Enneagram Movie Notes
Tom Condon
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Here's a range of movies that have clear Enneagram styles. They
are in no particular order although the selection is Six-heavy.
Talk to Her. Pedro Almodóvar's subtle, textured
film features a movie rarity: a fully realized male Two. It tells
the story of a friendship between two men Benigno (Javier
Cámara), a Two, and Marco (Darío Grandinetti), Fourish
with a 5 wing. Benigno is a lonely male nurse caring for a beautiful
young ballet dancer (Leonor Watling) left brain-dead by a traffic
accident. Marco is keeping vigil at the same hospital over his
comatose girlfriend, an injured bullfighter (Rosario Flores),
something of a counterphobic Six.
The plot pivots on an incident that is morally reprehensible but
somehow doesn't seem so. It is more like a Twoish act of love
that is both selfish and self-less. Both men are intimate subtypes
and form a close tender bond. There is an implicit gay subtext,
but, gay or straight, the film seems to say that love has a mind
of its own. Elegant, exquisitely acted and amazingly assured.
The Children of Paradise. French classic filmed in Nazi-occupied Paris during WWII. The film details the loves of a Threeish actress (Arletty) in a theater company. The two main rivals for her heart are a sullen Four mime with a 5 wing (Jean Louis Barrault) and a cheery extraverted Seven (Pierre Brasseur). The movie is something of a soap opera, but it's literate, multi-faceted and highly entertaining. The two male leads are in high contrast to each other.
The Seven Year Itch is dated and hopelessly sexist, but also sharp, sarcastic and funny. A married man (Tom Euell) is the victim of his own fantasies about neighbor Marilyn Monroe. He is a Six (7 wing) who can't tell his projections from reality: "Some people have flat feet," he says, "some have dandruff; I have this appalling imagination." Good illustration of a Six going to the low side of Three as Euell pretends to be who he isn't in order to impress Monroe. Then he gets trapped in his own impersonation and returns to catastrophic worrying and rationalizing. The character is a precursor to Woody Allen.
The Man Who Bought Mustique. A fascinating documentary about a charming, ill-tempered One (2 wing). Lord Glenconner is a self-preservation subtype who has no idea how angry he sounds.
Safe House features Star Trek's Patrick Stewart as a flagrantly paranoid counterphobic Six (5 wing), who may have something to be paranoid about. He has a One daughter, a Seven friend and a Three enemy.
13 Conversations About One Thing. Alan Arkin gives a great performance as a dour, pessimistic Six (5 wing) aggravated by a cheery, optimistic Seven. While some of its elements are tragic, the film's net effect is oddly buoyant. Full of Six themes like fate versus free will and doubt versus faith. Matthew McConaughey is Sevenish, although his character is depressed, and Clea Duvall plays a Nine.
The Business of Strangers. Strong performances highlight this character study of two women, Julia Stiles, an Eight, and Stockard Channing (Threeish) who get tangled in a twisty complicated rivalry. Their victim Frederick Weller is also Threeish.
My First Mister is a sometimes familiar, sometimes fresh tale of a relationship between an older man, Albert Brooks, a Six (5 wing) and a young woman, Leelee Sobieski, a Four (self-preservation subtype) Well-acted, occasionally touching and not what it sounds like. Brooks's son is an angry One.
John Sayles's movie Limbo is overlong but tightly acted by David Strathairn, playing an obvious Nine. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is a counterphobic Six and her moody teenage daughter (Vanessa Martinez) is a Four.
1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie stars Maggie Smith as a flawed but sympathetic Two who is an over-involved teacher at an English girls' school. Robert Stephens is a Sevenish artist, and the various forces who oppose Smith are Oneish, including the school's headmistress, Celia Johnson, and a hypocritical One student (Pamela Franklin) who brings Smith down.
Affliction features Nick Nolte as a counterphobic Six going mad. James Coburn is his vital, impossible and abusive father, a very unhealthy Eight. Willem Dafoe plays Nolte's Nineish brother and Nolte's angry ex-wife is a One. Though downbeat, the acting is powerful and brilliant. The film shows how Sixes can victimize others while believing they are victims.
Billy Crystal is the unwilling Six psychiatrist of Mafioso Robert DeNiro in the coarse-but-funny Analyze This. Bullied by Eight DeNiro, Crystal initially refuses to treat him but then grows interested in DeNiro's psychological dilemmas in spite of himself. Even as Crystal is about to be executed he is still on the job, doggedly asking questions, convinced that DeNiro's relationship with his father is the key to his adult problems. The mobster finally gets in touch with his feelings in the middle of a wild gun battle.
One of the best films of 1998 was Lolita, with Jeremy
Irons as a Four with a 5 wing (intimate subtype). Stanley Kubrick's
1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov's novel featured James Mason as
a Five (4 wing) sexually obsessed with his vulnerable yet tough
stepdaughter, an Eight played by Sue Lyons. The Kubrick film was
a black comedy while the newer one is genuinely tragic. The girl
here is still Eightish but not as obviously so. In both films
her mother is a Two.
Lolita 1998 was well-liked by some critics while many others
said it was boring. I found it beautifully done and horribly sad.
The film's sexual elements are as they should be: unsalacious
and yet explicit enough to be uncomfortable to watch. The 50-year-old
man's affair with a 14-year-old girl is presented as a failure;
he is a tragic figure who does an awful thing. In a career of
good performances, Jeremy Irons has not been better than in Lolita.
