Capsule Reviews: Submarine, The Iron Lady, I Melt With You

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2011)

Referencing The Catcher in the Rye with equal parts sincerity and irony, Submarine likewise moves so awkwardly between self-aware hipness and uncomfortable neediness that it never settles into anything other than an attempt to make some Welsh kitchen-sink version of a Wes Anderson film (think the cutting scene of The Royal Tenenbaums stretched to feature length). Ayoade, so effortlessly quick on The IT Crowd, languishes behind the camera, holding some potentially funny and/or insightful moment until it simply collapses. There's a lot of potential here, and I like that Craig Roberts' (a fine newcomer) character arc is paced with an exponential growth rather than a facile epiphany, but I was still left wanting more from this.

The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

To say that The Iron Lady resembles a television movie is an insult to television. Incoherently assembled into a downright hysterical mélange of randomly ordered shots that turn the political career of one of the most controversial figures of modern international politics into a you-go-girl story of a gung-ho women sticking it to all those men who thought she couldn't do it. Not that I'm a supporter of Thatcher's in any respect, but to reduce her life to such shallow nonsense is laughable: upon arrival at Parliament as the only woman, she opens the female bathroom to find naught but a chair and an ironing board. And I haven't even broached the subject of its handling of Thatcher's dementia, which it uses so unsubtly as to generate compassion for the real Thatcher not for her deeds or motivations but merely out of disgust for this level of exploitation. Jim Broadbent plays her hallucinated, dead husband like Jacob Marley come to haunt Scrooge; well, that or he's Margaret Thatcher's peevish but affable Tyler Durden. As the entire film branches out from this addled present, perhaps that explains why the movie is so completely chaotic in its construction, but whatever the reason, I ended up feeling sorry that an old woman had been so crassly used for a film that combines the worst of The King's Speech and J. Edgar into one garish whole.

I Melt With You (Mark Pellington, 2011)

I Melt With You is a glibly nihilistic tour through a midlife crisis that really thinks it's saying something. Four friends meet up for a yearly drug vacation in a house on Big Sur's shoreline that looks as if it would cost more to rent for a week than most houses are to own, where they engage in brotastic antics edited with masculine zeal. But when a cruel twist after one too many Oxycontin orgies uncovers a 25-year-old pact that the men made in college, which they decide to honor because that is what grown men do. Pellington, a music video director, packs the film with great but horrifically misapplied tunes that he seems to prioritize over the actual narrative, which vaguely trundles about dealing with some unexplained past as the present becomes an increasingly incoherent hodgepodge of fatalistic statements. Its self-flagellating tone borders on the parodic, and every intended shock is but one more unintentional laugh. The men are bad enough, but I was perhaps most irritated by the waste of the always-excellent Carla Gugino as the world's most clueless police officer, who basically comes in just to vent the smell of unwashed dude yet gets bizarrely emotional over the fates of these idiotic, self-immolating strangers. An utter piece of trash from start to finish.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson is one of a handful of interesting, unique directors working in America today whose work is marginalized by that most useless of criticisms: that he is a "style over substance" filmmaker. I don't know when bringing something visual to the most visually stimulating of all media became something worthy of derision but, while sometimes the phrase is used appropriately, those who casually toss it out at any film that dares look interesting should be forced to sit through a Dogme 95 marathon so they can appreciate what aesthetic means to a film's enjoyment and how fucking terrible movies are without it. Having said that, I'm far from the world's biggest Wes Anderson fan, having previously loved on The Royal Tenenbaums and found the rest of his oeuvre, even Rushmore, to be excellent in places and spotty in others. His last two features, the soulless Life Aquatic and the on-the-nose Darjeeling Limited, were neither outright bad, but for all of Life Aquatic's insanity and Darjeeling's back-to-basics vibrancy, I found little in either worth remembering; neither was an exercise in style over substance, but the substance communicated through their styles held no interest for me.

It is with some trepidation, then, that I admit how much I enjoyed his latest work, Fantastic Mr. Fox, as it might seem that I'm choosing a simple kid's film over his more complex works. Well, yes, this is a kid's film, as straightforward as entries in the genre must be, but it also delves into the key theme of Anderson's corpus: a dysfunctional, emotionally distant family and the extent its members will go to for each other. He does not so much gut Roald Dahl's story as stuff every crevice with his own sensibilities, stretching Dahl's whimsical story into a post-ironic bit of family fun, appealing to your 5-year-old and your embittered hipster teenager.

His Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is an egotistical chicken thief, so full of himself that he even acknowledges it at one point. His wife Felicity (Meryl Streep), forces him to give up his trade when the two narrowly escape death in one engagement and she reveals her pregnancy. 12 fox-years later, Mr. Fox writes opinion columns for the local paper that no one reads and has an uneasy relationship with his son Ash (Jason Schwartzman), a barely held-together wad of fur and rage. Fox hates his gray flannel suit existence and longs for the fire of his youth, so he moves his family out of the ground and into a tree, ostensibly for the freedom of sunshine but in reality for the new home's proximity to three farms owned by Boggis, Bunce and Bean and their irresistible products within.

The world that Anderson and his animators created for Mr. Fox and the other characters to roam has a pop-up book quality, evidently something artificial yet something you want to reach out and feel anyway. When the camera moves, it typically does so sideways, moving through rooms and layers in the inventive underground world of the animals as if scanning the panels of a comic book. Each of these areas, and the characters who inhabit them, bursts with Anderson's visual acumen: overwhelmingly bright colors, right-angle arrangements, symmetry. Anderson is a director both praised and criticized for his meticulous compositions, so what better medium for him to explore than stop-motion animation, the most involving method of building and photographing a world from scratch?

I'm tip-toeing around discussing the film as, pound for pound, this is the funniest picture in Anderson's canon. It's always tricky when a filmmaker or actor moves from working primarily in the R-rated field to children's entertainment -- how cringeworthy it is when the subject of "making the kids proud of me" raises its serpentine head in interviews -- but Anderson tackles the shift with extra cheek; how many PG films (PG only because some of the characters, as they must in an Anderson movie, smoke) not only broach the subject of existentialism but say the word aloud? The director also replaces every possible swear word with the word "cuss," and I suspect that he wrote the script without children in mind and censored himself later, because the word is bandied about quite often, including as a part of combinations such as "clustercuss." I'd like to see this method used on TV instead of the annoying and useless bleeping that grates the ears.

The Darjeeling Limited had its moments of character insight, but Fantastic Mr. Fox gets Anderson back on firm emotional ground. Mr. Fox's ennui is deeply felt (and his comments on the non-readership of his column is a subtle commentary, perhaps, on our own failing papers), and the caustic relationship between Ash, who projects his insecurities and self-loathing outward, and essentially everyone else is as revealing of his inner concerns as it is blisteringly funny. His exchanges with cousin Kristofferson in particular are ripe for comedy, as Kristofferson is everything that Ash isn't: athletic, handsome and, it seems, well-liked by Mr. Fox. These meaty lead performances are bolstered by a manic cast of supporters voiced by the likes of Anderson alumni Owen Wilson and Bill Murray, all of whom find that usual balance between the goofier aspects of the directors characters and their reserved, ultra-dry style.

However, a few items stuck in my craw after leaving the theater, and I still can't get over some of Anderson's choices after sleeping on my thoughts. Mr. Fox, Ash, Kristofferson, the opossum Kylie, they're all so much fun; so why are all the female characters uptight and as flat as Anderson's storybook compositions? I understand that the director is evoking a bit of a '50s suburban feel with the layouts of the animals' houses, but why did he feel the need to port over the vision of the domesticated housewife as well? Felicity knows that her husband resumed thieving upon moving near the farms, she only offers a few words of stern caution to try to stop him. When Mr. Fox places the entire community in peril by angering the farmers, Felicity only gets to run through one of those "Oh, I love you but you can be so silly sometimes!" harsh speeches that isn't so harsh. Speaking of the farmers: why are all the humans voiced by British and Irish actors when all of the animals are voiced by American ones? Yes, the composition of the farms brings to mind the English countryside where Dahl set the story, but there's no explanation for the clear difference. Perhaps it's a further distinction between animals and humans, but considering that the two groups can understand and converse with one another, it just seems like a lazy excuse for Anderson to use some actors he liked. And I don't even know what the hell Willem Dafoe thought he was doing as an evil rat who sounds as though he came from New Orleans, though I admit I liked his mix of zaniness and menace.

