Just a few nights ago, I watched a movie which I really didn’t know anything about, except that it starred Naomi Watts, one of my very favorite actors, and that it was described as in the genre of “Suspense,” and that it was directed by Philip Noyce, who has made some fine movies in that realm.
I really don’t see too many new movies I like, which is a subject for another essay. But I do not stop trying to find a few good ones, which is why I watched “The Desperate Hour,” a very recent film. The title of course evokes the name of the movie “The Desperate Hours,” the suspense thriller which starred Humphrey Bogart. I was pretty sure that this movie was not a remake, and not about a similar subject. But I really had no idea of what it was about.
It starts with Naomi Watts, the mother of two children, trying to get them ready for school. Her cute five-year old or so daughter is not a problem. But her older son, probably about sixteen or so, does not want to get out of bed, and he says that doesn’t think he will go to school. He is obviously unhappy, we don’t know if it is a somewhat typical teenage boy’s rebelling against things, or something else. Naomi says that he should get ready (he has a truck, and can drive himself), but she does not argue with him.
She makes sure her little girl leaves on the bus, and then, at least as I recall it, she decides to take a run, to try to deal with her obvious stress. She jogs on a pretty path surrounded by trees, not far from the main highways. As she runs, she starts to get calls on her cell phone. She talks to her mother, who is flying back into town. She talks to a woman friend who has scheduled a lunch for them and another female friend. She calls about her car which is in the shop.
But then she gets calls, and hears news on her phone (something I never do, I really am such a luddite that I only use my phone for calls and texts), which begin to worry her. We are learning along with her, what is going on. There is apparently some serious incident at a nearby school, and it involves some kind of threat of shooting.
One thing about Naomi Watts, at least in the films I have seen with her, is that she always seems real, without having to act. She has an open and expressive face, and one can identify with her, irrespective of gender. In this movie, she is a caring mother who does not have a husband, and she must take care of the two children she loves.
She is terrified that her little girl is in danger. She calls her school. She learns that there is a serious incident, not at that school, but there is a general lockdown. Her little girl should be safe, but Naomi’s mother must pick her up after she lands. Naomi tries to call about her car, but she cannot get it right away, nor can she get one of those taxi services. She tries to run toward the school where her son goes. She is not sure if he has left for school or stayed home. She learns that he did apparently go to school, because a helpful person, maybe from the car shop, is able to see his truck by using his phone.
Then things become even more terrifying for her. There is a sense that perhaps her son is the one who is the threat of violence. She has called 911, and spoken to a very caring and helpful woman, who does connect her to the police department. The detective ultimately asks questions about her son; does he have access to guns, what kind? We learn that her son has been devastated by the loss of his father, her husband, in a car crash, and has been having psychological issues.
Naomi cannot allow herself to lose control, or fall apart, even though she still has miles to go to run to the school, and she has slipped and hurt her foot and now is limping. She keeps getting and making calls. It may sound contrived, but watching it, it seemed very real and immediate; and everything she does seems understandable from a reasoning and emotional level.
I will not tell you what happens after that, but the movie is tense and very involving throughout. What it is about is an extension of so many of the stories of the last few years, stories which almost seem to run into one another, so that one tries to remember which was which; the shooting at the schools in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland Florida; the Pulse Nightclub in Florida; the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; the killing of many people in Las Vegas by a man whose motives never were discerned.
There were more. Who can forget those two teenagers in Oregon who gleefully shot their classmates with long-range guns? I never forgot about the young man who went to a Batman movie, and before it started, put on a mask, and started shooting people.
I may have gotten the facts a bit wrong on some of these, but not too much. One could look them up, if one wants to revisit them. One can look for motives or patterns, but will not find too much, other than that they all involved males with assault weapons who either took their own life soon after killing as many people as they could, or figuratively seemed to do so in what is somewhat glibly called “suicide by cop,” where they fully expect to be killed by law enforcement, but only after they have killed as many adults and children as they can.
We just have had another one, of course. A man who now appears to have been identified, although the police have not yet said that he is the suspect.. A Black man who appears to have written various social posts about homelessness, and attacking the mayor of New York City. I am sure that we will learn much more about him and what he wrote. Will it mean much? Not really, not in terms of preventing the next one or ten of these.
Oh, yes, writing this has just reminded me of the couple whose son went to school and killed people with the assault rifle they had gotten him as a present, and then they, at least the mother, tried to help him evade capture. Clearly, the dreadful shootings which had preceded that, did not cause the parents to make sure that their son did not have an assault weapon; they instead made sure he could have one. There really is not much to learn, at least from a prevention perspective, from these events, and prevention should of course be the most important, if not the only, thing we want to learn.
This latest assault so incredibly seems to have not led to deaths, only to serious injuries, due to the gun misfiring. He also appears to have had bombs and a detonator, it is so easy to find as many weapons as one wants. Officials do not want to term it a terrorist act yet. How is that defined, is that only about political terror? People in the Brooklyn subway were terrified. What do all these delineations ultimately mean?
Taking a brief look at some comments on what is termed the social media, the ethnicity of this individual, African-American, is important to some. Some people want to be sure that everyone knows that this person is not a the typical White male shooter, but a Black one. They accuse the more liberal network of trying to understate this. One wonders how this will affect the elections, with Republicans ready to exploit anything to purvey their “law and order; Democrats want to defund the police; lawless Black people are the biggest internal threat” rhetoric.
It is inevitable, and it provides fuel for discussion, but in my opinion, it is all misdirection. There are a large number of people, mostly all male, who harbor anger, hatred, resentment; and who in his country have the easy opportunity to turn it into mass killing, because of the almost unlimited access to guns. The Far Right Supreme Court, the body that Republicans always said should not legislate, may very well issue a decision this year which makes it unconstitutional for any state to place any limitations on an individual’s right to carry assault weapons in public or anywhere. We are the only country in the world that is so warped in that fashion, and of course we have by far the most gun killings of any nation.
What desperately needs to be done is to do at least some limiting of assault weapons, such as we once did. Without that, all this investigating of “causes” and “motives” will do no more than provide television coverage and talk show fodder, which will then fade out until the next one or ten of these horrible events.
There are indeed many good people, including Shannon Watts, and Fred Gutenberg, and David Hogg, who try so hard to get responsible gun laws passed. Maybe they and others will eventually succeed. Right now, all we have are the stories, and the pontificating which ends in nothing much. Yet if you see the movie “The Desperate Hour,” you will very likely end up in the emotional place of the film’s last words, spoken by one of the protagonists, and wholeheartedly agreeing with it.
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The Confluence 