Toronto Film Festival Day Seven: Micmas, Trash Humpers, Lourdes, and To the Sea

Micmacs: To judge from his films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet couldn't tie his shoelaces without first devising a Rube Goldberg contraption of toothpaste, waffle makers, and jars full of bees to do so. Jerry-rigged doodads dominate the Gallic auteur's new clockwork confection, which retains some of the anti-militarism of A Very Long Engagement while scrambling to outdo the sugary excesses of Amélie. The prologue, with its collision of disobedient landmines, prison-like schools, and a video clerk (Dany Boon) with a bullet in his noggin while classic film noir plays on his telly is breathless in its one-idea-per-shot inventiveness. Unfortunately, it takes no time for the inventiveness to turn antic and oppressive as the hero sets out to take down a pair of nefarious ammunition magnates with the help of a gang of adorable junkyard dwellers, and an onslaught of balloon-thought puns, contortionist gamines, and lavishly wasteful camera movement is unleashed. The one clear feeling is that Jeunet hates the human damage of warmongers and that he hates parting with his goony gizmos even more.

Trash Humpers: After Jeunet's wantonly prettified toy cities, Harmony Korine's pageant of belligerent grubbiness is almost welcome. Almost. Like Gummo, it's explicitly offered as an act of vandalism, with creatures ignored by the rest of society and cinema taking over the spotlight and tap-dancing all over notions of "taste." The joke is that the adolescent hellions from his debut have become rubbery prunefaces, wearing grotesque geriatric masks that turn them into hideous parodies of horny retirement-home troglodytes. Korine's world is a squalid stage, his characters are shock-artists channeling madness into performance: People hump trash bins (and trees and fences), smash TVs with hammers, molest dolls, deliver monologues, fill the air with cackling mantras and Beavis and Butt-Head giggles, and basically act like the Manson family shooting their version of Cocoon. (Mock-porno/snuff VHS graininess is the aggressively ugly aesthetic, complete with tracking problems.) Some of it has a grimy elation, but in the end the wrinkled masks serve mainly as a metaphor for a spastic enfant terrible in danger of aging without maturing.

Lourdes: Miracles are the most difficult things to depict on screen, according to Godard, who posited Hitchcock and Dreyer as the only ones able to pull it off. Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner's tour of the titular sacred site may not be invited into the pantheon just yet, but her balance of earnestness, irony, gravity, and wry humor is consistently captivating. Lourdes here is a tranquil, teeming playground. People go to confessionals, watch inspirational videos, tell each other their dreams, pray for miracles, and look on in envy as someone else gets them. Part of a group of pilgrims, the wispy, wheelchair-bound heroine (Sylvie Testud) isn't after wonders but people to meet (she unfavorably compares the city to Rome). A seemingly wondrous event takes place, though she remains, as one biddy puts it, "not as pious as she might be." Suspense grows, coolly but firmly: "The Lord giveth…" Composed with an eye for telling gesture within crowded frames and anchored by Testud's emotional purity, it's a modest but trenchant investigation of the spiritual.

To the Sea: A discovery and a revelation, Pedro González-Rubio's micro-budget seaside idyll shows how swollen and synthetic many of the festival's pricier entries are. Straddling the line between fiction and documentary with as much tenderness and sensuality as Robert Flaherty's works, the film takes three real individuals—separated couple Jorge and Roberta and their young son Natan—and has them not so much "play" themselves on screen as add their innate essences to González-Rubio's vivacious play of nature, people, and camera. Set in the Mexican-Caribbean reef of Chinchorro, where Jorge stays with Natan before the boy moves to Rome with his mother ("I'm unhappy with your reality, you're unhappy with mine" is how Roberta sums up the end of the couple's romance), it provides lambent views of underwater crustaceans, the boy's graceful bond with a white egret, and the vérité spectacle of seawater splashing the lens as a great barracuda is wrestled onto a boat. Immersive yet as fluid as the ocean, it's a movie André Bazin would have loved.

