Avuncular American

Medevac Diplomacy Requires Public Diplomacy

"Not our finest moment"

One of the main developing stories on BBC and other international media over the weekend is the mystery surrounding the apparent freeze - since Wednesday, 5 long days ago - of US military medevac flights from Haiti to the US, meaning Florida.  It's time to get a grip before this becomes a major calamity, human and diplomatic.

[UPDATE I, 1 February: the White House has announced that flights will resume Monday.  UPDATE II, 2 February: according to the New York Times, the Federal government will now reimburse hospitals for Haitians treated under the emergency.  The doctor whose outcry galvanized concerted action said the system was back "in sync."]

The White House has told the BBC that the suspension is due to "logistical issues," but the Miami Herald indicates that state-federal wrangling over reimbursement of medical costs has played a part in the confusion. A Florida doctor on the ground in Haiti said that "it is not our finest moment right now."

One Florida official referred to confusion over having to deal with multiple federal agencies.  Oops, there we go again, despite years of work and millions spent on "interagency" coordination.  Granted, well-intentioned people of numerous nationalities and organizational affiliations are pitching in during this dire emergency, under daunting conditions.  But that is exactly what interagency planning is for - coordination.

The decision to have the US military go in with overwhelming numbers, take charge of the Port-au-Prince airport, and regulate the flow of relief supplies and medevacs means that that the US is solely responsible for making this work.  When it doesn't, it shouldn't be up to Florida officials and US Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) spokesmen to trade charges over who is responsible for the holdup.  In addition to unblocking the jam, let's exert a little message control here.

Despite the destruction and the initial rush to help, things started out promisingly - hell, even Cuba granted special flight clearance for US military planes to fly through its airspace.  If Florida is having trouble admitting a few hundred additional Haitians, why not expand on this diplomatic breakthrough and work with Cuba's ongoing Haitian medical program to land patients there?

Image from the Commission for Aviation Regulation.

Lessons In Governance, Haiti To Capitol Hill

"The Price (and Potential) of Failure" is the title of the BBC World Service's excellent economic program Global Business with Peter Day (listen to the podcast).  The segment's title may put you in mind of the challenge facing the US Democratic party (more on that later), but in fact Peter Day is interviewing author Clare Lockhart, head of the Institute for State Effectiveness, about the challenges facing failed states, especially in light of the Haiti earthquake.

The Institute's diagram (click to enlarge) lists the "Ten Functions of the State," which Lockhart admits sound slightly statist/Stalinist, but are actually just attributes of good governance.  The kind of things - "effective infrastructure, regulated market, investment in human capital" - that you'd like to see whether you're in Haiti or in Harrisburg.  The kinds of things we Americans like to preach to Haitians, Iraqis, and Afghans - "national military controls a monopoly on the means of violence" - then balk when someone proposes gun control at home or limits to sales of military hardware abroad.

The lack of effective governance in Haiti is now answered with massive US deployment of its military, the only state institution capable of moving huge amounts of material under crisis conditions.  But the US military "monopoly" on rapid disaster deployment is simply due to its success in securing unlimited state spending on military hardware and personnel.  It's a choice, one that in other countries might be moderated by funding of civil defense - shown to be quietly effective in international relief efforts in Haiti.

Haitians have impressed aid workers with their stoicism in the face of utter disaster, but their stoicism is born of generations of constantly lowering expectations of their own government's capacities.  Americans still expect more of their government(s), though they sometimes want to deprive their "public servants" of the means to deliver services (see California's various Propositions, and the Reagan ethos of government as the problem).  At a minimum, they want governance from their government.

The United States is not yet a failed state, though many of its elected officials appear hell-bent on taking us down that road.  Republican legislators apparently plan to continue to say "no" to all Democratic proposed bills over the next three years, and Democratic Representatives and Senators appear to be frozen into inaction despite their large majorities in both houses of Congress.

Failed states don't all look like Haiti or Somalia.  Failure to reach your potential is still failure.

Health: It's Broke, And This Alone Won't Fix It

Within a 24 hour period, I've spent quality time with wonky Democrats and Republicans in Brussels.  The Dems were my fellow Democrats Abroad Belgium (DAB) people, and the lone Republican was a former boss, whose friendship predates any party political differences.  Health care reform and the state of the nation were the common themes, appropriate on this day of the SOTU (State of the Union speech by President Obama, his first since taking office).