Nevertheless, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a terrific return to form for Anderson, lacking the depth of his best work but making up for it with his first film to allow you to sit back and enjoy the visuals without having to worry about the story's complexity whacking you in the head every five minutes. And when I said that this was as much for the kids as the indie crowd, I meant it: yes, no child will catch the extended reference to The Third Man of a sequence in sewers, and they'll likely not catch the potential nod to Toy Story in the form of a milk (or apple, as the case may be) crate prison. But they'll have as much fun with its irreverence as adults, perhaps more so -- I was turned on to Monty Python at 10 and my parents still don't see its appeal, and they grew up in the proper time period for it. Anderson's humor may be smug, but he derives laughs directly from how smug the characters are, and nobody can spot a phony and laugh at him like a child.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence threw me when I first watched it last year; a fan of both Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, who began the project after reading Brian Aldiss' Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, I spent much of the film looking for the moments I could readily identify as belonging to either director. It was a rookie mistake, an outgrowth of a dependency on auteur theory to explain away the film and a distraction from the film's actual content and themes. I also tuned out the much-debated final section of the film, buying into the hype (before I'd even read it) that somehow it wasn't worth watching. Upon finishing the film, I nonchalantly popped it back in the Netflix sleeve and sent it back for the next movie in my queue.

Yet certain aspects stuck with me, ideas that I didn't pay attention to while watching the film now gnawing their way through the eroding memory of my "spot the auteur" game and nagging at me to give it another go. What really reinvigorated my interest, however, was Jonathan Rosenbaum's epic, 4000-word treatise on the film, entitled "The Best of Both Worlds." It remains my favorite article of his, and one of my absolute favorite pieces of film criticism. It is my go-to counterargument to those who argue that Rosenbaum is just some pretentious ass incapable of being pleased, using his once-limitless word count at the Chicago Reader to inform everyone how much smarter he was than us. It's also the article I use to introduce neophytes to his work. I could go on about what I love about this beautiful piece, but to do so would turn this review of a film into a rave of a rave that could spiral out of control and spark yet more discussions about my rave of his rave until Charlie Kaufman knocks at my door demanding a royalty payment.

Rosenbaum's praise of the film caused me to reevaluate my own indifference to it and, setting it aside long enough for some of the specifics to fade as to not influence my experience with the film, I at last returned to A.I. Rarely have I been so pleased to discover just how wrong I was.

A.I. opens with the sight and sound of the ocean, serene waves that take on an ominous tone when a narration explains that, in the future, melting ice caps destroyed numerous major cities, displacing millions and leading to mass starvation in poorer countries. The areas that still enjoy some level of prosperity ensure their continuing riches by licensing pregnancies to maintain population levels. With the lowered populace reducing labor, robots become a staple of city life. But Professor Hobby (William Hurt) aspires to the next level of robotics. He dreams of androids that do not only look like humans and experience sensory stimuli but emote.

A year later, an employee at Hobby's company, Henry (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica (Frances O'Connor) suffer the pain of their child's illness. Cocooned in a pod reminiscent of the hibernation chambers of 2001 or Alien, young Martin must stay in suspended animation until a cure for his rare disease can be found. This situation makes the couple prime test subjects for Hobby's latest innovation: David. Henry brings home what appears to be an 11-year-old boy, but Monica immediately understands what the boy really is and shouts for it to leave.

With this minimal setup, Spielberg crafts not only his most thought-provoking film (it is admittedly up against slim competition) but one of the most unabashedly philosophical films to ever be produced for mass consumption (and make no mistake, this is very much a film meant for a large audience). This first section of the 150-minute feature is entirely based on emotional development between the "child" and his new "mommy." Monica is repulsed by the machine at first, terrified by the stiff, servile messages coming from this utterly realistic thing. Yet she slowly becomes accustomed to the boy, until at last she agrees to program him with code words that will fully activate his humanistic programming (once this bonding process is done, David cannot be returned to the company without being destroyed), and the moment that David looks up with suddenly softer features and calls Monica "Mommy" is as breathtaking in its simplicity and direct impact as the appearance of the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park is in its epic grandeur.


