Ragtime

People have accused me of having a lack of appreciation for “modern times.” When reviewing my tastes, most are surprised that I can identify more songs by Rudy Vallee or Jelly Roll Morton than by Coldplay. (That’s actually quite an easy claim, as I don’t believe I could identify any songs by Coldplay… In fact, I’m so out of the loop, I don’t even know if Coldplay is a current enough reference to make that last line work.)

To prove these people wrong, I have selected a film that is a bit more… up to date, shall we say? I highly recommend Miloš Forman’s Ragtime (1981) as my pick of the week.

Sure, critics will quickly point out that this film is set at the turn-of-the-20th-century… But it’s in colour, so that should count for something.

Ragtime is based on E.L. Doctorow’s Gordian novel about a new century and new ways of life, and the undulating ways in which lives intersect, weave and collide. This novel is astounding in the amount of ground it covers, and I’m not sure how it could have been brought to the screen word-for-word. (As it is, Forman carefully chose the prime dramatic points of interest, and the movie is still 155 minutes long!) Like 1997’s excellent LA Confidential (one of the best films, period), which is a mere sliver of James Ellroy’s mammoth novel of corruption, sex and greed in 1950’s LA, the film version of Ragtime is an expertly pared and culled cross-section of a modern literary classic, with a script written by Michael Weller (whose only other major work appears to have been Hair in 1979!).

(Be warned, I go into detail about the plot in this review. If you want it to be a surprise, then just take my recommendation and go see it. However, I assume that the stage version of this, up there with “Fiddler” and “Our Town” as hackneyed local theatre fodder, has already spoiled most of the plot for you, anyway.)

The plot concerns several lives tossed amid the societal shifts in New York in the early 1900s, a period that has not been filmed as many times as its spectacle warrants. A seemingly perfect late-Victorian family is our starting point. Their lives are disrupted permanently when they find a homeless, ill and pregnant black woman (Debbie Allen) in their garden. The nameless Father of the family, played with massive force and quiet currents by stage actor James Olson, is a repressed and stoic business man whose practical and no-nonsense character is all for turning the woman over to authorities and continuing on with their perfect lives. The Mother, a stunningly serene yet commanding Mary Steenburgen, quietly insists that it is their duty to help. Mother wins – a first sign that things are changing. Mother’s younger Brother merely wants out of the cage of Victorian responsibility provided by his brother-in-law, and is embodied by a typically twitchy Brad Dourif. Soon, good deed done, the family attempts to return to their lives, but now with their charity case as their maid.

Before long the peace is once more shattered when the absent father of the young woman’s baby appears. He is Coalhouse Walker, Jr., and is played by magnetic Howard E. Rollins, Jr., who reminds us here exactly what he could have done as an actor had cancer not tragically cut his life short in 1996. Coalhouse Walker, an assertive and infinitely modern young black man, has made it big as a piano player of the newest and most dangerous musical form yet, Ragtime Jazz, and his character is, essentially, the human form of that music. He is explosive, attractive, disquieting, quick-silver, and charming, all at once, with enough style to win over the entire family, especially since he has returned to marry the woman he loves and give his son a name. The Victorian Father breaths a literal sigh of relief.

However, once again the peace, having twice been patched together, is broken, and this time there is no method strong enough to reestablish it. Racists deface Walker’s car, a brand new Ford Model-T, simply because the sight of a clearly successful black man driving such a car is too much for them to handle, and literally all hell breaks loose. Walker finds himself in a fight that he cannot win, and his fiancé pays the price. As the new century ravaged the social “norms” of Victorian America, this conflagration destroys and re-forges everything in its path.

By the end of the picture, the prim Mother has run off with a Jewish immigrant (Mandy Patinkin) who is involved in a new industry called “flickers,” the Brother has had a torrid and tragic affair with that decade’s version of a chippy (played by a doll-like Elizabeth McGovern), and he has joined forces with Coalhouse Walker to take the city hostage in a fight for the rights and respect of black men. Suddenly, the world is no longer one the staid characters can recognize, and the dynamic characters flee into their new freedom with an energy that leads to madness, and the actions, music and relationships all mirror this new world called the Twentieth Century.

I cannot easily sum up this film, or the various emotions it demanded of me. Though the characters are many, there is adequate time spent on individual lives to inspire hate, love, respect, humour, excitement and disgust. Often times these buttons are all pushed at some point by a single character as he or she develops! Further, for the film buff there is ample eye candy in terms of the mix of up-and-coming stars and the living legends. Keep a sharp eye out for, among others, Norman Mailer, Fran Dresher, Jeff Daniels, Frankie Faison, Michael Jeter, Samuel L. Jackson, Ethan Phillips, John Ratzenberger, and who knows how many others of interest in this cast of hundreds. Especially important is the final big-screen appearance of legend James Cagney, who is older and weaker at 80, but who still can give a body shivers when he snarls.

Unlike many films made in the 1980s, this is one picture that will be good for un-ironic viewings for decades to come. From point A to point B, this film is made with care and attention, from the spot-on casting to the hundreds of period costumes, right down to the clever paper cut-outs made by Mandy Patinkin’s Jewish tinker. The soundtrack (including Randy Newman’s first full-length film score, for a script he was born to bring to life), direction and acting are uniformly first-rate, and part of my reaction is one of simple admiration for a towering job of enacting such a book.

However, this is only a part of it. This picture challenged me. While the brief plot I have described may bring to mind ideas of “Noble Minorities” versus the “Brutal White Establishment,” Forman has done something different and far more complex. There are no easy answers in this film, and the audience is pushed by the choices we see on the screen. We are told that film going helps us create and re-create ourselves, and Ragtime is clearly a picture that takes this job seriously. Through the screen action, I interrogate myself, and this is at times engaging and at other times extraordinarily uncomfortable.

This is not a perfect film in that the draw of the first half seems unevenly matched with the repulsion of the second half, and it certainly isn’t a feel-good hit, but, nevertheless, it shouldn’t be missed.