The small independent movie Buffalo 66 manages to be grungy, tender, violent and hilarious, sometimes all at once. Except for a dull patch near the end, the film moves fast across its crazy-quilt story. Vincent Gallo plays an agitated counterphobic Six, just out of prison, who kidnaps a Niney stripper and demands that she pretend to be his wife on an ill-advised trip home to visit Gallo's loopy parents. The latter are perfectly played by Ben Gazarra, as Gallo's irrational, eruptive father something of a Seven with an 8 wing and Anjelica Huston as the nut-case Twoish mother. Consistent with the profile for unhealthy counterphobic Sixes, Gallo is scared and aggressive by turns, while underneath he's pathetic and kind.
Two movies that contrast a Five with a 4 wing and a Five with
a 6 wing are Love and Death on Long Island and PI.
Love and Death stars John Hurt as a voyeuristic widower
and English literature professor who accidentally stumbles into
a screening of a sleazy teenage comedy starring Jason Priestly
(from tv's Beverly Hills 90210). The elegant, snobbish Hurt "falls
in love" with Priestly's B-movie screen persona and decides
to seek the actor out at his residence on Long Island. Hurt essentially
becomes a stalker, befriending the harmless, slightly vacant Priestly
while in the grip of an obsessive love that Hurt knows is ridiculous.
Love and Death On Long Island is a modern retelling of
Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, which also features an aging
Five in love with a young boy from afar. Death in Venice
was filmed in 1972 with Dirk Bogarde in the lead role playing
a clear Five. Critics who knew the source book complained that
the film was solemn and tragic whereas Thomas Mann meant the whole
thing to be a comedy, a farce of the passions.
Love and Death captures the humor in Hurt's situation,
especially making fun of his proud, pointless inability to handle
the daily practicalities of life. He is a social subtype affiliated
with a rarified group of people who have arcane insider knowledge
(think academia). Hurt the actor is excellent and Priestly
holds his own against his classically trained elder.
PI is a bizarre, stylish film about a Five with a 6 wing
(Sean Gullette), a math genius who is seeking the existence of
a mystical number. Meanwhile he is being pursued by government
agents and going mad from both the stress of his task and the
isolation he needs in order to stay focused. He is a self-preservation
Five characterized by a tendency to withdraw from the world. The
film tries to convey what it feels like to be schizoid and mostly
succeeds. It has a few moments of intense disquieting gore right
at the end, so be warned.
The Governess follows a young woman (Minnie Driver) as she moves away from home and takes her first job on a remote coastal estate in the North of England. She becomes the governess to a family and falls in love with her boss, Tom Wilkinson, an older One scientist/photographer. An affair follows, made all the more illicit because Driver is Jewish, evidently a bad thing to be in those days. Wilkinson's One is sober and serious, a man of science fighting the irrationality of his feelings. The film has its moments but is choppy and predictable. Driver is far too contemporary an actress for the Victorian-era story.
A Merry War also features a very clear One. Based on
a George Orwell novel, the film stars Richard Grant as a cranky,
dissatisfied advertising executive who impulsively quits his job
to become a full-time poet. Grant is a social One, characterized
by rigidity and a fondness for ranting about the evils of civilization.
Instead of making a real go at poetry, Grant descends into chaos,
squalor and Sevenish licentiousness. A One's connection to Four
is clear as Grant becomes exceedingly melancholy, self-pitying
and self-victimizing. Luckily, he is surrounded by tolerant Nineness.
Helena Bonham-Carter is his too-patient fiancée although
her Enneagram style is not precisely clear. Grant's publisher/benefactor
(Gordon Clapp) is a gentle forbearing Nine.
Twelve Angry Men (1997) is a remake of a 1957 American
movie that was itself a remake of a television play. Nearly all
of the action takes place in one room as a jury deliberates the
fate of a young man on trail for murder. The plot hinges on the
American legal notion of "reasonable doubt" i.e.
if there are enough holes in what seems like compelling evidence
the jury must return a verdict of not guilty. At first the jury
members sound convinced of the young man's guilt, but one man
begins to raise doubts and a long argument ensues.
Both the original and the remake are in video stores. The first
is tightly written and well-acted but corny. The latter uses virtually
the same script with a few dubious attempts at updating. The central
character was originally played by Henry Fonda as a One and now
by Jack Lemmon as a mixture of a Six and a One. The character
raises ethical objections and plays devil's advocate towards an
irrational, overly forceful Eight Lee J. Cobb in the original
and George C. Scott in the remake. Cobb almost always played Eights
in the movies and so did Scott.
The other clear styles are an ultra-reasonable One, first portrayed
by E.G. Marshall and now by Armin Muller-Stahl. There is also
a bigoted Eight, first played by Ed Begley, Sr. and now by Mykeleti
Williamson. In the remake, this character has been changed into
a black militant who is so bitter and nihilistic that he changes
his vote from guilty to innocent for no reason so the new
script makes him seem like an idiot.
There is also an airy, blasé advertising executive, a Seven,
originally played by Robert Webber and now by William L. Petersen
of television's CSI. Petersen played a very clear Seven
in a good but obscure movie called Hard Promises. He played
a Five in Manhunter, the wonderful prequel to The Silence
of the Lambs. Manhunter was remade a couple of years
ago as the flat-footed Red Dragon.
For in-depth treatments of many other films, see The
Enneagram Movie and Video Guide. Tom Condon teaches workshops
and publishes books, CDs and videotapes on the Enneagram. For
a catalog and workshop information contact:
The Changeworks, PO Box 5909 Bend, Or 97708-5909
Or call: 541-382-1894 email:changewk@yahoo.com
http://www.thechangeworks.com