A Walker in the Suburbs

It would have happened last night, had it happened. But there was no seventh season of “Downton Abby” — and so I start this week without Lady Mary and Bates and Anna and all the crew.

Instead, I begin the week with “The People Vs. O.J. Simpson,” an excellent mini-series that just won a Golden Globe. But it did not take me out of myself and plop me down in the English countryside. It did not transport me to a place of elegance and ease.

For six years, there was Christmas, there was New Year’s — and there was Downton Abby. I don’t know if the scheduling was intentional, but it always seemed the perfect show for easing into the new year. It took the sting out of reentry.

Luckily, we live in an era of such television bounty that I couldn’t even be bothered to leave the house for a first-run film like “La La Land.” I needed screen therapy, and I got it — without venturing outdoors. But I didn’t have Downton. And that’s what I needed.

(Photo: PBS.org)

When I was expecting each of my babies, especially the first, I was physiologically incapable of watching any scene of childbirth in a movie or television show without shedding a tear or two. I was not an especially weepy pregnant woman, but there was something about the magic of it all that moved me every time. Matter of fact, there still is.

So imagine a TV program that features at least one and maybe more scenes of childbirth in each episode. It’s a “two hanky” affair if ever there was one.

But there’s more to the British drama “Call the Midwife” than a good cry. Set in the East End of London during the postwar baby boom, the show (based on the memoir of real life midwife Jenny Worth) follows the adventures of a team of nurse midwives (some of them nuns) based in the convent Nonatus House. It’s a cast of lovable characters serving poor women who have more children than they know what to do with but who are treated tenderly and with great compassion.

There is no malpractice insurance, no planned Caesarians. The midwives take it all as it comes, encouraging the mothers through difficult labors that would be treated in an operating room these days. And there are plenty of historical back stories, too  — polio makes an appearance, as do thalidomide babies.

But what makes the show so special is its big heart, its voice-overs at start and finish (done by Vanessa Redgrave), its frequent insistence that it’s really all about love.

There is something so old-fashioned and inspiring and true about the show that watching it makes me feel like a slightly different (enlarged? more tolerant?) person.  Call the Midwife? For me, it’s Watch the Midwives.

(Historic dockyard Chatham where “Midwives” is filmed. Courtesy Flickriver)

The Oscars are less than a week away. The Netflix movies had been piling up. It was time for a binge-watch weekend.

It began with “Under the Sand,” a French drama with Charlotte Rampling. I’d like to see “45 Years” before next Sunday, so this was a Rampling appetizer of sorts. Next up was “Bridge of Spies,” a best picture nominee already available for rent on Amazon. It was long, as advertised, but because I was watching it in the basement, I could pause and come back an hour later to finish it.

“The Revenant” was the only film I saw in a theater last weekend. It was also long, as well as beautiful and brutal (also as advertised). After an evening of “Foxcatcher,” a 2014 film for which Steve Carrell was nominated for best actor, I ended the day with an hour of “The West Wing” with Celia and Suzanne.

Yesterday was the Steve Jobs biopic, also available to rent, and just before bedtime, the second-to-last Downton Abbey. It, quite frankly, made the whole binge-watching weekend worthwhile.

When I was a kid you saw two movies for the price of one. Yesterday I two movies for the price of two — thanks to some felicitous timing at a gem of a small theater.

This place has smallish screens and no stadium seating — but four of the eight nominated feature films were playing there plus some selected shorts (which attract the die-hard fans).

What joy to find a good seat (on the right hand side two seats in), to snuggle down so my head was resting on the back, to stuff my windbreaker behind me for extra comfort — and then to enter the two fantasy worlds created on screen.

I left the movies as I always do, slightly stretched, slightly dazed, open to possibilities. A double feature is a short vacation.


(Photo: Courtesy Cinema Arts Theater)

Academy members look not as much for “feel-good” movies, critic Ann Hornaday wrote in a recent Washington Post article — but for “feel-deeply” movies. These are the films that become “Best Picture.”

Not always, but sometimes. This year, yes.

I had seen almost all  the nominated films by the time I made my way to “12 Years.” I’d hesitated at first, heard it was hard to watch — and it was. But when the film ended and I walked, half-dazed, out of the theater that cold gray Saturday, I felt emptied and re-filled. It was the kind of movie experience you have once or twice a year, if you’re lucky.

It was a reminder that nothing beats superb acting and straight story-telling, building to a powerful conclusion. It was a true catharsis – for the main character and for the movie-goers who took the journey with him.

(Taken last year at one of the great old theaters.)

The Golden Globes have happened, Oscar nominations will be announced soon — and yesterday I saw two movies back to back. It was a double feature of my own making, made possible by an art house theater that happened to be playing several of the films I want to see. The movies were “Nebraska” and “Philomena,” but that’s not important.

What’s important is that in that darkened theater there was no past or future, only present. The elusive present, so hard to reach. The present filled with motion and sound.

It was a present that took me out of myself and deposited me into the lives of others, where, for four hours, I lived quite happily.

Movie-going doesn’t take away our problems; it’s more like respite care. But sometimes, that’s enough.