Health care reform can and should raise the level of emotion in any debate, and the passion was clear when each of us recalled personal horror stories: family members denied care and expat (or binational) Americans who feared returning to their country because they feared prohibitive health care costs.  Among the overseas Dems, all of us know that there's another way to approach health care, and that is the social democratic way, i.e., as a basic human right, the way most of the European countries - whether governed by free marketers or socialists - have come to view health care.

But what struck me most was how little passion there was in favor of the options that present themselves to the Democrats in Congress.   Yes, Pass the Damn Bill was the reluctant consensus, but only because Democrats need to show something for their year in control of White House, Senate, and House of Representatives.  No one expected it to solve all ills, or, beyond a few health care jobs, to create any of the employment that the country needs to earn its way out of the recession.

My Republican friend, meanwhile, saw "health care reform" as a mislabeled good, when what we appear to be discussing is just "health insurance reform," and not a complete fix of even that.  How about tort reform, a genteel way of saying that trial lawyers should not be able to game the system to extort hideous "damages" for medical errors.  My sister the nurse, going back thirty years, used to wow us with stories of frivolous lawsuits after medical procedures deprived patients of their "psychic powers" - okay, said the juries, here's a few million in compensation.  Yes, tort reform is a necessary - and apparently missing  - part of comprehensive health care reform.

None of the conversations I've had over the last 24 hours have shaken my belief that we need to fix the broken health care situation in the US.  It's a "situation," not a "system," and it's by all accounts "broke" - i.e. broken, and bereft of resources.  But the bill(s) - Senate and House - that are now under consideration are not the final answer.  They are only the preamble.

Pass what's passable, yes.  But don't stop there.  If Step One was Medicare in the Johnson Administration, and Step Two the current "health insurance reform" bill, to be passed willy-nilly by the Democrats, Step Three will need to be a truly comprehensive health care reform, one that the Republicans have to be co-partners in adopting.

But Step Three can't happen without Step Two, and Step Two would never have happened without Step One.  Health care, like good governance and civilization itself, is a work in progress.

Image from Car Basics.

Health Care: Too Big To Fail

Go ahead and swallow the pill

Now that Democrats have had a few hours to weep and gnash teeth over the defeat of their candidate in the Massachusetts election, let's remember this: they still have large majorities in both Senate and House, and both chambers have passed health care reform bills.

The progressive blogosphere is starting to resound with calls of "Pass The Damn Bill" (Steve Benen's Political Animal).   He gives several devastating arguments as to why they should do so, mostly having to do with what might be called sunk costs - having spent so much time and political capital, to abandon health care reform now would be craven cowardice in the face of resurgent Republicans, who after all are the minority party.

Jonathan Chait ("Mass Hysteria") in The New Republic predicts that Democratic lawmakers will come to their senses and pass the bill - or else:

[B]oth chambers have already voted for a bill and set themselves up to be attacked for tax hikes, Medicare cuts and all the rest. The only chance the Democrats have to change that perception is to pass the bill, so that it can be explained in the context of success rather than as a tar baby subjected to endless criticism. If they let it die, they not only keep all the baggage of their votes, but they add a general stench of failure and profound demoralization of the base to their burdens. That would be a recipe not just to lose the House but to lose 50, 60, 80 seats.

I agree with Benen and Chait (Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall say similar things); how can the other important business of the nation be tackled if we don't finally pass the landmark bill of Obama's first year?

But what if this doesn't happen, and the House insists on changes to the Senate Bill?  What if the Republicans, instead of just threatening to filibuster, are made to actually put up or shut up?  The last actual filibuster, apparently (I'm relying on Fox News, not my usual source for facts), was in 1992, during Father Bush's presidency.  Since then, "filibuster" has really meant "threat of filibuster."

So what would happen if the minority of 41 Senators stood in the way of the majority, over an issue of such importance to Americans?  Those 1 million sick person marches that I've been wondering about might have a better chance of getting under way.  People who've lost their insurance because they got sick, and others who've lost coverage because they got fired, maybe they can start showing up in their hundreds of thousands on Republican Filibuster Day.

