The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts & News
Tuesday, September 13, 2016 — 5

Heart of ‘Morris’ can 
triumph over flaws

By MADELEINE GAUDIN

Daily Arts Writer

If “Morris From America” is 

anything, it’s charming. With 
a palette swathed in colors 
reminiscent 
of 
an 
Ikea 

showroom, 
the 
coming-

of-age 
film 

follows 
thir-

teen-year-old 
Morris (new-
comer 
Markees 

Christmas) 
and his father, 
Curtis 
(Craig 

Robinson, 
“Hot Tub Time Machine”) as 
they navigate life as expats in 
Heidelberg, Germany.

Christmas plays the titular 

Morris with a subtlety rarely 
found in child actors. He lets the 
audience in on the innate contra-
dictions of adolescence — in one 
moment, he can be both insight-
ful and clueless, confident and 
confused.

At the prompting of his Ger-

man tutor (Carla Juri, “Wet-
lands”), Morris joins the local 
youth center, where he meets 
Katrin (newcomer Lina Keller), 
an older girl who befriends Mor-
ris seemingly just to bully him. 
Morris’s futile pursuit of Katrin 
is the center point around which 
the film is grounded. Unlike 
the average coming-of-age film, 
Morris doesn’t get the girl and 
the movie benefits because of it.

While Katrin shares the most 

screen time with Morris, it’s the 

relationship 
between 
Morris 

and his father that’s the rich-
est and most appealing. The 
film opens with the two argu-
ing about the necessity of a hook 
in a rap song. They disagree on 
almost everything from flow to 
curfew, but at the end of the day 
they need each other with an 
intensity unmatched in the rest 
of the film. Morris wants Katrin, 
but needs Curtis.

What Hartigan does a won-

derful job of illustrating is the 
symmetry of their two lives. 
Both are shot from the same 
angle, sitting alone at the dining 
room table — Morris with a pea-
nut butter, jelly and potato chip 
sandwich and a porn magazine, 
and Curtis with a steak and an 
imaginary conversation with his 
dead wife. The two scenes work 
in tandem because they high-
light the deep loneliness and 
sense of isolation that color both 
characters’ lives. Through mag-
azines and imagination, both 
men are desperate for human 
connection. The irony (and, 
sadly, the realism) comes in the 
fact that despite their despera-
tion, they cannot connect with 
one another.

Life is hard for a kid from the 

Bronx trying to tackle adoles-
cence in Heidelberg. And Har-
tigan does not shy away from 
addressing the day-to-day rac-
ism that Morris has to put up 
with. He’s constantly fielding 
questions about his basketball 
skills, possible drug trafficking 
and sexual promiscuity (at the 
ripe age of thirteen when sex 

is so, so painful to talk about). 
These moments help solidify not 
only the reality of small-town 
Germany, but also the degree to 
which Morris is unlike anyone 
else around him. And how that 
difference is the root of much 
of his, and most likely also his 
father’s, loneliness. At the end of 
the day, he and his father are, as 
Curtis puts it, “the only brothers 
in Heidelberg.”

“Morris From America” is 

almost perfect. There’s heart 
and there’s charm and just 
enough edge. But it fails to find 
the type of resolution you’d 
expect. Morris and Curtis end 
the film just as alone, just as 
adrift as they were at the start. 
It’s realistic, perhaps, that mon-
umental change cannot be made 
in 90 minutes of storytelling, but 
it makes the billing of the film as 
a coming-of-age movie hard to 
fully believe. Morris is the right 
age to “come of age,” but it’s hard 
to tell if he really does.

Steeped with loneliness and 

pulsating with heart and hip hop, 
“Morris From America,” despite 
its shortcomings, is a beautiful 
testament to the heartbreaking 
weight of adolescence. 

A24

Yeah, they want it back to back.

ALBUM REVIEW

B+

Morris 
From 
America

A24

State Theatre
If the film is 
anything, it’s 

charming.

