A Depression-era drama about bankruptcy and aging and the quiet moral failures of the petit bourgeois, Make Way for Tomorrow is the anti-Avatar.
In a recent interview, James Cameron expressed frustration that critics have ignored the fact that the hero of Avatar is disabled. There’s a problem with that thought, of course. Avatar’s hero isn’t really disabled. In Cameron’s story, he runs around, leaps valiantly between giant tree limbs, screws a blue alien babe. (A less-thoughtful interview with Cameron on the subject of alien sexuality can be found here.) In reality, it’s less that Jake Sully is disabled and more that he’s not fully served by technological progress. It is a progress that, at the film’s close, allows him and the people around him to leave behind their bodies for the psychedelic pastures of the mind. In this idea, Avatar expresses the basic hope that technological progress might free us from our bodies and from the limitations of the physical world. It is a hope endemic to (and to some extent, realized by) the wonders of the capitalist free market. It is also a hope that looks good in 3D.
Just when you thought this kind of thing was all Hollywood was ever capable of, you come across a film like Make Way for Tomorrow, Leo McCarey’s Depression-era drama about bankruptcy and aging and the quiet moral failures of the petit bourgeois. In these things and more, Make Way is the anti-Avatar.
McCarey’s movie follows the plight of Ma and Pa Cooper (Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore) as their home is foreclosed upon and they are forced to separate. Ma finds herself in conflict with the loose ways of a younger generation. Pa finds himself unemployed and unwanted, a financial burden upon his already haggard daughter. The plot is a slow study of their inability to find place in a world in which they have no value, and the movie ends simply but wonderfully, with a lyrical sequence in which the couple is temporarily reunited on a date in midtown Manhattan.
All of which is to say, Make Way opens with a home foreclosure and closes on the permanent separation of an elderly married couple. For shear teariness and resistance to the fantasy of unrestrained success, it’s a pretty powerful fruit punch.
Unlike Avatar, whose vision of progress is inseparable from its technological mysticism, McCarey’s film gestures toward progress of a political nature. Make Way was released in 1937, just two years after Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. As the critic Gary Giddins points out in an interview on the new Criterion DVD, it’s hard not to read Make Way as a quiet argument for the institution of Social Security. Outside of the studio, McCarey was a social conservative, but he wasn’t a Fox News merchant of hate. The clear implication of his film is that, with some kind of social safety net, this couple might have lived out their lives at home and with some measure of dignity.
Studio films of the 1930s are often thought of as shiny nickels of escapist entertainment, studied regressions into the dreamscapes of the rich and famous. And with their garish interiors, soft-lit stars, and pressed tuxedos, it’s easy to read them this way. With its high key lighting and terrarium-style neatness, McCarey’s film looks a lot like other studio fare of the era. But Make Way feels a lot less like an escape and much more like simple reality, a kind of looking glass Top Hat. It’s as if, instead of following Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as they tap their way to love and happiness, you just stayed in the living room with Astaire’s parents and watched the slow dissolution of their marriage.
That this idea feels like a surprise is something of an indication of Hollywood’s grand omissions as well as its ongoing battle to achieve some sort of settlement with new technologies. Try to call to mind Hollywood movies about aging and you find that they can be counted on one hand. On Golden Pond (yes), Driving Miss Daisy (sort of), Cocoon (no). Aging, bankruptcy, things not working out — these subjects are not part of Hollywood’s self-image. McCarey was fired from Paramount after directing Make Way and you can kind of see why: in just a couple years, Gone with the Wind would be released in lush color, full of young actors and actresses pushing aside older cast members, and proclaiming a bold vision of tomorrow through a reinterpretation of the past, the end of the Civil War in widescreen.
But if Make Way is the anti-Avatar, it would also be wrong to say that Make Way is without a vision of the future. Unlike Avatar and the fantasy of perfect technological progress, Make Way finds its hope in the things of this world, in its attachment to their surfaces, and in its gesture toward a particularly powerful instance of political progress. There is hope and there is hope, the fetish and the thing itself. We need more of the latter.