Enforcing democracy (as opposed to honoring outmoded Senate rules like the filibuster) can be difficult.  More than a century ago, the Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, had to endure cries of "despot, tyrant, dictator, Czar" when he single-handedly ended the practice of the "silent quorum," whereby a party could hold up legislative business simply by its Representatives remaining silent during roll call.  Then, the reformer was a Republican, and the diehards were Democrats.  We need similar intestinal fortitude a century later to kill filibustering.

Today, in his first post-election news conference, Senator-elect Scott Brown sounded conciliatory on health care, which may not come as a surprise, since he voted for Massachusetts' plan as a state senator.  So if Senator 41 is called to filibuster, maybe he can read the Massachusetts health care bill out loud, as a model for Federal legislation.  But wait a minute, it already is.  So what's the problem?

Two choices, Dems: either "pass the damn bill" now, or make the Republicans suffer so much for their filibuster that they filibuster all the way to November.  How will that look to voters?

If Not Obama, Who? If Not Progress, What? Regress?

A fellow expat friend reported back from his trip to the States on the ubiquitous "I Voted for McCain/Palin" mugs in airport souvenir shops.  Maybe that's a function of Washington being such a political town, but I find it odd that the Democratic Party Store online has no equivalent stuff.  You have to go to Democraticstuff.com, a commercial venture, to get anything close, and then the message is mixed: "I Voted For Change" in big print, with Obama/Biden as a footnote.  If you wear that these days, does it mean that you didn't get enough Change, or that it hasn't come fast enough?

Another friend sees Obama as "our last, best, hope" - there it is, Hope, along with Change.  Hard to imagine that it's only a year since the incredible feeling on the Mall, with the hundreds of thousands of people gathered for the historic Inauguration.  Since a Cajun group captured the magic of "Yes We Can" put to zydeco, "Oui, on peut."

Okay, the campaign is over, the election won, and the Inauguration a year ago.  Reality is, well, rather daunting.  But then we said it before the Inauguration, when then President-Elect Obama was in the unenviable position of being The One Who Everyone Is Waiting For, even while there was an actual President still in the White House.  How was Obama going to deal with the legacy left by George W. Bush?  Two wars, one near-Depression, and a national image that was a photo montage of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

Back then, Americans knew that the weight of all of these simultaneous crises was going to be almost too much for one man to bear.  A year later, why are many Americans disillusioned?  Why are some Massachusetts Democrats considering venting their frustration by abstaining or even voting Republican?  Did they forget their relief at the election of an honest, intelligent President, a pragmatist who needed to walk his country back from the brink?

During the 2008 Presidential primary campaign, I wrote a post "Trop Beau Pour Toi," a play on the title of a French film from the Eighties.  "Does America Deserve Obama?" was my subtitle.  I have to ask now: who, and of what political stripe, do people think would better be able to tackle the monumental work left to be done?  Climate change and retooling the United States for a resource-challenged future?  Building a resilient society where paying medical bills no longer puts you in the poor house?  Harnessing international cooperation to face the threat of instability in the Middle East?

Are Americans going to jettison someone who can actually inventory the problems, take in world-class opinion, and craft solutions that are workable?  In favor of what - a Sarah Palin or a Rush Limbaugh?  Again, let's go back to that moment in late 2008 or early 2009, when we all recognized the task facing Obama.  How can people even consider bringing back the same crew that brought America Abu Ghraib, sub primes, surplus splurging... the list goes on.  Do you fix that in a year?

"Rome wasn't built in a day," so goes the old saying.  I'd give it eight years.  And Change is an ongoing condition, contrasted with status quo.  And no, I do not want a return to the world as seen by Dick Cheney or as imagined by Sarah Palin. I'll take pragmatic over Paleolithic any day. 

A Cartoon Worth 1000 Words

Britain's Guardian newspaper has a couple of our favorite political cartoonists, whose ability (and eagerness) to go for the jugular is more finely honed than most of their North American cousins'.  Case in point: Martin Rowson from Saturday's Guardian, on "Bones and Bonuses," a haunting depiction of contrasting values in the 21st century.

The full title of Rowson's drawing is "The World As It Is, or, Bones and Bonuses."  Be sure to check out Rowson's colleague Steve Bell's take on Haiti, "Perhaps if Haiti were a bank..."

