Kumon
When we lived in New York City I used to ride down Seventh Avenue, which turned into Varick Street at Clarkson Street, where my youngest son Thomas’ high school was located. Somewhere along that length of Seventh or maybe Varick, I would see a curious sign on a storefront. It was called Kumon with the “o” in the name formed by a round little face with two wide-set eyes and a straight little line meant to be a mouth. Kumon is a nationwide math and reading tutorial system intended to give youngsters remedial help with their core learning needs. Parents of means all across the country want to give their little darlings whatever edge they can to be ready for the competitive world they face. These are not necessarily the sorts of parents that got entangled in Operation Varsity Blues and that snared moms Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman in the admission cheating scandal. These are just regular parents that want their children that might have some learning disadvantage to do their best to get caught up. Whoever designed their logo and signage was brilliant in my opinion. The little face in the Kumon “o” with only a circle, two dots and a simple line was designed in such a way that it looks like a bewildered child’s face. The face looks serious, but worried, the way a child might look if he or she knows that their parents are worried about their academic performance and yet the child is genuinely trying to do his or her best. It is a wide-eyed look that doesn’t understand. It doesn’t understand what’s wrong though something is wrong and it doesn’t understand the math or the reading very well at all. The child is open to suggestion, but not really sure what is going on. For a simple drawing it says an enormous amount.
Every time I saw the sign I smiled to myself and thought of a little kid looking up at his or her teacher or parent and saying a simple “Come-on!” or spelled another way….Kumon. I thought of all that today because I started to watch a movie that I had heard about either on TV or perhaps in the New Yorker in the last few days. The movie is called C’mon C’mon and it stars Joaquin Phoenix and was written and directed by Mike Mills, who brought us Beginners, an interesting film about LGBTQ issues in later life. Joaquin Phoenix is an unusual actor and perhaps an even more unusual person with a highly unusual upbringing. The movie is Phoenix’s latest controversial undertaking. It is made in black & white for some reason, which is hard to fathom. It is about a man who steps in to help his single-mother sister look after her young son. Phoenix plays a radio journalist who is busy interviewing young people to gather data for a story. Phoenix takes the boy from Los Angeles to New York to give him a slice of life experience, which his sister is less than enthusiastic to learn. There is a slice of the craziness about this man, Johnny, that is part of the essential Joaquin Phoenix and seems to be his hallmark. The film’s title seems most appropriate since Phoenix has that slightly disturbed and bewildered way about him that makes an adult saying “C’mon C’mon” to a child in an attempt to force him into his own fantasies, perfectly predictable.
Phoenix is the true middle child of five and was also a true follower of his older brothers River and Rain. That was so much so that he renamed himself for a while, Leaf, to blend into his sibling pattern where his two younger sisters were named Liberty and Summer. Joaquin simply didn’t fit the pattern even if he was born while his parents were living in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The name reminds my of Vince Vaughn in Four Christmases when his given name was Orlando to his brothers’ Denver and Dallas, named for the cities of their conception. His mother was a nice Jewish girl from NYC and his father was a Brit, so Joaquin must have been about Puerto Rico. The family was there as Children of God missionaries, which has that Mosquito Coast or perhaps Jonestown feel to it. The last name Phoenix was even an adopted name (the paternal name was Bottom) representing their personal rising from some sort of ashes I suppose. The family was raised vegan and they tended to hang out together and follow in each other’s footsteps,mostly behind the legendary River, who died tragically of an overdose while with Joaquin (who made the virally replayed 911 call).
Joaquin always had that broody way about him from his early roles in To Die For and 8MM. While every role was critically acclaimed (I guess brooding is impressive to critics), it was his portrayal of Emperor Commodus in Gladiator that set him apart as he proved that he could stick his tongue out as far as anyone in Hollywood. That started his award track in which he has garnered an amazing 188 nominations and no less than 70 wins according to IMDb (a 37% win ratio). Recently, Jonah Hill on the set of Don’t Look Up said of Meryl Streep that she was a GOAT. That confused her until it was explained to her that it meant Greatest Of All Time. She has been nominated 373 times and won 177 awards (47% win ratio), so Joaquin isn’t quite at her level yet, but for example Tom Hanks has only 199 nominations and 91 wins (46%) while Robert Redford has 55 nominations and 43 wins (a whopping 73% win ratio).
Some people only measure Oscar wins and nominations and in that case Streep is still the GOAT, but others like Hepburn, Jack Nicholson (similarly cuckoo like Joaquin), Olivier, Bette, Newman, Pacino (pretty cuckoo these days), Spencer, Denzel and Brando (again, a bit cuckoo as he aged like Joaquin) rank ahead of Joaquin. The traits of a guy like Joaquin Phoenix make him not really care about awards and perhaps that is the truest sign of pure genius.
I simply cannot look at Joaquin Phoenix and look forward to one of his movies for some reason. Maybe its the cleft-pallet look or the steely hazel eyes. It does not seem strange or coincidental to me that he won this leading man Oscar in 2019 for his portrayal of the psychotic Joker in the movie by the same name. The fact that Heath Ledger won the Oscar for best supporting actor posthumously in 2008 for portraying the same character is weird and the circumstances of Ledger’s death were pretty much in the cuckoo category to boot. Crazy seems to work well in Hollywood and I would never go so far as to suggest that these cuckoo performances are not award-worthy, but I’m just not sure they draw me to the movies involved time and time again. Many of the stars that are a few degrees off top dead center still draw me to the box office, but not as much as the top notch sane ones do. You might say to me, “C’mon, stop being so mainstream!” As for me, I like to think of myself on that topic as that little kid on the Kumon sign, staring in bewilderment as to why crazy sells so well at the movies.