[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]
Two
important American Studies lessons from one of our quirkier, funnier, and more
affecting late 20th century films.
Nobody’s Fool (1994),
the Paul Newman starring vehicle based on the 1993
Richard Russo novel of the same name (which I will admit, in a very
non-literature professor moment, to not having read), is a very funny movie. It’s
funny in its
script, which includes plenty of laugh-out-loud funny insults, retorts, and
quips; Newman’s Sully gets the lion’s share, but perhaps the single funniest
line is given to a judge who critiques a trigger-happy local policemen by
noting, “You know my feelings on arming morons: you arm one, you’ve got to arm
them all, otherwise it wouldn’t be good sport.” And it’s just as funny in its
world, its creation of a cast of quirky and memorable characters (who, not
coincidentally, are played by some of our most talented character actors,
including Jessica
Tandy in her final role). That those same characters are ultimately the
source of a number of hugely moving moments is a testament to the film’s (and
probably book’s) true greatness.
Unlike many of
the other late 20th and early 21st century films I’ve
discussed in this space—Lone
Star and City of Hope,
Gangs
of New York, Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala, and many more—Nobody’s Fool is not explicitly engaged with significant American
Studies issues. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t American Studies
lessons to be learned from its subtle and wise perspectives on identity and
community. For one thing, Sully’s most central culminating perspective (SPOILER
alert, here and in the next paragraph!) is a powerful and important vision of
our interconnectedness to the many communities of which we’re a meaningful
part: “I just found out I’m somebody’s grandfather. And somebody’s father. And
maybe I’m somebody’s friend in the bargain,” Sully notes, rejecting a tempting
but escapist future in favor of staying where he is; while he has ostensibly
known about all these relationships for years, what he has realized through the
film’s events is both how significant these roles are for his own identity and
life, and how much his presence or absence in relation to them will in turn
influence the people and communities around him.
If Sully has
learned that specific, significant lesson by the film’s end, he has also, more
simply yet perhaps even more crucially, done something else: recognized the
possibility for change. Sully’s not a young man by the time we meet him, and
it’s fair to say that he’s very set in his ways; one of his first lines of the
film, in response to his landlady (Tandy) offering him tea, is “No. Not now,
not ever,” and the exchange becomes a mantra of sorts for the film, shorthand
for Sully’s routines (with every person in his life) and the fixity of his
perspective and voice. So it’s particularly salient that the film ends with an
extended and different version of this exchange: “No. How many times do I have
to tell you?” Newman replies, and Tandy answers, “Other people change their
minds occasionally. I keep thinking you might.” “You do? Huh,” are Newman’s
final words in the film, and he delivers them with surprise and, it seems to
me, a recognition, paired with the earlier epiphany about interconnections,
that perhaps Tandy is right, and he has future shifts ahead of him that he
can’t yet imagine. If the American future is going to be all that it might be,
that’s going to depend on most—perhaps all—of us being open to change, most
especially in our own identities and perspectives; Sully’s only begun that
trajectory, but exemplifies its possibility, at any point in our lives and
arcs, for sure.
Next
foolish text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?