Tea Party, Third Party, or 100 Liebermans?

A few months ago, at a conference in Uzbekistan on that Central Asian country's intermittent forays into the democratic process, I happened to mention the ill-fated US Presidential election of 2000, where third party candidate Ralph Nader may very well have helped give us eight years of George W. Bush.  I was trying to show how third parties in the US (Nader was one example; Ross Perot in 1992 could have been another) - if they only exist to field candidates for the Presidential election - can simply serve to dilute the vote of either of the two main parties' candidates, and basically hand the election to the other.  Hence Clinton in 1992 (lucky for us Democrats), and Bush in 2000 (bad news for the US, and for the world).

Another American present at the conference took issue with the very existence of third parties in American politics, saying that they would threaten the stability of the political process.  I assume he had the Nader/Perot examples in mind too.  But the poor Uzbeks were confused, as it looked like the American "experts" were at odds with each other.  Not really, if we are only talking about Presidential politics, since the Electoral College system can't deal with the millions of popular votes won by a Nader or a Perot.  They are simply lost to either of the Republican or the Democratic candidates, and can't be "traded" for influence like minority party votes in a parliamentary system.

A Tea Party Senator, a Green Governor?

But what if third parties in the US weren't just a four-year cycle phenomenon?  What if the "Tea Party" faction were to emerge from the populist edges of the Republican Party, whether or not it declared its independence?  And proceeded to contest mainstream Republicans in the GOP primaries?  Would that be catastrophic for American democracy?  What would prevent a labor left subset of the Democratic Party from doing the same thing in a relevant constituency?

Look at the above picture of the French National Assembly's hémicycle (not the current political alignment).  It shows the main parties, but also the smaller parties that align themselves left, right, or center.  Some of these parties are tiny, and may only have one or two deputies.   Now, transpose that seating plan to the US House of Representatives.  Other than messing up the neat Red/Blue division, what would be the problem with having a few "third party" seats?

In the Senate, we have a nominal "Independent Democrat" in the person of Joe Lieberman, who is just as likely to side with the Republicans.  Another "Independent" is Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  By giving us the conniptions over whether or not he will filibuster (something which so called "Blue Dog" Democrats like Ben Nelson were ready to countenance) over health care reform, Lieberman's strength was amplified over what any one Senator should possess.  Would the election of a "Tea Party" Republican or two start to teach both main parties that their fate should not be in the hands of a minority of one?  Might that be the beginning of the end of the ancient filibuster system?

Why not the emergence of a local or state-level Green Party (maybe Schwarzenegger should just declare independence from the Republicans and go with his Green muse next time)?  Or a labor mayor of Detroit?  Tea-partyism doesn't have to remain the preserve of the loony right.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a Democrat, always have been, and don't want Naders, Perots, or other spoilers showing up in 2012 for a race that they can't win, but that they can make Barack Obama lose.  But I'm confident enough in the strength of the decentralized US system to imagine a multi-colored seating plan in Congress, a Green governor or two, or even a Tea Party mayor.  Elective office can often be a sobering experience, and I'd rather the Tea Partyers try governance at a local level - say, Mayor of Brookville, Ohio - before they make a bid for the White House.

Le concert

Comedies make you laugh, and tragicomedies do too, but how to describe Le concert, Radu Mihaileanu's latest film?  Its Russian settings, with hilarious takes on all the cliches we've come to expect of post-Cold War Russia - thuggish, gun-toting Mafia lords and their cash approach to culture, aging Communists longing for the good old Soviet days, Everyman (and Everywoman) scrounging to raise a ruble in the crudely capitalistic present - will make you laugh until you cry.  The frenzied action never lets up - it might even strike some as a bit over the top, like a Kusturica film - even when the troupe is unleashed on a sedate and unsuspecting Paris.

But the tears you'll shed during the climactic concert - a faux Bolshoi orchestra attempting to recreate a Brezhnev-era musical moment that was cruelly cut short - will be tears of joy.  A neighbor of ours, a hardy outdoorsman who had never before displayed his sentimental side, said that he was not immune to the emotion of Le concert, and I can understand.  Music does that to you, especially a stirring Tchaikovsky concerto played with such virtuosity.