Micmacs, Trash Humpers, Lourdes, and To the Sea @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival Day Six: Mother, Enter the Void, and The Hole

Mother: Further memories of murder with Bong Joon-ho. The mother (Kim Hye-ja) is a middle-aged, small-town store clerk running a little clandestine acupuncture on the side, the son (Won Bin) is a man-child who gets distracted by golf balls while seeking revenge on hit-and-run millionaires. Won is hauled off to jail after a schoolgirl is found murdered, and Kim, sure that her boy is innocent, turns amateur sleuth. Park Chan-wook would have wrung the Grand Guignol hell out of this premise, but Bong is less interested in shocks than in the synergy between vast Korean fields and the equally mysterious inner landscape of the dazed matriarch making her way across them. A welter of motifs and clues (a sluggish psyche's gradually unclogged remembrances, tell-tale snapshots in a promiscuous high schooler's cell phone, a key scene played from different angles) fused by superb filmmaking, it at times suggests a dark-humored lampoon of one of Naruse's odes to maternal diligence, but with a tarantula sting of its own.

Enter the Void : 2001: A Space Odyssey as a stoner's trip between life and death and assorted altered states? That's the setup for Gaspar Noé's mammoth pothead doodle, an all-sensation marathon that alternates between dazzling and unendurable. "They say you fly when you die." Sutured and lubed to give the feel of a single POV shot, it follows a faceless, drone-voiced American fuck-up as he marvels at the phosphorescent Tokyo cityscape, gets shot during a drug bust, and watches his own corpse being dragged away as his soul hovers around other characters, slides past walls, and rummages through incestuous relationships, star-children, and light shows. Seeking cosmic transcendence (or at least a Keanu-like "whoa"), Noé pulverizes screen space: The screen flickers, blurs, rotates, turns liquid, and stretches like taffy. I should confess I walked out not long after the first hour, so the already infamous vagina-cam shot of a ginormous incoming penis will have to remain for me the imagined stuff of dreams and nightmares.

The Hole: The void in Joe Dante's ebullient family-horror flick, meanwhile, is a bottomless pit in the basement of a fractured family's new home. Moving into yet another city with their restless mom (Teri Polo), two brothers (Chris Massoglia, Nathan Gamble) ward off boredom by exploring the new surroundings with their vivacious neighbor (Haley Bennett), which leads to the eponymous pitch-black portal. After peeking in, the three find their fears taking physical and increasingly baroque form: a grinning clown puppet, a blue-skinned, sad-faced little girl out of a J-horror yarn, a looming patriarch wielding a serpentine belt in a Caligari-styled living room. The plot takes heavy-handed turns toward the end, but Dante's sense of mischievous fright, cinephiliac erudition (Orlac Glove Factory, anyone?) and never-condescending use of adolescent anxieties and 3D giddiness, make this a welcome return to the big screen for a director who has never missed a chance to locate the skewed abyss under the placid surfaces of suburbia, and wink at it.

Mother, Enter the Void, and The Hole @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival Day Five: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, White Material, and Survival of the Dead

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done: The other half of the Werner Herzog Nutty Procedural Double Feature, this David Lynch-produced thriller offers far more controlled absurdism than Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but is easily the lesser work. One of the supporting actors playing straight man to Cage's cyclonic clowning in Lieutenant, Michael Shannon takes center stage here as a San Diego momma's boy who returns "different" from a trip to Peru and takes an unhealthy interest in playing the matricidal protagonist in a production of The Oresteia. The setting is a hostage negotiation between Shannon and police officer Willem Dafoe, with Chloe Sevigny, Brad Dourif, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, and other kooks duly dropping by. Smooshing near-parodic versions of tropes by both Herzog (maddening jungles, incongruous animals) and Lynch (promiscuous coffee-drinking, tuxedoed dwarves), it's strenuously deadpan where the other film was organically hysterical. It works most intriguingly as a curious meeting between simpatico but ultimately incompatible artists, not unlike Dali doing his own version of Millet's Angelus.

White Material: Based on the reactions of many of my Toronto colleagues, it seems that Claire Denis has reached the point of artistry and expectations at which a merely excellent film could be seen as something of a disappointment. Indeed, next to the best of her extraordinarily vivid previous works, this story of French colonials and civil war violence in an unnamed African country is an uncharacteristically open-and-shut case for the auteur. Still, the beauties are numerous. Isabelle Huppert plays the owner of a coffee plantation struggling to keep both business and family together in the midst of gun-toting rebels and insurrection-squashing militias. There is a plot (Denis is a splendid storyteller), but her question, as usual, is not "Where are we going?" but "What are we seeing?" From the first image of a car's headlights revealing a dirt road full of wild dogs to the blissful view of Huppert riding her bicycle, this is sinewy, elliptical, ethereal filmmaking. If this is lesser Denis, that's still miles above just about everyone else out there.

