013. http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/enough-said-notes-on-james-gandolfini/ 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre of 2014 Oscar predictions, a nomination for James Gandolfini in Nicole Holofcener’s “Enough Said” is making the rounds as choice gossip. Already a decorated actor, who died suddenly of a heart attack in June this year, Gandolfini was yet to play a love interest in a romantic comedy—with perhaps the shady exception of “Romance & Cigarettes “(which is excellent). If you were fortunate to know the actor outside of the nefarious family man Tony in David Chase’s operatic “The Sopranos,” you may have observed with what equanimity he played tough guys and military men who were impaired by their shortcomings or haunted by personal failures. He didn’t become Tony until he was in his late thirties, but placed on either side of his smaller roles in film, Tony becomes the centerpiece—a life of compromised masculinity that the performer both deliberately and inadvertently channeled through his craft.

When he wasn’t a wise guy, Gandolfini undercut martial stature with a series of soldier parts. In “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” Big Dave Brewster is a buffoon whose every gesture he flitters out like a punch line, sparring with an invisible opponent. At this stage (2001), well into his status as the Don of New Jersey, it is an impressive feat to find a distance from Tony. The Coens, aware of this task, make his size a little more ridiculous; he sits small in his suit, the cigars are bigger. He is also briefly featured in a frilled apron, which I take as a little wink to Edward G. Robinson’s uncharacteristic attire in “Scarlet Street”.

In “The Last Castle,” opposite the impossibly virtuous Robert Redford, Gandolfini plays bureaucratic prison warden, Colonel Winter. He wears glasses that magnify his eyes to a cartoonish dimension. His speech is so precise on every consonant—every syllable issued with such desperate control—that his buttoned-down repression makes him figure pathetic, wound so tight that his shame in Redford’s war-hero shadow, is screaming from behind his pursed lips. We feel everything he doesn’t say.

In Armando Ianucci’s sensational “In The Loop,” he is another military man whose experience and jurisdiction is constantly called into question. His vitriolic encounter with Peter Capaldi sees him again made a fool of and his playroom war strategies with the gorgeous Mimi Kennedy reflect how ludicrous it is that anyone should project expectations onto a man based on his position, or his battle history. Kennedy warns that he tread with care in that child’s bedroom. He picks the paper up off the floor and dolefully (and delightfully) scrunches it between his hands.

Apart from Tony Soprano, “Killing Them Softly” was the first of his roles to magnanimously swathe esteem and place an aura of splendour around the actor. It wears its homages to gangster films and “The Sopranos” like scouts badges, which in itself is a kind of mimicry of the show. He plays Mickey, a hired gun on parole, recruited by Jackie (Brad Pitt) to help him carry out a hit. The warm tones of the restaurant’s décor are coloured around his tinted steel frames. He gives a monologue—about his wife wanting a divorce, and him wanting her back—and the camera keeps with him, drawing us into his sorrow without actually moving. He moves us. His body turned away from Pitt, his brow flexing as he loses his argument with himself, his gaze falling to another place, a different conversation. His gestures imply the space between New Orleans and his home. We imagine that this place is New Jersey.

In “The Sopranos” pilot, Chase and Gandolfini were still configuring the episode structure, tuning tonal kinks—they knew not what it was. They use voice-over for the first and last time. Tony Soprano hadn’t yet that buttery, heavy-tongued Jersey accent that Gandolfini perfected by the time the show was picked up. He is already an intimidating figure, standing taller than all of his co-stars. When Christopher boasts that he should go to Hollywood, Tony violently pulls him up from out of his chair, as if his nephew were made of straw. According to Chase, this was Gandolfini’s suggestion. It bears a striking resemblance to Brando’s sudden accost of Al Martino early in “The Godfather” (also a conversation about Hollywood). Brando was a method actor. He gained weight. He wore weights in his jaw to sag his cheeks. Gandolfini didn’t need to accessorize his volcanic nature; just illuminate it, with the occasional cigar.

Learning Tony’s tells is part of the engagement that “The Sopranos” offers. Tony is a prolific liar, to everyone he knows, including himself. In the program’s fifth episode, “College,” he lifts that awed expression to Hawthorne’s words, “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Gandolfini is, like Tony, an excellent liar, most particularly when viewers are in on it, when we know the truth, whether Tony does or doesn’t. Tony understands Hawthorne’s words. His look is not one of confusion, but of a concealed fear at his impossible situation. What truths these lies reveal about the character are headily immersive—enormous—and it’s probably the point at which “The Sopranos” became cinema, and it was partly because Gandolfini could lie to us convincingly and unconvincingly at once.

He met with a challenge early in the third season of the show when actress Nancy Marchand (who played Tony’s mother Livia) died during the hiatus, causing a major story restructure and the need for a graceful cover-up. Tony visits Livia to discuss her recent arrest for trying to use stolen airline tickets that he had palmed off on her. Gandolfini has a conversation with a body-double in a chair, and a digital patchwork of Marchand’s shining moments gather some likeness of her being. It isn’t entirely a success, but Gandolfini is still marvellous. Tony’s anxiety at the possibility of his own mother testifying against him is conveyed with abrupt despondency. He is rushed, flustered, pacing and grabbing for all kinds of props and conversation to fill a significant void. It also recalls their first argument in the pilot episode, and is orchestrated beautifully, considering the mournful circumstance.

In the final episodes of “The Sopranos,” when Tony’s monster is revealed and then abruptly banished from Dr Melfi’s office—a harsh farewell that forces us to engage the criminal—Gandolfini made the transformation seamless. All these feelings toward this sociopath have been dormant within us, glimpsed on several occasions but concealed, seen through the eyes of those who love him much stronger than those averse to him. We were suddenly accountable. Our desire for a positive outcome for Tony finally appears perverse, wrong, and impossible. In the last moment, we finally learn what it is to be Tony. What the world looks like to him. What every scene must have felt like for its star. There again, for the last time, was that awed expression. And then the light went out on “The Sopranos”.

It is difficult to distill such an immense performance—in terms of substance, not just duration—into a few paragraphs. Gandolfini was his best opposite Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli and Vincent Curatola. All altercations and sentiments shared between he and them, those breaths between words, when his eyes would gaze into theirs, those fleeting seconds of silence, full of passionate intensity, those forlorn endeavours to placate one another, hard blinking, truth striking, truth erupting, are when his sad eyes can hold the entire room in orbit.

With few exceptions, James Gandolfini played men who were in conflict with the limits of their masculinity; a gangster who has panic attacks (“The Sopranos”); a military man who has never been in combat (“The Last Castle”, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and—in some sense—”Not Fade Away”); a monster who fears abandonment (“Where The Wild Things Are”); a hit man whose addictions have numbed him (“Killing Them Softly”); a brute whose first kill haunts him (“True Romance“); a kidnapper who befriends his hostage (“The Mexican“). His legacy offers years of a man’s life and the sum of his parts form a vivid, and beautiful semblance of modern manhood. It is a rare combination of choice and accident that an actor’s roles should narrate such an assemblage. He was an artist. He had something to say.