Don't get me wrong: despite its title and its story premise, this is not a "musical," or even a "musical comedy."  There's that difficulty again in classifying Le concert.  Let's just say that if you like a good story, a good laugh (despite the tears), and music from visa-fixing Gypsy fiddlers to the Red Army Chorus' ever-rousing Kalinka, you'll enjoy Le concert.  But there's a serious side to the story, which is what attracted France-based Mihaileanu to it.

Mihaileanu, the son of a Romanian Communist who had to change his name from Buchman to escape Nazi extermination camps, has dealt with Jewish themes before.  His award-winning 2005 film Live and Become (Va, vis et deviens), dealt with the difficult integration into Israeli society of the Ethiopian Falasha Jews.  He has based Le concert on an amalgam of historical incidents, based on the record of Antisemitism in Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

The Brezhnev era: with all the recent hoopla over 1989 and the Gorbachev perestroika and glasnost that helped to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union, it is worth remembering the darker days that preceded Mr. Gorbachev.  Brezhnev appeared to be a throwback to the days of Stalin and his henchmen, especially as regards Soviet Jews.  Writes Professor Christie Davies in The Social Affairs Unit blog:

Official anti-Semitism was also popular. It gave the most menial of workers someone to hate, someone to blame, someone to despise. Your vilest traditional prejudices were endorsed and encouraged by your rulers. Newspapers deliberately stressed the Jewish identity of Jews executed for economic crimes...

Without miring us in historical detail, Mihaileanu focuses instead on the memory of Lea, the violin soloist whose ouster from the Bolshoi has left a lasting mark on all who knew her.  The director's choice of French actress Mélanie Laurent uncannily parallels the fictional "faux Bolshoi" conductor's selection of a French soloist to replace - or is it replicate? - Lea.  Actress Laurent speaks of her own Jewish roots: her grandfather, like Mihaileanu's own father, was also a Communist who resisted Nazi persecution.

So there it is: a feel-good movie that isn't lightweight; a comedy with a serious side; a film where music's role is central but does not require a degree in Tchaikovsky studies... Le concert is a touching film, a fitting addition to Mihaileanu's growing body of respected work.

     

Expatriation: Does Distance Improve Vision?

We're still in the zone where it's acceptable to make lists of things 2009 or "best/worst of the decade," but I'll spare you yet another retrospective.  I do, however, want to comment on a couple of comments received from other bloggers, where, from very different quarters, I was included in "favorite" or "top 5" categories.

It's always flattering to get praise, and I thank my fan club.  But here's the quandary: I have been praised for my "objectivity" and "non partisanship," which are perhaps the last words that I'd have used to describe my attitude to blogging.  When I left my career as a diplomat, I reveled in being able to sock it to the Bush Administration, about which I have real trouble being objective.  And my involvement in Democrats Abroad on behalf of the Obama campaign was highly partisan.

But I'll let my fans speak for themselves.  First, Mark Golbach, who with Linda Brazill publishes "Each Little World," a very personal blog of good writing and photography on a very eclectic range of topics, based in Wisconsin:

Reading Loftus transports me outside the borders of my country, gives me back that outsider's view of things, and provides a measure of objectivity that is very hard to come by in our national press.

Now, from a world that is topically and geographically (though not philosophically) closer to mine, Yasin Akgun of The Conservative Blog,"Independent Conservative Commentary" from Great Britain:

What I particularly like about this blog is that it is written by someone who can be unashamedly non-partisan about the EU, something none of us Europeans can claim to be. It is interesting to see the views of somebody from America on the European Union, something we rarely hear about.

Akgun is referring to my other blog, "Errant European," where I tend to cross-post items that are primarily of interest to European readers of Blogactiv/Euractiv, a Brussels-based media portal on EU affairs.

I think what my pair of admirers may have touched on is my expatriated condition, which lends my subjectivity an aura of objectivity and/or non-partisan observation.  In Europe, I'm an American who lives here and follows events with interest, but not with the same level of partisan commitment that divides Europeans into socialist, liberal (meaning free-market), Green, or conservative camps.  As Akgun's Conservative Blog has pointed out, Europeans are often confused over American politics (so are many Americans!), and have only a vague idea of where Republicans and Democrats would fit on their wider political spectrum.