Survival of the Dead: Are George Romero's late-career ghoul operas fatigued retreads of his seminal undead movies, or eccentrically satirical twists on the horror subgenre he virtually created? When a zombified heroine gallops across the screen on horseback and barely any of the characters bats an eye, it's damn near impossible to tell the difference. Kicking off "six days after the dead began to walk," the latest Dead chapter picks up on a strand from the previous one, following the rogue soldiers who had previously crossed paths with the vlogging youngsters in Diary of the Dead as they head into the Hatfield-McCoy territory of dueling patriarchs and cowboy bellicosity. There are trenchant bits (like the landowner's "dead-head" wife kept chained in the kitchen) amid the erupting viscera, but for the most part Romero settles for pleasing fans who cheer every drip of gore but couldn't care less about political subtext.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, White Material, and Survival of the Dead @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival Day Four: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Soul Kitchen, and The Neil Young Trunk Show

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: The title makes it sound less like a remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 masterpiece than a coming-this-fall-to-CBS cop show, yet Werner Herzog's dizzying comedy is its own unruly beast. It may have taken somebody who's wrangled Klaus Kinski five times before, but Nicholas Cage's bruise-purple twitchiness is employed fruitfully for the first time in ages: Playing the titular dope-snorting, high-gambling, granny-terrorizing homicide detective, Cage offers a deranged high-wire act that is unmistakably part of the director's singular world even as it keeps spilling over the edges of that world. By the time the lieutenant is lurching across the screen like a broken-backed Nosferatu, even seasoned weirdoes like Brad Dourif and Fairuza Balk are stepping out of the way. Herzog's New Orleans is even more aggressively eccentric than Tsai's Paris in Face: Visions of demented lyricism (an alligator's view of a roadside crash, a pair of iguanas seemingly breaking into a Big Easy aria) giddily punch through the film's hack-policier surface.

The Neil Young Trunk Show: Next to their previous collaboration, 2006's luminous Heart of Gold, Jonathan Demme's new film of a Neil Young concert might seem like a minor work, though in its own way it presents fans with nearly as many blissful moments. Shot in Pennsylvania's Tower Theater during the grizzled singer's 2008 Chrome Dreams II tour, the pictures combines performances of classic favorites ("Cowgirl in the Sand," "Cinnamon Girl"), overlooked tunes ("The Sultan," "Mexico"), and autumnal numbers ("No Hidden Path") on a stage bare but for a few props (mementos from the singer's spiritual "trunk") and Young's guitar-thrusting physicality. Compared to the Young who was facing an open grave in the mortality-infused Heart of Gold, the performer here glows with lifeworn vigor, haloed by the spotlight and set off by vibrant stage colors, his hair thinning and unkempt yet still sweeping. Captured by Demme, it's a beautifully crafted and profoundly emotive spectacle.

Soul Kitchen: This year, Toronto has largely been a festival of extremes, with several films either minimalist-morphing-into-wallpaper or with adrenaline leaking out of their ears. Like Lieutenant, Fatih Akin's two-fisted culinary comedy falls (dropkicks, really) into the latter slot. Closer to the high-decibel exoticism of the director's breakout hit Head-On than to the border-busting gravity of his previous The Edge of Heaven, the picture sets up camp at a ramshackle Hamburg restaurant run by a frazzled Greek bruiser (Adam Bousdoukos) and takes in the hotheaded chefs, paroled relatives, and corporate scumbags pushing through. The whirring multiethnic textures are more exhausting than exhilarating: Akin's camera-in-heat keeps slamming, always rushing to cram in one more canted angle, one more musical cue, one more smackdown between squabbling characters. Still, it's something of a relief to see Edge of Heaven's we-are-the-world solemnity giving way to gags about massage-room boners and aphrodisiac-laced desserts.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Neil Young Trunk Show, and Soul Kitchen @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival Day Three: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Face, and Police, Adjective

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: Bound to get the lion's share of media attention, Heath Ledger in his final (uncompleted) role is actually just one of the copious phantasmagoric elements in Terry Gilliam's impassioned farrago. Troubled productions are nothing new to the director, but Gilliam forges ahead and gets his Fellini freak on as soon as a rickety caravan of saltimbanques materializes to regale modern-day night clubbers. A millenniums-old fabulist cursed by immortality, Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is not only the new incarnation of Gilliam's obsession with addled visionaries, but also his most personal examination of artistic endurance, from the Faustian deals struck for survival to the melancholy of spinning yarns to increasingly jaded audiences. A character's carny pitch ("Do you dream?") becomes the director's inquiry, ringing throughout as both question and invitation. Cluttered with shifting CG canvases, Monty Pythonish revues, and cameos patching up Ledger's absence, the film's sideshow illusionism is often ungainly but rarely less than deeply felt.

