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.