THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, August 9, 2019 |A
LIFE & ARTS
FILM REVIEW|JOE MORGENSTERN
‘One Child Nation’: Ghost Generations
A look at the terrible toll taken by China’s decades-long campaign of population control
AMAZON STUDIOS
The documentary by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang focuses on the draconian one-child policy that convulsed China between 1979 and 2015.
THEATER REVIEW|TERRY TEACHOUT
Discovering an American Classic
Madison, N.J.
FEW AMERICAN PLAYShave
traveled a more circuitous path to
posterity than N. Richard Nash’s
“The Rainmaker.” It started life in
1953 as a “Philco Television Play-
house” live-TV drama, then was
turned into a stage play and,
shortly thereafter, a movie star-
ring Katharine Hepburn and Burt
Lancaster, subsequently serving
as the basis for a hit Broadway
musical, “110 in the Shade.” “The
Rainmaker” remains to this day a
regional-theater staple, so much
so that it’s being performed this
month by two of New Jersey’s top
companies, the Shakespeare The-
atre of New Jersey and Cape
May’s East Lynne Theater Com-
pany. Unable to see both versions,
I tossed a coin and opted for Bon-
nie J. Monte’s Shakespeare The-
atre production. Warm, sympa-
thetic and richly humane, it’s one
of the very best things that Ms.
Monte and her marvelous com-
pany have given us, the kind of
revival that causes you to realize
that a play you’ve always liked is
in truth an American classic.
In all its iterations, “The Rain-
maker,” billed by its author as a
“romantic comedy” but far moresubtle than that, is the story of
Lizzie Curry (Monette Magrath), a
farm girl from an unnamed “west-
ern state” who believes herself to
be “as plain as old shoes.” Even so,
she still catches the wandering eye
of Bill Starbuck (Anthony Marble),
a smooth-talking rainmaker-con-
man who breezes into town to take
unscrupulous advantage of a soul-
killing heat wave and lingers just
long enough to change the lives of
everyone he meets. Like Professor
Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” he
brings them hope—Lizzie above
all—and they in turn forgive him
his transgressions.
The manifold virtues of this re-
vival start with Ms. Magrath, whose
acting is a miracle of creative imag-
ination—shebecomesbeautiful,
right before your amazed eyes—
and extend to the performances of
the entire supporting cast. Nothing
is hokey or exaggerated: Under-
statement is the watchword. The
homespun comedy of “The Rain-
maker” is all the more effective
when it is allowed to emerge from
the unfolding action instead of be-
ing pushed at the viewer, and that’s
what happens here.
Ms. Monte, who has not only
directed this production but de-signed its evocatively rough-
hewed set, is surely responsible in
large part for these qualities,
which are never more evident
than in the scene in which Star-
buck persuades Lizzie that
“there’s no such thing as a plain
woman....They’re all pretty in a
different way—but they’re all
pretty!” Ms. Monte has staged
their climactic encounter with
hushed delicacy, and Ms. Magrath
and Mr. Marble are more than
equal to the challenge of bringing
it to gently persuasive life.
If you’ve been feeling bruised of
late, whatever your reasons may
be, Ms. Monte’s “Rainmaker,” with
its shining message of hope in the
face of prolonged trial, is just the
medicine you need. I’ll be sur-
prised if I ever see it done better.The Rainmaker
Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey,
F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, 36
Madison Ave., Madison, N.J. ($
and up, depending on availability),
973-408-5600, closes Aug. 18Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama
critic, is the author of “Satchmo at
the Waldorf.” Write to him at
[email protected].SOME DOCUMENTARIESachieve
distinction through clear-cut
cause and effect—they bring rec-
ognition to worthy subjects, or
cause grief for deserving scoun-
drels. But what of a film that de-
picts the almost inconceivable
horrors of an event in the past?
Whateffectcanithavenow?The
subject of “One Child Nation” is
the draconian campaign of popula-
tion control that convulsed China
between 1979 and 2015 by limiting
families to one child. A strong ra-
tionale for this devastating—and
distinguished—documentary fea-
ture comes from one of its most
eloquent participants, an artist
named Peng Wang. He has used
the one-child policy as a recurring
theme in his work to help pre-
serve in the national memory an
infamous period that is being ex-
punged from the public record.The film does that and more, both
as oral history and as exemplary
investigative journalism.
“One Child Nation” was di-
rected by Nanfu Wang and Jialing
Zhang. Ms. Wang was born in
China in 1985, when the nation’s
unprecedented social experiment
was in full swing. During her
childhood she sang songs cele-
brating the virtues of one-child
families as a member of a choir
that was, in turn, part of a na-
tional campaign involving folk
arts, opera, popular culture, mass
rallies, ubiquitous posters and in-
cessant propaganda on TV. (She
has a brother, thanks to an excep-
tion that allowed some rural fami-
lies like hers to have two children,
provided they were born five
years apart.)
As an immigrant in the United
States, she began to wonder whathuman history.
Ms. Wang’s film is not for the
faint of heart, even though its
most shattering passages are
straight-to-the-camera accounts
rather than images; the words of
those who lived through the mad-
ness, and in some cases perpe-
trated it, are worth any number of
numbing pictures. It’s one thing to
understand that enforcing the
one-child policy required vast
numbers of forced sterilizations
and abortions. It’s another thing
to hear stories in harrowing de-
tail: of homes demolished because
women in them refused to be ster-
ilized; of other women tied up and
dragged screaming to local clinics.