Face: Following in the footsteps of Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon, Tsai Ming-liang comes to Paris and makes it his. Like Doctor Parnassus, it's a memory film largely composed of mementos—pet themes and images—from the auteur's past, fragmented and bluntly personal. The crux is the filming of the Salome story presided over by a Truffaut-worshipping director (Lee Kang-sheng), overseen by a frazzled producer (Fanny Ardant), and starring a befuddled old-timer (Jean-Pierre Léaud). A matriarch expires in an apartment flooded by a wayward faucet, an actor falls asleep and the snowy set is suddenly stacked with mirrors and chorines, the starlet (Laetitia Costa) who had previously stared sullenly at the camera winks and bobs and lip-synchs to a sugary Chinese song. Filming in the Louvre, Tsai finds a haunted house: People appear as reflections on glass panes or encircled by darkness, Truffaut's muses (Ardant, Jeanne Moreau, Nathalie Baye) are like visiting apparitions. Nothing connects, but much of it ravishes.

Police, Adjective: Leave it for the Romanian New Wavers to turn the act of leafing through a dictionary into one of the year's most riveting cinematic moments. Corneliu Porumboiu's great moral inquiry (disguised as a dreary police procedural) swiftly and unobtrusively sketches a Kafkaesque cosmos by simply following its protagonist, a young cop (Dragos Bucur), from the overcast streets of Bucharest to the phosphorescent greens of his cramped office. Investigating a minor case of pot-smoking high schoolers with increasing reluctance, the drudging hero gradually grows engaged in the interpretation of the moral signs and meanings around him, whether irritably debating a song's symbolism with his girlfriend, scrambling to rush a computer report from an uncooperative co-worker, or humoring a petty tyrant of a police captain's impromptu semantics lesson. Not just a wry portrait of the clash between changing attitudes and rigid laws, but also a call for active consciousness in life and in cinema.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Face, and Police, Adjective @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival Day Two: The White Ribbon, A Serious Man, and Up in the Air

The White Ribbon: Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks from Funny Games? Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer, or, rather, to make the audience's collective skin crawl at the question. Something of a distant Teutonic relative to H.G. Clouzot's caustic Le Corbeau, the story traces the "horror and perplexity" contaminating a small village after a series of mysteriously interconnected events inexorably suggests the oppressive rot lurking under the townspeople's unsmiling, puritanical façade and spreading into the next generation. (Shot in monochromatic tones peculiarly reminiscent of Dreyer's Gertrud, it's Haneke's most visually polished picture yet, though the buzz of flies seeking decay is never far.) Unfolding like a finely wrought adaptation of a sprawling, detail-rich novel, the film showcases Haneke's undeniable technical mastery and is thankfully light on the filmmaker's patented hectoring shocks. The lingering feeling, however, is ultimately less of a portrait of encroaching dread than of a Children of the Corn prequel played as rigid thesis.

A Serious Man: The camera descends onto a snowy village, and then slowly zooms from the pitch-black inside of a character's head toward the light of an earpiece playing Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love." These two showy camera movements appear early in the Coen brothers' latest tragicomedy, visualizing my recurring problem with the filmmakers (they're always looking down on their own characters) and perhaps their riposte to that line of criticism (they're working from deep within those characters). The two views are more in harmony here than in any of their other movies since The Big Lebowski, though where Jeff Bridges's Dude endured his tribulations with a rumpled suavity, Michael Stuhlbarg's Larry Gopnick watches in helpless terror as enough indignities are piled on top of him to make Job himself cry, "Uncle!" The film navigates its protagonist through a late-'60s sea of bullies, yentas, backstabbers, and parasites, hitting moments of pitiless cosmic doubt that shame No Country for Old Men's frigid cynicism. Bleak, hilarious, remarkable.

