Honor thy Father and Mother

I can't quite justify this as a father's day, Dads in Media post - it's more of an honor thy father and mother post. Or - a fortuitous opportunity to revisit one of the questions in SLIFR's Memorial Day Quiz: #32: "Name a favorite film and describe how it is illuminated and enriched by another favorite film." I had the chance to see Leo McCarey's Make Way For Tomorrow, and that inspired me to return to an all time favorite, Tokyo Story. The former is often suggested as a direct source for the latter - believable enough. This is not a finished essay - these are notes, comparing them, to draw out some of the specific concerns of each. If it matters - I won't pretend to avoid spoilers; after 50 and 70 years, I hope that's not too much a concern.

1) Seeing them together, it's notable that McCarey's film is a good deal harsher than Ozu's. Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the saddest movies ever made, and the story is quite a bit darker. The old couple in MWFT are forced out of their home - they have nowhere to go, they have to rely on their children. In Tokyo Story, the old couple is just visiting. They have a home to go back to - they are still independent. Not only that - in McCarey's film, the couple is separated - the film is about their forced separation. Not so much in Ozu - when they do separate, it's only for a night,and it's voluntary. (Though this obviously changes at the end of the film - though more later.) The tone is lighter too in the Ozu -and there are decent people - Noriko (Setsuko Hara's character) notably; Kyoko, the youngest daughter, also comes off pretty well. None of the kids redeems themselves in MWFT - strangers,and a shop keeper, treat the old couple well, do them a good turn or two, but the kids all fail.

2) On the other hand - Ozu is more complex and detailed in showing the social relationships in the family. Not only are some of the (extended) family members quite nice, but we see the problems between the old couple. McCarey presents them as happy together - deeply in love - never having any real doubts about one another, despite their failures. Ozu, however, shows a happy old couple that has not always been happy. The father used to be a drunkard, and probably abusive - indeed, the difference between his behavior when he drank and when he didn't might influence the way his children react to him. Shige and Koichi knew him when he was a mean drunk - he stopped drinking when Kyoko was born, and Noriko only knew him after she married Shoichi. In any case - in Ozus film, this is a couple who have hurt each other in the past, have hiurt their children - just as their children are hurting them now. If there is anything like that involved in the McCarey family, it's not in the film.

3) Tokyo Story is more socially and economically detailed. That isn't t say that money and class and all that aren't significant in the cCarey film - they are - but that Ozu digs into it deeper. I think this is a fairly important point - Ozu is usually not treated being particularly socially relevant, yet throughout his career he deals with the social and economic world with good deal of care. Tokyo Story contains a precise set of observations and analysis of the world - he addresses money and class in remarkably subtle and intelligent way. He's more subtle than McCarey - McCarey makes explicit points: about unemployment and foreclosure; about Anita giving bridge classes to maintain a certain standard of living (which is not enough to add another member tot he household - though that's because they are selfish) - as well as jokes, like the idea of old people having millions stashed away. But he doesn't really link it to the outside world. The links are obvious, in 1937 - they don't have to be spelled out... But Ozu, also not spelling things out, does weave the various strands together. The parent's expectations vs. the kids' lack of success; their stinginess, especially compared to Noriko's generosity and very noticeable poverty; the links between the conditions all of them live in and the conditions in Japan, 1953 - a period when Japan began to bounce back from the war, but did so very unevenly. Money was being made, but it wasn't being spread around very well. Those issues probably come out more clearly in Naruse's films, or Ichikawa's, or Kurosawa's contemporary films, but Ozu does a fine job of showing the contradiction. Here the contradictions are implied - in Good Morning, say, the contradictions - the expectations that people should live a certain way compared to the difficulty most people have living up to those expectations - are much clearer. But still - here, the war, the boom, the need to work to survive and get ahead, the ways people work - the social issues involved in what people do (shops in the home and so on) are all implied.

4) A point about awareness. It is interesting that McCarey gives the old couple a chance to take a shot at the kids - when they decide to ditch dinner with the kids, Bark tells Nelly what he thinks of them. The message gets through - they talk about it. It is interesting though that we don’t get to hear it. Compare this to Tokyo Story - where no one tells Shige and Keizo what they think of them - indeed, Noriko and the father remain solicitous to the end. But - Shichiki and Tome do discuss it, as do the three drunkards. (This is similar to Bark and Max talking.) And more importantly, perhaps - after the funeral, Kyoko lights into the rest of them. We hear it - but they don’t. In MWFT - they hear it - we don't. One thing both films have is the middle generation indulging in self-pity and guilt: oh, how awful we are! The end of the McCarey film does this rather neatly - the four of them sit around and say they knew what bastards they were, though it only hurts when Dad says it. And they go on - we really are monsters - but none of them does anything to stop it. None of them is going to raise a finger to change the way things are. They wallow in their misery, they let their self-recrimination take the place of any decent behavior. This is more pointed than the similar scenes in the Ozu film - but it’s there too. Shige wails about mom’s death; Keizo says what a bad son he was (Shige does too, of course) - neither of them lets it do more than fill them with the delight of self-pity.

5) Finally - going back to the first point. MWFT is, ultimately, about separation - the story is almost as much a variation on Love Affair, with it's tragically parted lovers (after an idyllic interlude), as about the generation canyon. It is also about the old couple's helplessness and dependency on their children, where Ozu’s is about the failures of the kids merely to be good enough. Circumstances do not force the couple apart - they have a home to return to. But as if in compensation for this - Tome dies. It's odd - this may be more final than the ending of MWFT, but it does not seem quite as dark. They stay together to the end, after all - though more, McCarey’s ending focuses on the human choices being made. The couple is not parted by anything absolute - they are parted by the selfishness of their children. They suffer directly through the meanness of their children. Ozu’s couple parts by death - something outside the range of human agency.

It's a different dynamic. Ozu is, in the end, less devastating than the McCarey film. Everything is more ambivalent, and the ambivalence is more explicit, closer to the surface - the fact that some of the younger people are nice, the lack of direct complicity by the children in the suffering of their parents, the more complicated relationship between the old people and so on. McCarey focuses the melodrama, the anguish - both by emphasizing the doomed love aspect of the story, and the responsibility the children bear for it. Ozu diffuses it - makes the film about life itself. Allows more time for the other failures of the kids - their mediocrity (present in McCarey, but somewhat underplayed - though interestingly, he plays it up in Bark’s case: he’s shown as a genial mediocrity himself), the broader generational themes, the connection of the generational issues to the specific circumstances of their lives. There is more a sense of flow in Ozu - which is typical of his work.

Indeed - it’s what marks him out: nothing ends in Ozu. I think this also connects him more to Capra than McCarey (a controversial statement I know...) McCarey’s films end - fairly definitively, even if the ending is a beginning (as it is in The Awful Truth.) Capra’s end, but they end on patently artificial notes. It's as though Capra were telling us: this is where we are going to stop; everyone is happy everything has worked out for these nice people. But if you have been watching this film, you know that every time things work out, something new comes along - don't be fooled into thinking this is different, just cause I'm ringing a lot of bells on the soundtrack.

Ozu dispenses almost entirely with the happy endings - indeed, with anything that could really count as an ending. The films end - definitively, but that's because he establishes himself as their maker so forcefully - he ends them formally - as here, with echoes of the opening of the film... But the story - the worlds - the things happening to the people in the film, are usually well on the way by the time he reaches the end of the film. This effect - of continuation, of constant change - is usually reinforced by the fact that soething in the story we have been told almost always foretells the things that will happen next. Even in as devastatingly sad a film as Late Spring - we have been told about the father's marriage, which started badly, was loveless and sad - but turned into something else - became happy. This film (Late Spring), crushing us with the separation of two people who love each other - already contains within it an image of the rest of their lives, where this pain will give way to something else. (A new set of pains, when the daughter has to marry off her children? Late Autumn?)