By SOPHIA KAUFMAN

Daily Gender & Media Columnist
F

or the past two sum-
mers, I’ve worked at a 
month-long arts camp 

for kids from six to fifteen-
years-old in NYC. That’s a 
wide range that encompasses 
different learning styles, sens-
es of humor and educational 
backgrounds, so each year 
when we take the kids to a 
show the camp always tries to 
pick something that the older 
kids will like, but won’t be 
too complicated for the little 
ones to understand. This year, 
we saw “School of Rock” on 
Broadway.

I hadn’t seen the movie 

“School of Rock” in several 
years, but it was a staple in my 
household when my brothers 
and I were little. For anyone 
unfamiliar with it, here’s the 
basic plot: Dewey, a couch 
potato who moonlights as a 
musician, is kicked out of his 
band while living in the apart-
ment of his tweedy friend Ned 
and Ned’s girlfriend, Patty. 
The latter, sick of Dewey’s 
bullshit — he doesn’t pay rent, 
doesn’t clean up after himself, 
is a bad influence on Ned, is 
generally aimless and annoy-
ing — tells him to find some 
rent money or get out. Desper-
ate, Dewey takes a job meant 
for Ned as a substitute teacher 
at a prep school for kids, 
teaches them how to play rock 
music and kidnaps them to 
perform at Battle of the Bands, 
having used the power of Ste-
vie Nicks’s music (and beer) to 
manipulate the principal into 
saying yes to that “field trip.”

When all the prep school 

parents storm the school, they 
discover all their children are 
at Battle of the Bands with 
Dewey, after Dewey tells them 
how great their kids are. The 
sappy moral lesson is that 
sometimes adults don’t listen 
to their kids and project their 
own priorities and desires onto 
children. But there’s a second 
lesson I realized that a whole 
generation walked away with, 
while I watched the story 
unfold on a Broadway stage.

And it’s about 

The Girlfriend.
The worst part about 

“School of Rock” was the 
depiction of Patty, Ned’s girl-
friend. The trope of the nag-
ging wife is ubiquitous and 
one of the most easily glanced 
over. The one joke of the entire 
show that got the biggest 
laugh from the kids was when 
Ned, who went to Battle of 
the Bands to support Dewey, 
rounds on Patty and tells her 
loudly, in a voice full of frus-
tration, to “Shut UP!”

There was a laugh break 

lasting almost a minute. It’s 
the ultimate PG “bros before 
hos” moment. And I get it — 
Patty is annoying, and a bit of 
a control freak. But she’s also 
right. Dewey has been exploit-
ing his friendship with Ned for 
who knows how long, and thus 
mooching off Patty. Dewey is 
the one in the wrong here, and 
in any real-life scenario, it’d 
be easier to see. Yet, the audi-
ence is led to sympathize with 

Dewey and gleefully hate Patty 
in every scene they share.

There were a few jokes that 

were packaged as commentary 
on the status of women in the 
music industry, or women in 
general, but they didn’t go over 
well. They were quick and the 
kids I was sitting with didn’t 
pick up on them. For example, 
there was a joke about women 
only making 75 cents to every 
dollar a man makes — but 
none of the kids from my camp 
group laughed. Not even the 
older kids understood the 
reference — I know, because I 
talked to them about it after-
wards. There were a few jokes 
that the kids did laugh at; 
when Dewey asks the students 
what the point of rock is, one 
kid quips “to get chicks” and 
Dewey agrees before remem-
bering that that’s not exactly 

the point he’s trying to make 
at that time. One girl refuses 
to be a groupie because she 
googled them and found out 
they are “sluts” who sleep with 
the band. (“Slut” is an ugly 
word to hear out of the mouths 
of middle school girls, espe-
cially in that context when it 
was so unnecessary, but that’s 
almost another article on its 
own.)

The best scenes in Broad-

way’s “School of Rock” by 
far are the group numbers 
in which all of the kids sing 
together, either about loving 
music, “sticking it to the man,” 
or about how their parents 
don’t listen to them. The script 
and score aren’t particularly 
strong, but that makes sense 
given the source material.