The first act also establishes an amazing unity between two disparate styles of filmmaking, between Kubrick's often bleak philosophical and anthropological concerns and Spielberg's emotional directness and his notion of cinema as a means of exhilaration and positivity. One of the employees at Hobby's initial presentation broaches a serious question she tags as moral but is equally existential, asking "If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that Mecha in return?" Hobby ducks the question by alluding to the story of creationism (that God created humans to love him, with the unspoken allusion to John 3:14's declaration of God's love of His creation), but sets up one of the basic issues the film addresses and asks us to answer.

Monica, driven by maternal instincts, dotes upon this robot as if her child, but Henry, who was so excited by the invention and pressured his wife into keeping David, sours when confronted with the fully programmed version, put-off by David's sudden humanity (this depiction of a father's excitement with the idea of a kid growing into a resentment and absence when the child finally arrives shows Spielberg getting to the heart of his theme of father-child relationships). When the Swintons' real son Martin (Jake Thomas) returns home, David receives his first exposure to human cruelty. I feel that Martin is somewhat justified in hating David, considering that his parents essentially replaced him with this robot while he lied in cryostasis, but he manipulatesDavid's programmed honesty and servility into turning the poor android into an unwittingly terrifying being, at times perceived by the Swintons as a Chucky doll of the 22nd century.

At last, Martin's schemes go to far, and the father orders David's return to the factory for destruction, but the mother cannot bring herself to kill her child, even if he's not technically her child or even alive. She instead takes him to a forest and abandons him with his animatronic toy bear, Teddy. It's a heartbreaking moment, as David displays the extent to which he can feel true emotions and love.

After a fade-out, Spielberg completely shifts gears, and the second act of the film investigates not an individual family who would order something like David but the society that is enthralled with Mechas. The director, working with Chris Baker's 600 pre-production illustrations, crafts a stupefying metropolis called Rouge City that makes Ridley Scott's vision of the consumerist overload of Blade Runner's Los Angeles look like an Amish community. Its epileptic blend of Scott's nightmarish futuristic vision, Las Vegas and the Pleasure Island segment of Disney's Pinocchio, Rouge City is as far away from the idyllic wealthy suburbs where we met David but linked by a nonplussed acceptance of robots among humans. Spielberg's visual evocation of Pinocchio is one of his more sly moves here, lining up nicely with the story's inexorable link to the story of the puppet who became a real boy.

Rouge City

Pleasure Island

Even the character of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), the first character introduced in this new segment, can be directly tied to David and his quest to be loved. Just as David was an experiment for humans to project love upon an ideal -- not only might unlicensed couples be allowed to have a child, it would always be stuck in that period of total and unconditional love, never growing old and moving away -- Gigolo Joe is manufactured to cater to every aspect of the physical aspect of human love. Both are empty shells who can only project their ability to love at the expense of any other identifiable traits; when the abandoned David meets Joe and tells him of his quest to find the Blue Fairy of the Pinocchio tale, Joe, on the run after the bitter husband of one of his clients framed him for her murder, offers to tag along to seduce her.

Their search for the Blue Fairy is fraught with danger, as a subsection of society views the rise of Mechas as a threat to the species. In the film's only glaring misstep, both David and Joe are rounded up for a "Flesh Fair," a Thunderdome-esque exposition of Luddite savagery. Well, I say Luddite; everyone in attendance has their own futuristic gadgets, but they destroy any Mechas they can get their hands on in some zealous rage of self-preservation. Where this sequence goes wrong is in its visualization: the Flesh Fair is little more than a motocross, a rock concert(!)(?) and a warped public hanging square all in one, populated only, it seems, by shitkicking working class buffoons, none so poor that we might infer that robotics drove them out of work but displaying typical redneck bloodlust. The scene only redeems itself at its end, when its most eager participant (Brendan Gleeson) trots out David, the first robot to genuinely fulfill the emotional roles of a human, the crowd is so struck by his realism that they refuse to allow him to be destroyed. Does that mean that even a mongoloid mob such as this has some basic civility when confronted with something so well-made they cannot distinguish from a human? Or are they just so collectively dumb that they cannot fathom a machine being made like this despite all their violence predicated on the fear of something like David existing?