One midwife—not just any mid-
wife but the one who delivered
Ms. Wang—believes she per-
formed between 50,000 and
60,000 sterilizations and abor-tions in the course of the cam-
paign. Some fetuses, she says,
were almost full-term: “Many I in-
duced alive, and killed. My hands
trembled while I did it. I was the
executioner. The state gave the or-
der but I carried it out. I killed
those babies.”
She continues to work, but, in
an irony too painful to savor, seeks
expiation by limiting her practice
to helping couples with fertility
problems. By contrast, a former
family-planning official, elevated
by medals and awards to the sta-
tus of a national hero, remains un-
repentant. “If I could go back in
time,” she says, “I would do this
work again.” The filmmaker’s
mother endorses the wisdom of
the government’s response to
soaring population and the pros-
pect of widespread famine. “You
can’t imagine the poverty,” she
tells her daughter on camera.
Were it not for the policy “there
would have been cannibalism.” For
her own part, Ms. Wang acknowl-
edges an apparent irony in her em-
igrating from a country where
abortion was government-man-
dated to a country where it’s in-
creasingly prohibited, but declines
to see the policies as opposites. In
both cases, she says, the state is
depriving women of choice.
As if its overarching narrative
weren’t powerful enough, the film
tracks a poisonous cascade of un-
intended consequences that Or-
well could not have envisaged,
though Jonathan Swift might have
imagined on a more modest scale.
Countless numbers of infants
considered illegal were aban-
doned—put in baskets and left in
public places. Of those who sur-
vived, many were harvested, in ef-
fect, by a national network of
scavengers and human traffickers.
One cheerful man, now retired,
recalls seeing four or five babies
a day dying on the streets when
he was a kid, and then, as an
adult, going into the business of
selling them—as many as 10,
babies in all, he thinks—to state-
run orphanages that, the film con-
tends, often falsified records of
provenance before re-selling
them, at a huge markup, to adop-
tive parents from abroad. Shock-
ing as it may be, “One Child Na-
tion” needs to be seen. It’s a
document that deepens our un-
derstanding of the totalitarian
state that China was, not that
long ago, of the enormity of the
inhumanity that the central gov-
ernment visited on its most vul-
nerable citizens.had actually happened during that
period, though only after giving
birth to her own child. What she
uncovered in return visits to her
native land was a mostly unknownhistory that began with known,
desperate need—China could not
sustain its soaring population—
but was marked by murderous
cruelty, boundless cynicism, sys-
tematic greed, impenetrable lies
and, above all, suffering on a
scale seldom if ever equaled inEnforcing the policy
required vast numbers of
mandatory sterilizations
and abortions.Anthony Marble as
Starbuck, Monette
Magrath as Lizzie
Curry and Isaac
Hickox-Young as
Jimmy Curry in
N. Richard Nash’s
‘The Rainmaker’FILM REVIEW|JOE MORGENSTERN
A Beguiling Buddy Tale
THE HEROof “The Peanut Butter
Falcon” wants to be a hero in his
own life story but doesn’t think
he qualifies because, as he says at
one point, “I am a Down syn-
drome.” That’s poignant, as well
as incomplete: Zak (Zack Gottsa-
gen), the less articulate half of
what turns out to be a buddy tale,
knows perfectly well he’s much
more than a syndrome. It’s also
the only bit of poignancy in a
comedy adventure that has no
use for the stuff, any more than it
does for naked tenderness, dis-
ability sentimentality or full-fron-
tal sweetness.
This lovely debut feature by
Tyler Nilson and Michael
Schwartz starts with Zak stuck in
a nursing home in Georgia. Not
for long though. He makes his es-
cape briskly, and ingeniously.
Then the question becomes how
this ardent fugitive, eager for ex-
perience and clad only in his skiv-
vies, will cope in a world he
hardly knows. Part of the answer
begins to reveal itself when he
crosses paths with another guy on
the lam, a small-time crook, Tyler,
who’s played with delicious grav-
ity by Shia LaBeouf.
The two are destined to be the
best of friends, of course, but
communication between them is
bracingly harsh at the start. Tyler,
pursued by enemies, has no pa-
tience for Zak’s periodic an-
nouncements that he is a Down
syndrome person; no desire to
teach him life lessons, though he
does; and no intention of helping
him fulfill a TV-fueled dream of
finding and enrolling in a profes-sional wrestling school run by
Zak’s idol, a backwoods legend
called the Salt Water Redneck (a
smallish but stylish performance
by Thomas Haden Church). (The
movie takes its title from the
name Zak takes as a wrestler.)
They’re simply traveling com-
panions on a road that becomes
a river, floating on a raft that
tips its makeshift sail in the di-
rection of Mark Twain. Then they
are three, thanks to the arrival of
Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), a
nursing-home attendant who has
tracked Zak down and is deter-
mined to bring him back. If her
job description makes you think
of Nurse Ratched, think again.
Quick and witty, with a vivid ap-
preciation of the cockeyed ad-
venture, Eleanor is a buoyant
spirit played by a buoyant spirit;
Ms. Johnson has never been
more appealing.
Both of the first-time feature
directors have had experience
making documentaries; it shows
in their film’s sharp-eyed atten-
tion to its surroundings. (Nigel
Bluck did the excellent cinematog-
raphy.) And they certainly found a
counterpart in Mr. Gottsagen, who
has little experience as an actor
but brings to his role something
that the best professional actors
bring to theirs—an almost palpa-
ble gift for seeing, hearing, feeling
and being in the moment. You
sense that Zak is savoring life’s
intensity and figuring out, as he
goes, not only what he can do—a
lot more than he thinks, Tyler
keeps insisting—but who he can
be in a suddenly expanding future.Zack Gottsagen and Shia LaBeouf in ‘The Peanut Butter Falcon’ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONSJOE GUERIN