Category Archives: Drama

Occasionally I meet old friends whose life has passed them by. As young men, they seemed so full of promise. I thought they would be professional successes in adulthood with loving wives and children. Yet something happened along the way. They were barely making a living, had not married, and were a shell of their former selves.

They tried to keep up a happy façade, but I sensed an undercurrent of profound sadness beneath the superficial smile. That narrative arc permeates Don’t Come Knocking, the elegiac narrative of Howard Spence, an aging movie star who recklessly tossed away every opportunity to lead a fulfilling family and professional life.

The movie begins with Howard suddenly leaving a film shoot of his latest western, which is being filled in the Utah desert. He rides away on a horse, changes his clothes so that he will be unrecognizable, and decides to reconnect with his mother whom he has not seen for thirty years. He travels to his hometown of Elko, Nevada to see her.

In the interim, the movie company launches a search for him led by Mr. Sutter, an insurance executive determined to find Howard and return him to the set. For the moment, the production is stalled and cannot continue. Tension mounts on the set because for each day the film is delayed, there is great financial loss to the studio. Indeed, without Howard returning and completing his scenes, the director cannot wrap up the film. Sutter’s search for Howard is the subplot of Howard’s personal journey to find himself after years of behavioral excess.

Howard’s reunion with his mother, after thirty years of absence, is both touching and weird. They speak with a familiarity that suggests a loving and authentic rapport with each other, but Howard’s conversation with her seems like the tentative remarks of a teenager who has stayed out late one night. Howard is almost clueless about the mess he has made with his life until he peruses his mother’s scrapbooks, which contain newspaper accounts of Howard’s self-destructive behavior with drugs and women, his barroom brawls, and his movie debacles.

His mother informs him that he has a son in Butte, Montana. This piques Howard’s curiosity and he decides to find him. While in Butte, he meets Doreen, his old flame and the mother of Earl, his son. Both Doreen and Earl are puzzled by Howard’s return; they resent him intruding into their lives after an absence of twenty years.

Confronting his past is not easy for Howard either. His emotional malaise is captured in an iconic scene in which he sits on a couch that has been left abandoned in the middle of an empty street. Howard sits quietly while the camera pans around him from dusk to dawn. He is still, but everything around him is moving. The scene suggests that for many years he has not adapted to the changes going on around him. He cries, he reflects, he meditates, and finally begins to understand the price he has paid for his youthful folly.

How Howard tries to reconcile with Doreen and Earl makes for a compelling and, at the same time, an oblique family drama. Don’t Come Knocking does not have a neat ending, but it does intimate that even in the most extreme of circumstances, people can find a way to communicate and adjust to new emotional realities.

Howard Spence, after years of profligate living, begins to comprehend the damage he has inflicted on others by his casual attitude towards marriage and fatherhood. He cannot alter the past; but he can be wiser, at least in some small way, for the rest of his life.

There is a story told about a great nineteenth century ethicist, Rabbi Israel Salanter, who happened to be walking late one night in front of the home of a shoemaker. Rabbi Salanter observed the man was working by the light of flickering candle. He asked the shoemaker why he was laboring so late at night. He replied: “As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to accomplish and to mend.”

This is an insight that Howard gains through the crucible of painful human experience. He cannot change the past; but as long as he is alive, he can make connections in the present that make him relevant to lost loves and forsaken children.

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I was a mediocre high school student at A.B. Davis High School in Mt. Vernon, New York. One day when I had to turn in a book report about a book I had not read, I decided to copy a friend’s paper. I did not realize that my friend had plagiarized his paper, so my act of plagiarism was once removed from the original act. Nonetheless, I was submitting work that was not mine. My history teacher, Mr. Elman, for whom the report was written, discovered my duplicity and failed me for the course. He was very disappointed in me and I felt ashamed of what I did.

Today, I thank God that I had Mr. Elman for a teacher and that he failed me. He taught me an invaluable lesson of honesty early on in life and I am eternally grateful to him. In hindsight, I realize that getting caught was a good thing. At the time, it was an academic catastrophe, but later on I saw the good that came out of an unpleasant incident.

The notion that out of disaster good can come underpins the narrative arc of Music of the Heart, the heartwarming story of Roberta Guaspari. Roberta, a talented violinist who put aside her musical ambitions to be a loyal wife and mother, has been left fifty violins by the husband who deserted her.

Her whole life in turmoil, she seeks employment as a music teacher, but can only find work at an innercity New York school. She is hired as a sub, but slowly becomes an important player in the school’s music program, especially when she gives her students violins to play as she initiates a string program at the school. At first, parents are ambivalent about the program, but when they see the excitement in their children’s eyes, their objections to the program vanish.

The film skips to ten years later when three schools are successfully implementing Roberta’s violin program. Her grit and energy have been transmitted to her students; they are happy to be acolytes in her program, which fosters discipline and gives the students recognition within the city school system. Indeed, the program makes the kids feel important.

At the zenith of her success, another problem arises. Budgetary cuts force the program to close and Roberta is compelled to find a funding source that will enable it to continue. To solve her problem, she, together with former students, parents, and teachers, decide to stage a major fund-raising concert at the 92^nd Street Y. All seems fine until, only a few weeks before the concert, they lose their coveted venue. A lay leader, impressed by Roberta’s program comes to the rescue. Her husband, Arnold Steinhardt, is a world-class violinist and he secures Carnegie Hall for the concert. Moreover, he enlists his friends, Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, and Mark O’Connor, to participate in the concert with the student performers.

In the closing scene of the film, Roberta’s mother reminds her that none of the good stuff she is experiencing now would have happened had not her husband divorced her and forced her to establish herself in a new career. She transformed herself from a housewife and mother to a successful teacher and mentor to many children who passed through her classes.

Judaism never sees catastrophe as terminal. In fact, Jews traditionally say a blessing both for the good and bad that life brings them. The reason: one never knows if short-term adversity will lead ultimately to a good outcome. Indeed, when Jews were exiled from their land after the destruction of both first and second Temples, they did not despair for long. They recognized that now they had to redefine themselves as a nation without a land but bound by the Torah, the God-given law that enabled them to survive for centuries. The ability to affirm life after calamity strikes is the crux of Roberta Guaspari’s story. Music of the Heart illustrates her journey from despondency to success.

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