The central issue affecting David is the dividing line between "Orga," organic beings, and "Mecha," the robots. It's revealing that the humans, even the ones most adamantly opposed to the technology, do not simply say "man" and "machine," for the Mechas have grown into a type of existence that cannot be differentiated from a humans with the same facility as, say, animals, which technically are Orga. The robot servants and the pleasure bots like Joe can all carry out but one function -- when you strip away his ability for minor independence, the same applies to David -- but they can all reason, react to pain, find a certain pleasure in their lives, even if it's only a programmed response. In an early scene, David sits at the dinner table in his "stock" condition, his emotional programming still unactivated, and suddenly plays a bit of a trick on Henry and Monica bursts into loud laughter, causing both of the humans to laugh just as boisterously. It's a light-hearted and funny scene, but it brings with it a question: the machine David, not even yet programmed to achieve his most human-like behavior, can laugh at something he finds amusing. What, then, separates his mechanical response from the supposedly organic one of Monica and Henry?


Perhaps as a result of Spielberg's framing, though certainly a key aspect of the story, David is more sympathetic than any of the humans we meet; even Monica does not put up a struggle when the patriarchal Henry orders David destroyed, and her idea of a compromise is to simply dump a machine programmed to be a 11-year-old in a forest surrounded by humans who destroy everything they find and hope for the best. When David and Joe use a super-information center called Dr. Know (voiced by a loopy but not obnoxious Robin Williams) to find the Blue Fairy at "the end of the world" (a Manhattan covered by the risen seas), we discover the information was planted in Dr. Know by Hobby to reclaim his invention for analysis. Hobby delights at David's misery and the horrific jealousy he displays when Hobby introduces him to a copy of another David unit, which results in a violent (and futile) act of aggression to prove his individuality.

The final section of the film, set 2000 years after David runs away from Hobby and finds the Coney Island Blue Fairy deep in the ocean, is where even the film's fans suddenly scream in outrage. The first time I watched it, I had no idea what the creatures, seemingly made as much from pure energy as any flesh or metal, actually were; in retrospect, it's easy to tell that they're Mechas because of a sharp visual clue Spielberg gave us early in his out-of-focus, distorted introductory shot of David. The film up to this point pitted Orga against Mecha, but these humanoid Supermechas, wandering a frozen landscape long after humans went extinct, make the distinction meaningless. They scan David's memories and offer to reconstruct a vision of Monica to be with for a single day, allowing him his chance at happiness while giving them a window to study mankind through his experiences.


Many pointed to this segment as saccharine, Spielbergian fluff, though everyone involved is quick to point out that this coda was always in Kubrick's idea of the film. And, frankly, I don't see what people are talking about; David's day with Monica is fun and happy and carefree, yes, but it is also hollow, a programmed emotional stimuli no different than the one David himself was made to provide. In Rosenbaum's review, he noted that the issue broached at Hobby's first meeting tackles the idea of whether a robot and a human could share a mutually loving relationship, but the film never tackles the question of whether robots could be so humanistic that they might love each other. I respectfully disagree; the film revolves around the idea that human love has given way to mechanical, programmed affection, and though the real Monica's love of David obviously does not extend to that of a real human, she is devastated to leave him in the forest. Furthermore, David and Joe share a loving friendship, reliant upon one another for safety, and there is a haunting moment between them as an electromagnet snares Joe and he bids farewell to David with the hauntingly existential "I am...I was." David's vision of Monica at the end professes her unconditional love of David, as affecting but ultimately hollow a display of emotion as David provided to the real version.

This harsh juxtaposition reveals the "shotgun marriage," as Rosenbuam dubs it, between Spielberg and Kubrick auterial concerns. Spielberg's films are about the individual and the emotional resonance of that one person above all else, including accuracy or honest self-appraisal; I still love his Jaws to death, but as a young adult grown out of childhood I'm now somewhat put-off by its subtext, that people can always overcome giant obstacles, even if it means recklessly killing it without ever acknowledging a less violent solution. Kubrick's, on the other hand, are about the loss of individualism into the unified whole of society, usually in a satiric manner but occasionally quite serious (in 2001, the individual is absorbed into the obelisk to further the evolution of our species). In the film's final moments, we discover that the entire movie was a flashback of sorts, played for the Supermechas just as the projectionist played the film for us. Just as we feed off of David's emotions, so too do the future mechas take his most personal memories and project them to their curious society. In the combination of two wildly different styles, scenes such as this provide the most honest look at the methods and ideas of both directors.