I’m not saying that “School 

of Rock” doesn’t have some 
good messages; I’m glad we 
took the kids to see it. But the 
writers had a chance to create 
a more nuanced character in 
Patty for the sake of the little 
girls on the stage and in the 
audience, and they didn’t — 
and that would have meant 
much more and had a much 
deeper effect than the throw-
away quips about the wage 
gap. Kids aren’t necessarily 
educated about the wage gap; 
it’s not something you can pick 
up on on your own. That’s why 
there are still people who deny 
its existence.

But the kinds of tropes that 

the character of Patty embod-
ies saturate our media. We 
can’t get away from them, 
and we absorb and internal-
ize them from a young age. 
And yes, women can be just 
as annoying as men — I’m not 
here to claim that any criti-
cism of a female character is 
an attack on women. But you 
do have to wonder about the 
speed and depth of internal-
ized stereotypes about men 
and women when a bunch of 
five-year-olds laugh harder at 
a man telling a woman to shut 
up than anything else in an 
entire show.

Kaufman is The Daily’s new 

Gender & Media Columnist. Email 

her at sophkauf@umich.edu.

GENDER & MEDIA COLUMN

A field trip lacking 

in feminism

The ultimate 

PG “bros before 

hos” moment

The University of Michigan’s 

Senate Advisory Committee on 
University 
Affairs 
convened 

Monday to discuss a lack of 
faculty 
engagement 
at 
the 

University of Michigan-Flint, 
and hear from UM-Flint faculty.

Jerry 
Sanders, 
UM-Flint 

associate professor of biology, 
said due to the lack of a faculty 
governance body, issues related 
to academics are often deferred 

to administrators.

“Unfortunately, 
for 
many 

years, 
support 
for 
faculty 

governance was very limited,” 
Sanders. “This has led to a 
culture where the benefits of 
faculty governance are not well 
known, and it is not practiced.”

Sanders noted there was once 

a faculty senate at UM-Flint, 
but it was disbanded several 
years ago. The absence of a 
governing body, he said, has 
resulted in power struggles 
between 
department 
heads, 

deans and faculty members, 

as well as a lack of professor 
involvement in policymaking 
on campus.

Quamrul 
Mazumder, 

UM-Flint associate professor 
of mechanical engineering, told 
the body that administrators 
often dismiss faculty concerns 
as non-grievable offenses.

“The 
divisive 
culture 

of 
powerlessness 
has 
led 

to 
widespread 
faculty 

disengagement,” 
Mazumder 

said.

The 
representatives 
from 

UM-Flint, 
after 
addressing 

the problems on their campus, 
offered up several potential 
remedies to the committee.

Sarah Lippert, an associate 

professor of art history at 
UM-Flint, said the current 
UM-Flint Campus Chancellor, 
Susan Borrego, and Provost 
Douglas Knerr have been far 
more cooperative than their 
predecessors on the issue of 
faculty governance and input.

“For the first time that many 

folks on campus can remember, 
we have a provost and a 
chancellor that are willing to 

work with us,” Lippert said.

Lippert asked for faculty from 

the University’s Ann Arbor and 
Flint campuses open a dialogue 
with the provost and chancellor 
at UM-Flint on the best way 
to handle faculty grievances 
and manage disputes between 
faculty, department chairs and 
deans.

In response, SACUA member 

John Lehman, professor of 
ecology 
and 
evolutionary 

biology at the University’s Ann 
Arbor campus, suggested that 
UM-Flint faculty come together 

to 
create 
a 
cross-campus 

review of grievance reports and 
consensus across colleges on 
the best ways to handle faculty 
issues.

SACUA 
Chair 
William 

Schultz, 
professor 
of 

mechanical engineering at the 
University’s Ann Arbor campus, 
ended the meeting by saying 
the committee would review 
the concerns of the UM-Flint 
faculty and reach a decision in 
the coming weeks.

SACUA hears communication concerns from UM-Flint

Representatives discuss need for faculty voice on campus, ask for action from Ann Arbor body

TIM COHN & 

ANDREW HIYAMA

Daily Staff Reporters

MAZIE HYAMS/Daily

SACUA member Robert Ortega at the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs meeting at the Fleming Build-
ing on Monday. 

MAZIE HYAMS/Daily

SACUA member John Lehman at the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs meeting at the Fleming Building 
Monday. 