As an American expatriate looking back at my native country, I also have this interested but slightly detached view, though my partisan commitment is real.  From my earliest years, I was aware that my parents, who came to the US from Ireland, were different from my little friends' parents.  When my father first came to the States, he was amazed at his cousins' and colleagues' chauvinism over things American.  Their unwillingness to believe that things could, perhaps, sometimes be done in a better way overseas, or their conviction that if it didn't exist in the US, it simply didn't exist elsewhere.

Neil Gaiman, a British expat in Minnesota and author of Neverwhere (though the book is on London, its title is a good description of the expatriate condition), says that after years of living in the US, he "still feels alien, which is probably a very good thing for a writer to feel."

Like Gaiman, I think that the view from afar helps visual acuity.  Whether it's farsightedness (image from Wikipedia, "hyperopia"), objectivity, non-partisanship, or subjectivity of a special order, I have made it the thread that runs through this blog.  Glad that some have come to like it.

A l'origine - In the Beginning

In the beginning, there was a confidence man.  A crook whose modus operandi consisted of impersonating names filched over the phone from unsuspecting secretaries, making his own business stationery, reselling stolen equipment on the black market.  The first ten minutes or so of Xavier Giannoli's excellent A l'origine should be required viewing for equipment rental clerks.  Rent an expensive machine to "Phillippe" and you'll never see it again.

Phillippe doesn't launder money as much as he irons it - literally.  Crumpled notes wind up looking like they just came out of an ATM.  His is a cash economy, and he lives on the move.  The map in his glove compartment is marked with hits, past and future.  Until he arrives in one town where his assumed identity of a project manager means something to the locals - hope.

A l'origine (film's official website, EuropaCorp), a Cannes 2009 selection, is based on a true story.  Of a swindler who winds up taking on a moribund public works project - building a section of a motorway (!) - when all he had set out to do was bilk the willing locals of their cash and move on.  Giannoli, who had read about the case in the late Nineties, has turned an unusual subject into a formidable film, where not only is the story based on fact, but the film production began to resemble the story line.

Giannoli has spurned special effects, so the rain you see is real, as is the mud that accompanies road construction in mid-winter.  If the bulldozer operators and dump truck drivers look real, that's because they are - two kilometers of highway were built on the bleak northern France location.  The challenges faced by Phillippe and the local authorities and entrepreneurs that he enlisted in his quixotic "cause" - cash shortages, bad weather, non-delivery of services - were all faced by Giannoli and his crew during filming.

Fine, you say, but how is the acting?  First, the supporting roles.  French film icon Gérard Depardieu plays with sullen ease a very nasty fellow crook, one you never want to cross.  Giannoli has worked with Depardieu before, and Depardieu is loyal to his director, to the point of offering to drive a truck when production financing hit a rough spot.  Emmanuelle Devos plays the town mayor with such credibility that the local citizens wanted to keep her on.  Devos, for those who don't know her, won the César for Best Actress in Sur mes lèvres in 2001.  Her presence in a film, according to the writer/director, is "a sign of life;" Giannoli wrote the part with her in mind.

Phillippe, our crook with the beginnings of a conscience, is played with taciturn virtuosity by François Cluzet, a 50 something actor with more than 80 film and TV roles under his belt.  Chosen by Giannoli for his "physicality" in portraying a man of few words but big deeds, Cluzet is perfect.  He captures the "deer in the headlights" look that the judge in the real life case found in the real (bad choice of word) Phillippe, who stayed on with the construction project "because for the first time in my life, I was somebody..."

Cluzet's Phillippe isn't Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can, where the con artist was at times a public figure.  Phillippe's one foray into the limelight puts his photo in the local newspaper - dangerous when plenty of people in the area have been stung on previous jobs.

Maybe I'm fascinated by "based on a true story" films, like Owning Mahowny and Reversal of Fortune, where fact is stranger than fiction.  But there's a danger of getting too interested in the backstory behind A l'origine.  This isn't a documentary (there was a such an attempt by an earlier film maker, but Phillippe stole his computer and the project fell through!), and Giannoli says that he has simply wanted to make a film about real people - even though his subject is an impostor...

If you are interested in the story of the film, and if you can read French, then I recommend this interview with Xavier Giannoli and Laurent Leguevaque (the real life judge who caught Phillippe) in "lart7.fr."

But don't read it 'til you've seen the film.