Yet for all of its intelligence, all of its jaw-dropping visual splendor -- perhaps Spielberg's always acute visual sense resonated even more than his work on other films because the images are put in service of some genuine meaning -- A.I. succeeds because of its protagonist. Haley Joel Osment is now remembered for whispering "I see dead people" and for not escaping the aftermath of Pay It Forward (his tiny adolescent body just didn't have the strength to push the rubble of that film's horrific collapse off himself), but his performance here never hits a false note. He is initially creepy and overbearing, but transitions effortlessly into an adorable boy who is as lovable, fragile and naïve as any other kid. Osment himself decided upon the excellent idea of never blinking to reveal his artificiality, a wry character tic that proves unexpectedly heartrending at the end when David, himself revived by the Mechas and given only a day with a reincarnation with his mother, lies in her arms and closes his eyes, off "to that place where dreams are born."

Doubt

I tend to have problems with plays adapted for the film. Obviously this is not a blanket statement, since so many writers have moved a story from the stage to the screen, but often they leave me cold. Why, though? Most of these adaptations sport incredible casts, and many members of those casts perfected their performances by actually appearing in the original play. The writer often adapts his own play, and the sets flesh out the limitations of the stage into something that can add weight to the acting. So why, then, do I have such a hard time with adapted plays?

Doubt, at the onset, at least, seems like it will defy my expectations. It opens with Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) delivering a subject on the title of the film, remarking how doubt "can be a bond as strong as certainty." Moving amongst the children in the back of the cathedral is Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), hissing at the restless kids to straighten up, and already you can sense she doesn't care for the new priest.

Streep moves through the film with a look of perpetually concealed rage. She monitors the class of the cheery, sweet Sister James (Amy Adams), whose students act up a bit thanks to her leniency; after class, Aloysius offers tips on how to get control of the class. "You're too innocent" she tells Sister James later, and one need only sit back and bask in the irony of such an indictment of a nun. One day Sister James tells her superior that Father Flynn called young Donald Miller into the rectory, and when the boy left he acted...strange. The elder sister's eyes flash with fire and narrow. "So," she sighs with malice, "it's happened."

While Sister Aloysius plots to take Flynn down, Sister James must cope with the thought of a man she admires being a molester. She effectively personifies the doubt of the story, as she finds herself torn between the two factions: when (circumstantial) evidence comes to light, she sides with Aloysius. Yet she also notices Flynn's kindness and Aloysius' obvious hatred of the reform Flynn brings with him, and finally levels her own accusation towards the sister: "You just don't like him." Playwright John Patrick Shanley essentially structures Doubt around Sister James, so the responsibility of subtle rests on Adams' shoulders, and she pulls it off magnificently.

Think of her role in these terms, the performances of Hoffman and Streep take on an entirely new context. Sister James represents the average Catholic caught in the middle of two opposing viewpoints of Vatican II: on one side the welcoming new face of Father Flynn, which carries with it the sudden suggestion of molestation that would later tarnish the Church's image, and the old school fire-and-brimstone clergy of Sister Aloysius. When the two figures finally confront each other, the maelstrom of emotions that might normally seem like the usual stage-to-screen overacting works, and it's one of the most memorable scenes of the year.

Complementing these three incredible performances is a brief but scene-stealing appearance from Viola Davis as Donald Miller's mother. She has to go toe-to-toe with Meryl Streep, and the consensus for once is right: she more than holds her own. Her impassioned speech adds layers to the story and only pulls the truth farther from our grasp. Davis adds a human face to three otherwise symbolic figures, which makes her unessential yet welcome.

True to form, Doubt never lets us know what really happened. Oh, there's a clear winner, but we learn something about the method that the character took to best the other, and it raises more questions. Did the loser acquiesce out of guilt, or fear of accusation? Both Flynn and Aloysius know the power of doubt and how it could rip the parish apart, and with Sister James, the parish stand-in, in the middle of it, we'll never learn the full truth.