Up in the Air: Be a capitalist asshole, but don't be alone. That's the message in Jason Reitman's glib crowd-pleaser, which takes the most facile bits of Thank You for Smoking and Michael Clayton and stitches them together with a potpourri of musical montages. The jet-set dislocation of a moneyed frequent flyer is the presiding metaphor, as a Golden Club prick (George Clooney) who makes his living firing people and delivering relationship-whittling motivational speeches is made to face his own emotional isolation. Clooney's early scenes with Vera Farmiga promise sexy, satirical amorality, but it soon becomes clear that the actor's attempts to suggest emptiness behind handsomeness are really an excuse for narcissistic cuteness, just as Reitman's use of the crumbling economy is quickly exposed as white noise for yet another tale of an aging bachelor's redemption.

The White Ribbon, A Serious Man, and Up in the Air @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival Day One: Antichrist, Bright Star, and Vision

Antichrist: Let it not be said that I prefer to ease my way into things. For my first screening on my first day at the Toronto International Film Festival, I dived right into Lars von Trier's Antichrist, the hound from hell that has polarized viewers since its cause célèbre debut in Cannes. As usual with overhyped shockers, the Rite of Spring promised turns out to be closer to ominous Muzak. Still, filled with psychosexual wounds and scored to a cacophony of growls and moans, it's a bravura jumble of concentrated bad vibes. Flower vases hold primordial slime, CGI critters warn about doom, cocks ejaculate blood. As if taunting his critics, von Trier's horrific-wacky tale of a grieving nameless couple (Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg) alone with their fears in a woods cabin evokes not just misogyny, but medieval misogyny. As with Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, there's no anchor to the cataract of malevolent images other than the director's own crawling neuroses. Gainsbourg's mutilating succubus is far preferable to von Trier's usual brand of suffering maidens though.

Bright Star: At the opposite pole from von Trier's raging therapy session lies Jane Campion's delicate period embroidery. Staying in the realm of 19th-century poets after having played a snippy version of Rimbaud in I'm Not There, Ben Whishaw offers an appropriately pallid John Keats, a penniless artiste alternating between brainstorming odes to beauty and bouts of tubercular cough. The film traces his final years with his beloved Fanny Brawne (a gracefully passionate Abbie Cornish), a young society woman who quickly takes center stage as the latest of Campion's individualist heroines. "I have two luxuries to brood over," Keats tells her. "Your loveliness and the hour of my death." Had it fused the romanticism and morbidity of that swooning declaration, the film might have achieved the sense of lyrical danger that Campion's work has at its best. Unfortunately, its drawing rooms and blossoming fields remain so prettily tasteful that the slightest bit of energy, like the broad Scottish accent of Paul Schneider's Charles Armitage Brown, comes as a relief.

Vision: Sisterhood (familial, political, spiritual) has been Margarethe von Trotta's recurring theme for over 30 years, so it's no surprise to see the veteran feminist auteur examining society's gender hierarchies from within the walls of a cloister. A biopic of Hildegard von Bingen (Barbara Sukowa, fierce and luminous), it paints the 12th-century magistra, writer, and composer as an instinctive visionary with a profound hunger for knowledge, endowed with intense, even possessive emotions and, in her struggle to lead her fellow nuns onto a commune of their own, something of a Moses complex. Visually stolid (too often the film settles for blocky robed figures hitting their marks against stony walls) but generous-spirited, von Trotta scrupulously contemplates von Binden's controversial apparitions, aching relationships, and multiple deathbed resurrections not as signs of sainthood, but as proof of an all-too-human search for illumination and love.

Antichrist, Bright Star, and Vision @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Kill Bill: The Right's Commitment to Murdering Health Care Reform

I had intended to write a series of blog entries on health care reform this summer focusing not only on already well-documented problems within the system and challenging illogical, boogeyman arguments against a public option, but also on issues that haven't received enough—or any—mainstream media attention, like the underinsured and the role doctors play in the rising costs of health care. Though perhaps inevitable, but no less unfortunate, the spate of attacks on reform that erupted during Congress's August recess required those in favor of it to go on the defensive instead, spending time combating misinformation and distortions about public opinion when they should have been touting the progress Congress has made in making reform a real possibility for the first time in decades.

I found myself unwilling, if not unable, to comment on the distractions, partly because it was so downright depressing to me—a reminder of the brief period just after Sarah Palin was announced as the vice presidential candidate for the Republican ticket last fall and before she revealed herself to be a perpetual political punchline. At a Labor Day barbeque, a friend and staunch Barack Obama supporter glibly called me "un-American and un-democratic" for suggesting that hecklers shouting down a congressperson until his or her public forum grinded to a halt is not democracy but the ugly face of corporate-sponsored astroturfing. It's a tactic used to stifle progress and send a message. That message, of course, is "Kill the bill!," a slogan brought to you by the same masterminds who crafted last year's "Drill, baby, drill!" and which was chanted ad nauseam at town halls across the nation during the final week of summer.

