Atonement

I saw the film last night. Read the book beforehand.

First of all, I thought the film was basically a good adaptation of the book. The screenplay is pretty tight, the acting is good, they certainly pulled out all the stops with cinematography, sets, costumes, locations, etc.

Briony feels that she is really the one who has kept Cecilia and Robbie apart. I agree - what she did was certainly wrong and the class-based society that assumes Robbie is guilty is problematic. But what I felt more than anything was how war destroys everyone's life. I am used to examining World War II in the context of the Holocaust and how it affected Jews. But this film really shows how deeply affected the British were by the war, how devastating it was not only for soldiers who saw and experienced horrific deaths, injuries and conditions, and also for the nurses who cleaned it all up and put on a calm, collected air in the face of things they had never imagined. And the average citizen, evacuated, or worse, bombed in London.

The word tragedy has become so commonplace, but the more I learn about war, the more I believe it is a tragedy made up of millions of individually tragic stories. Sometimes we only value the worst tragedies, so we focus on the most extreme things we have heard of, but a great love torn apart by war is indeed a tragedy whose importance should not be diminished. I believe that love is the most important thing in this world.

Hannah's Second Yartzheit

It's still so hard to believe that Hannah has a yartzheit.

I have so many questions, many of which will never be answered. Why did this happen? Will I be able to survive life without her? Is there any meaning to life, does everything turn out for the best?

The pain of missing Hannah definitely ebbs and flows now that it has been a while. When she first died, I remember feeling so much pain, everything set me off. Every time the train pulled into the 96th Street station where we would always meet up to go downtown, I would burst into tears. I go there every day, so that pain has diminished. Or at least I had thought so. The other day, I was huddled into my puffy coat (really Hannah's) and the train pulled into the station, and I realized, I'm in as much pain now as I ever was. I miss her from a place in my chest that contracts in agony thinking about her. It's just that the novelty has worn off. There's nothing new or interesting about my pain now. It's repetitive. I miss her. Why did this happen? 25 years old. No meaning, no purpose, no sense. The obvious swirls around me, and others don't know what to say in response, so I've pretty much stopped saying it. But it doesn't change the pain. In fact, as anyone knows who keeps something inside, it probably hurts more now.

After that initial month, I had the briefest sense of relief. I had survived Shloshim. I began putting on makeup again, shaved my legs. I would be ok. Then my mind finally recognized reality: Hannah would not be coming back. My month of agony wasn't a penance that would allow her to return. In fact, her death wasn't personal. She didn't die as a punishment for me - if so, how to explain the pain everyone else felt? I couldn't find any reason to explain her death. And I began to live in a new world. An irrational world with no explanations, no answers and no peace. When Hannah had been alive, even if we were in a fight, we would still say we loved each other before we went to bed or got off the phone or said goodbye. We knew from losing Papa suddenly that you don't always get a second chance to say something, and that pride was no reason to spend a lifetime regretting something. And now the precious treasure I thanked God for in every Amidah was gone.

I wish I had some brilliant understanding of Hannah's life and death. Unfortunately what I feel more than anything is a vast desert around me, with mirages of happiness that don't seem meant for me. And the bubbly, no-nonsense girl who wowed everyone with her varied spectrum of talents, interests, wisdom and beauty? She's a story, a word that makes normal people hush in discomfort. In an instant, the Hannah who cultivated joy and decisiveness became a reason for sadness and questioning.

Boo-hoo! Writers strike cancels Golden Globes

But the upside is I won't be staying up all night waiting to hear which film won Best Drama. (I'm still reading the book so I can't see Keira's wet body yet!)

Shooting Open/Shut - my latest film

I am working on "Open/Shut" by the Italian director Fabrizio Schepisi. It's a great opportunity for me and very close to my heart because I play a character whose older brother has died in a plane crash. It's an emotional challenge but extremely rewarding and important. My younger brother is played by Alex Jacovelli. Hopefully I'll have some shoot stills soon!

Kevin Kline's Makeup Chair

Last night we went to see the penultimate performance of Cyrano de Bergerac with Kevin Kline in the title role. Not surprisingly, he was excellent. His movements were as agile as his speech. An unbeatable swordfighter and a poet.

The theme of honor ran through the play - first, the "fop" from Scene 1 would rather duel with Cyrano than lose face after being criticized by him. Later, Cyrano doesn't tell Roxane that he was writing Christian's letters because he doesn't want to spoil the idea she had of her perfect husband. Roxane herself clings to honor as she mourns her unconsummated marriage for the next 15 years after Christian's death. Understandably, her chaste life in a convent was snipped from the Steve Martin version we all enjoyed years ago.

When someone we love dearly dies, it can be so hard to reintegrate. The romance of loving a dead person is so unmarred. It's the gritty annoyances of daily life with our living loved ones that grounds us in reality and keeps us from idealizing them. There is a certain kind of honor associated with putting a deceased person on a pedestal - not wanting to speak ill of the dead, for example.

But the honor Cyrano's contemporaries felt was more the kind of honor that Dinah's brothers used to justify killing the men who raped her, or the "honor killings" in the Islamic world. This seems to me a far cry from the natural state of things.

I prefer the honorable nature that Kevin Kline demonstrated after the curtain call: A member of the cast had lost everything during the week to a disastrous fire, so to help recover the costs, Kevin auctioned off his makeup chair, which the whole cast signed onstage, to the highest bidder - $3000.