Mesopotamia

By Arthur Nersesian
Akashic

Sandy Bloomgarten is a writer you either envy, pity, or outright hate. In theory, she's an excellent reporter, but often, to pay the bills, she resorts to working for gossip rags like The Enquirer. Who of us in a bind hasn't resorted to similar means? But when tabloid celebrity gossip takes over your professional ambitions and drives you to alcoholism, it may be time to reevaluate your work-life balance.

In an attempt to make ends meet after a bad divorce, Bloomgarten takes a freelance gig near her Tennessean hometown of Mesopotamia, where she's forced to briefly reconnect with the strange, confusing liberal Jewish family that adopted her from a Korean orphanage at birth. Her nearly-mixed-race heritage and her family's strained relationship history could have been teased out in a much more interesting way, but is instead only played up for its freak factor and used by Bloomgarten to demean herself through unnecessary use of slurs like "kook" (a portmanteau of "gook" and "kike") and offset her discomfort as the only "squinty-eyed Jewess" most people have ever encountered.

Along the way to finding a story worth reporting, one of Bloomgarten's sleuth companions ends up dead as they piece together the murder of several local Elvis impersonators. She ends up babysitting for a widow with seven children who sing various songs by The King as punishment. She has orgasmic sex with a Hunchback of Notre Dame-meets-Phantom of the Opera ogre who finds and saves her from being raped by a pack of local hoodlums. These are only a few of the slightly less than believable encounters the fill the first half of Mesopotamia. It only gets weirder from there.

Bloomgarten's legitimate problems—such as alcoholism, accompanying one-night stands with strangers, and other situations which call for an exercise in compromised, possibly poor judgment—are glossed over, which left me with an icky feeling. This is no doubt due in part to having encountered the destructive nature of alcoholism firsthand, though I was generally unsettled by the rampant drunk driving, possibly unprotected NSA sex, and pill-popping found in the book. Is it because I'm the straightedge monogamist type or because the novel, with a female protagonist, was authored by a man without an inherent sense of how a woman would act in these improbable situations? Do I simply misunderstand sexual liberation and flagrant drunkenness as gendered? All of these things are possible. I can often lose myself in fiction, but personal hang-ups aside, this was one novel that failed to sell me on the improbably destructive plot.

If you're going to be able to enjoy Mesopotamia for the hedonistic, celebrity-crazed cultural artifact that it is, you'll need to bone up on A-lister gossip from the past year and retain random Elvis trivia to make sense of the puns and wisecracks. Often, you'll feel like you're spying on some sort of Bizarro World skeptics convention with a few too many of the characters tossing around self-righteous anti-Bush, pro-global warming propaganda that the most devoted leftist thinker would find irritatingly cliche. If you'd like to finish the book without being tempted to hurl it across the room, you'll also want to cultivate a bit more sympathy for the protagonist than I did.

Review by Brittany Shoot

Off and Running

Directed by Nicole Opper
First Run Features



Considering the number of children in need of adoption—and the number of children who are actually adopted each year—it's surprising there aren't more adoption stories being told. Aside from “The Locator,” we've had especially limited access to stories about adopted children reaching out to their birth parents. The delicate, vulnerable position of someone sending a letter out into the world, waiting and hoping to hear back about where they come from, is still a bit of a mystery, and more than worthwhile. In fact, I knew little about it until my own adopted mother finally reached out to her birth parents at age fifty-six.

Not only is that seminal search a matter of discovering identity for the adoptee; it is, potentially, a matter of deep-seated tension between the child and her adoptive parents. My mother actually waited until both of my grandparents had passed before seeking her own answers, to avoid the risk of hurting them.

Nicole Opper's Off and Running provides a candid, thoughtful portrait of such a situation in all its complexities. The documentary follows Avery Klein-Cloud, a charismatic star high school athlete from Brooklyn, who attempts to continue living the life she and her adoptive parents carved out for her while waiting on correspondence from her birth mother. The fact that Avery is transracially adopted—the African American daughter to two White Jewish mothers—makes her quest for identity that much more significant.

At the beginning of the film, Avery frankly admits her persistent discomfort in Black social spheres growing up, and later, when a counselor asks, “Do you feel Black?,” Avery says she doesn't know what that means. Her brother Rafi, also adopted but of mixed race, provides an interesting contrast; not only does he seem to have little interest in contacting his birth parents, but he seems entirely unconcerned with his origins. At the very least, he doesn't seem as dependent on where he came from for a sense of self.

Still, Avery's bravery in her search for answers is admirable, and considering how obviously torn she is about her particular situation, she is incredibly forthcoming and self-aware. We get an unexpected amount of access to her private thoughts and feelings about what she's going through, often things that she doesn't even share with her mothers. But as the tension in the Klein-Cloud household escalates, Opper seems to pull back and even gloss over certain pivotal incidents, like a falling out between Avery and her parents that results in her moving out for a period. Opper barely addresses an abortion Avery decides to get when an unwanted pregnancy threatens to impede her track career. In fact, this part of the story is so glossed over that I wasn't entirely sure that it happened.

In the end, Avery's coming of age—and to terms with the fact that she may never meet her birth mother—feels undeserved though still inspiring. Perhaps the fact that Opper has a personal relationship with the family (she was one of Avery's teachers in middle school) can account for her trepidation in handling such sensitive issues. But her reluctance does take away from the moral lesson of the film: that adopted children need to stand by those who've cared for them and showed them support every step of the way, which, in this case, is Avery's unconventional but extraordinary family.

Review by Caitlin Graham

** Sometimes we accidentally duplicate a review. What can we say? Perfection is an illusion. Click here for another Feminist Review writer's perspective on the film.