The Republican talking point has been to insist that those who showed up at town halls across the country last month were ordinary citizens who are unhappy with the changes they see taking place since Obama took office in January, who don't want him interfering in their presumably cozy relationships with their health insurance providers. They just want to express their concerns, Republican officials will tell you. You know, like Heather Blish, former vice-chairman of the Kewaunee County GOP, who showed up at her former boss's opponent's town hall claiming to be "just a mom with no political affiliation" to protest health care reform.

Many of these people, however, are undoubtedly real, law-abiding citizens, but the groups mobilizing this so-called "grassroots" scare campaign are anything but grassroots. And it wasn't just right-wing commentators or the fringe activists who listen to them who disseminated and continue to disseminate misinformation. "Death panel"—a term so repugnant and dripping with mischaracterization used to describe a part of the proposed reform bill that would reimburse Americans who choose to seek medical advice regarding end-of-life care—was hatched in the sickened brain of right-wing think tank fellow and Cantel Medical Corp. board member Betsy McCaughey and was propagated via Facebook by Palin like a 15-year-old mean girl spreading rumors about the popular new kid in class.

So it came as no surprise when, during Obama's address to a joint session of Congress last night, Republicans behaved exactly like the angry mobs of town hall protesters they encouraged, pandered to, and used like political pawns throughout the recess. By the time I post this, Rep. Joe Wilson will likely have already started making the cable-TV rounds, ratcheting up his public profile in the wake of his outburst of "You lie!" when Obama attempted to debunk the rumor that his health care plan would insure illegal immigrants. It was a moment so profoundly revealing, in terms of both Wilson's willful ignorance and his party's cynicism, that it left no doubt about what the Republican strategy (to kill the bill) and the purpose of that strategy (to score political points against the president) has been. Wilson wasn't the only elected official heckling the president—just the loudest and most red-faced. Whether it's Sen. Jim DeMint expressing his desire to "break" Obama by stopping health care reform, or Sen. Chuck Grassley engaging in negotiations with Democrats under the guise of a bipartisan solution and then perpetuating myths about "killing Grandma" at town hall meetings and vowing not to vote for the very bill he's been tasked with helping to form, the Republican Party's objective has been to stifle any forward momentum.

I often hear the argument by those on the right that calling out this kind of behavior is frivolous because there is bad behavior on both sides of the aisle. And while that might be true, there is simply no parity on the left today. The left hated George W. Bush because he was perceived to be a corrupt warmonger; the right is painting toothbrush 'staches on portraits of Obama because he wants to reform health care. Symbolically dissing the commander in chief by denying him an applause line or twittering away while he speaks in the chamber is nothing new, but there was a palpable outward contempt for Obama last night that's unprecedented in modern political history. And one that, exemplified by right-wing parents yanking their children from school so as to shield them from the president's address to K-though-sixth-graders on Tuesday, reeks of something far more dangerous than old-fashioned partisanship.

The party's opposition to the president (reform in any shape) notwithstanding, Republicans were going to reject any idea that was presented to them simply because it's the nature of our two-party system. One should always ask for more than what they want or are willing to settle for when sitting down at the negotiating table, and the biggest problem with Obama's plan has always been that he conceded too much too soon, pitching the compromise (a public option) instead of a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system that would truly represent the kind of universal coverage that has become a pillar of the Democratic platform. A proposal to further dilute the immediate impact of reform by putting a "trigger" on the public option, meaning that that particular part of the bill would only go into effect if and when the insurance industry failed to meet certain coverage criteria laid out by Congress, was even rejected by Republican Governor and likely 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty because, he told CNN's John King, it "simply kicks the can down the road," which, like the conflicting GOP talking points that a public option would both provide inferior coverage and simultaneously be too good for private companies to compete against, is essentially an admission that he knows insurance companies—and Republicans—will never step up to the plate.

Obama ended his speech by evoking Ted Kennedy, reading part of a letter the late senator had written following his cancer diagnosis last year and which he asked to be delivered to the president upon his death. Kennedy's words—"What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country"—are the best and clearest articulation of both broad liberal ideology and the necessity of universal health care I've heard to date. Obama's assessment of those words took Kennedy's legacy of proud 20th-century liberalism into a new era: "[Our predecessors] understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter—that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves."