February 7, 2006

It was time to sit down with my church’s personnel committee and plan a new year, and I was ready. I knew just how to make the case for a salary increase: I asked for a raise to a level equal to 100 times our secretary’s salary. I explained that the standard metric for executives is a salary equal to 400 times that of the company’s lowest-paid employee. I expected the committee to praise me for my humility and to accept a salary request that was only one-fourth of the accepted norm. But its “no” was fast, fierce and firm.

In the play A Thousand Clowns, by Herb Gardner, a character named Murray discovers that he can offer a simple apology to almost anyone—even a complete stranger—and he or she will forgive him. He stands on the corner of 51st and Lexington in New York City one day, telling those who walk by him, “I’m sorry,” and in almost every instance, he’s forgiven on the spot. “That’s the most you can expect from life,” he muses, “a really good apology for all the things you won’t get.”

A cynical teenager, backpack slung over one shoulder, sighs to his buddy who’s just announced his parents’ divorce: “Joint custody blows.” So begins The Squid and the Whale, the Kramer vs. Kramer for our time. It tells the story of a divorce not from the adults’ point of view—a glamorous Meryl Streep and intense Dustin Hoffman revealing their pain—but from the children’s. The parents in Squid are portrayed by Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels, first-rate actors cast as utterly unattractive divorcing parents.

The myth that sports are racially redemptive makes for formulaic movies. Glory Road feels a lot like Remember the Titans. The films (both produced by Jerry Bruckheimer) show how a team’s drive to win a championship overcomes racial divisions and leads blacks and whites to bond like brothers.

Adopting the approach of most movies made about the life of the notorious pleasure seeker, Lasse Hallström’s Casanova isn’t a biography but a free-form embellishment. It treats Casanova as a legend, a symbol—like Zorro. Though he’s celebrated for his sexual conquests in his city—the lush, candied Venice of the mid-18th century—few people actually recognize Casanova (Heath Ledger) on sight, though many claim to. When he stops on the street to watch himself represented in a puppet show, a man observes that the figure on the miniature stage is Casanova to the very life.