Watching Films On Rainy Days

As the hurricane passed by about seventy or eighty miles north of us it spread a wide arc of torrential rains and flooding coupled with gusts of high wind that at one point threatened to knock imprudent me to the ground when I had journeyed out with a friend for lunch.  These were the days to stay at home, and this we did for the most part, and saw three films where otherwise we might have been out of doors.  Our house guest who was from the parched lands of California literally reveled in being drenched in rain, we said, "good for you," but otherwise the out of doors had nothing to offer other than stupefying tropical humidity.  The three films were "White Mischief" a twenty year old drama based on a true story of a decadent group of English settlers, young sons of the aristocracy and so on, who had to make a living out in the colonies, in this case Kenya, in the so called Happy Valley, where they farmed.  It was the story of two sexual adventurers, male and female, and the disruption their behavior brought to the group, ending in scandalous murders.  The fascination of the film lay principally in the accomplished cast of actors who acted out the hurts, the angers, fascinations, and sexual attractions racing through the group of men and women whose fundamental decadence acted as the perfect catalyst to the monumental boredom the area engendered.  It makes you think about Isaak Dinesen's "Out of Africa" in a new light.  Another we watched was the documentary of Vivian Maier, the Chicago based nanny who managed to take over one hundred thousand photos during her off hours, which she secreted in a rented storage facility, just as she kept herself a secret from her employers through the years.  The effort to build a character from the reminiscences of her now grown up charges and their parents is only partially successful; she was aggressively private.  Much more revealing was a selection of her photos showing an astonishing capacity to frame the happenstance and unexpected, and the humanity of her direct vision into the subjects who came before her camera.  Here was revealed a woman who surrendered all of herself to the vision outside of herself, from which Mr. Maloof, who somewhat discovered her, promoted her photos,  tries to assemble a person (although at the end of the film it is not clear that she has really emerged from behind the assiduously locked doors of the rooms she inhabited in her employers homes),  The third film we watched was about the American pilot of the U2 that was shot down over Russia and the efforts of an American lawyer (Tom Hanks) to arrange a deal with the Russians for the return of one of their spies (Mark Rylance) captured by the Americans.  The acting was exceptionally strong in this film, but it is not a kind of film I enjoy.  Everything happened to the various protagonists of this story; the makers of the film never went into how they felt as the story unfolded.  I tried to explain that I always come away from films like this thinking that I had read the account in The New York Times and no closer to the persons who were the protagonists than what the printed word allowed me.  My husband and our house guest were united in their disgust exclaiming that I was a fool.