International Picks
7/10
"Dying is easy; comedy is hard," said an American stage actor before he breathed his last. I think that's why I'm inordinately impressed by successful light comedies - they're so rare. The Full Monty is a spirited story of suddenly unemployed steel workers in the North of England. Off-balance and broke, they cast about for something to do and hit on the idea of becoming male strippers.

Australian actor Tom Wilkinson plays a hilariously hotheaded One-the only group member who knows how to dance. Robert Carlyle is a flaky, big- dreaming Seven on the run from his own desperation. Mark Addy is an angry resigned Nine convinced that the stripping will only lead to humiliation. Carlyle played the violent psychotic Eight in Trainspotting.

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4/29
There's one word for every aspect of Un Couer En Hiver (A Heart in Winter): elegant. Pretty, porcelain-doll-faced Emannuelle Beart is a concert violinist who gives her violin (and her unrequited love) to cold, stingy repairman Daniel Auteuil (Five with a Four wing). When I first saw this film in 1992 I thought it was written by an Enneagram student, so exact is its portrayal of a unhealthy Five.

Emannuelle Beart is probably a real life Two. Her characters often have a rough time in love, as if her movies have to punish her for being so beautiful. In L'Enfer (The Hell) she marries an unhealthy counter-phobic Six, not unlike Billy Zane in Dead Calm. Most of the movie tracks the husband's degeneration into paranoidal jealousy. The film is harrowing but is instructive about the extremes of unhealthy Sixness.

Though it may annoy French people, Eric Rohmer's films always remind me of Woody Allen movies; his characters are openly neurotic in a similar way. Instead of Allen's Sixes, Rohmer's films often showcase Fours.
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A Tale of Winter dwells on a Four (Charlotte Very) who waits in perpetual longing for the return of a man who abandoned her. When we first meet her, she seems an irritable, self-indulgent, whiner unfoundedly pining away for her lost love. But the joke of the film is that he comes back to her in a way that exactly matches her romantic fantasy.

Another useful Rohmer film is Chloe in the Afternoon, about a Four businessman (Bernard Verley) who becomes fascinated with a flightily eccentric Seven (Zouzou). The film show us a Four growing hypnotized by his own romantic fantasies before snapping out of his trance when reality intrudes. Chloe has a surprisingly moving ending when we finally hear from Verley's long-suffering Niney wife.
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3/30
In Career Girls, British director Mike Leigh's follow-up to Secrets and Lies, two college roommates remeet and compare their relationship then and now. Katrin Cartlidge plays the Eight while Lynda Steadman is the phobic Six. Career Girls works well as a character study though not as a narrative. It pointedly relies on coincidence and unsuccessfully tries to rationalize the device.

The same Eight-Six character relationship can be seen in the movie Leaving Normal reviewed in the Video Guide. The Eight is played by Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly is the phobic Six. The Eight-Six dynamic is also destructively evident in John Cassavettes's film, A Woman Under the Influence. Gena Rowlands (real-life Nine) plays a terrified, unstable Six married to violent, desperate Eight Peter Falk (real-life Nine with an 8 wing).
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Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies is a stunning movie that deserved its Oscar nominations and critical ballyhoo. At first it seems like melodrama but it's more like a psychodrama, one that rolls towards a powerful ending that will leave you either bathed in sweat or tears.

Morris (Timothy Spall), is the story's moral hero, a Nine with a 1 wing. Brenda Blethyn plays a screechy, whiny self-involved Two, who, by film's end, has become highly sympathetic. Phyllis Logan plays Spall's brittle Oneish wife. The other characters are not so Enneagramatically clear.

Leigh's earlier movie Naked is also worth a look for an in-depth portrait of an unhealthy Eight, played by David Thewlis. He is never pleasant but interesting if you're learning about the Enneagram. The film is brutal and funny.
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Speaking of Gena Rowlands, Unhook the Stars is a fine showcase for her acting even if it's not a great movie. Nick Cassavettes, the film's writer/director is a Nine with an 8 wing. So is Gena Rowlands and she plays her style in this movie. Marisa Tomei, a fluttery, ungenerous actress, is better than usual here as an single mother Eight who bonds with Rowlands.
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Billy Wilder's 1950 Sunset Boulevard centers on an insane, melancholic has-been movie star named Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) who lives in a gothic mansion that reflects her memories of past glory. She's an unhealthy Two - a social subtype characterized by excessive, prideful ambition. Her delirious obsession is of returning to the movies and making a comeback, a "return to greatness." She also demonstrates an unhealthy Two's connection to the low side of Four.
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I sometimes dread screening old movies because they are often corny and crudely made but this movie is timeless and Gloria Swanson is fabulous. Erich von Stronheim is in the background as Swanson's Fiveish chauffeur and William Holden is a corrupt Threeish golden boy whom Swanson desperately falls for. The story is actually narrated by his corpse.

Sunset Boulevard was eventually made into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber (Three with a Four wing). Several women were cast in the Norma Desmond role including Glenn Close, Patti LuPone, Faye Dunaway and Betty Buckley. All are real life Twos.
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Another ambitious Two drives the plot of All About Eve. Bette Davis plays an aging actress who is sabotaged by a smiling-but-backbiting Eve, played by Anne Baxter. Latter is a Two with a 3 wing, consumed with ambition and skilled at deceit.

Davis is her usual self, often seeming like a nasty jealous Four and other times a Seven with an 8 wing. I read two biographies of her and never got her Enneagram style but she was likely a jealous competitive Four. Elegant, cynical, Fiveish George Sanders is in the background. Gary Merrill as Davis' fiance is a blustery, loyal Eight. This edgy intelligent movie is famous for its crackling dialogue.
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While we're at it, Gone With the Wind has been recently reissued and Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) is another ambitious Two, with elements of the intimate subtype-her tendencies toward coquettish seduction and haughty blaming. Consistent with the subtype, she's melancholically fixated on Ashley Wilkes (something of a Nine). She's also rivalrous with her sister, a Good Girl Two (1 wing) played by Olivia deHavilland.

Vivien Leigh was a real life Four and sometimes played them (Ship of Fools). The black housekeeper (Hattie McDaniel) is a One. Her assistant (Butterfly McQueen) is an hysterical Two. Gone With the Wind is distinctly racist, by the way.

Clark Gable's Rhett Butler seems an Eight and a Seven at different points in the story. Rhett is written as an Eight but Gable was a Seven with an Eight wing. He went back and forth between those styles throughout his career. In 1958's Run Silent, Run Deep he was an abusive Eight submarine commander pitted against a defiant, principled One played by Burt Lancaster. In 1961's The Misfits he is clearly playing a Seven to Marilyn Monroe's Six.
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