I Was a Simple Man

dir: Christopher Makoto Yogi

2021

I was a simple man. I still am, in a lot of ways. No-one really wants to think of themselves as being overly complicated. But being too simple seems like intellectual laziness.

But enough about me. I Was a Simple Man is pretty much, if you ever decided to sit down and watch it, a flick like no other that you might have seen in your life. The themes, of mortality, of regret, of past and present merging, all that crap, aren’t unique, but there really isn’t another film to compare this to.

I read such impassioned reviews of this flick back in the day, and I was determined to eventually watch it. The one thing about watching this, that meant I started and stopped it many times, was that the main character has a dog, who is often on screen with him.

You might think: so fucking what, old man? How is a dog an impediment to watching a movie, you lazy fuck?

Well, the thing is, if my dog is in the room and awake, the appearance of a dog, or any four legged creature on screen really, means that my dog goes absolutely fucking berserk. And If I’m watching a movie late at night, which I usually am, having the dog go completely fucking berserk is not conducive to sleep for the other members of my household. Or for enjoyable movie watching.

Only recently did I come up with the innovation of piling up couch pillows between her and the telly so that she can’t see the doggoes, even if she can hear doggoes barking.

So, finally, I got to watch the flick the whole way through. Yes, I am stalling for time, how did you figure it out?

The flick starts with a conversation between two old men looking over a sea of concrete and glass towards some verdant mountains. They natter about someone who has an eyepatch now, and one chap hands a wad of cash over to the other, who’s too ashamed to admit that he needs it. They part just after one of them saying that they remember when this place was free and undeveloped.

This being Hawai’i. Shooting anything in Hawai’i immediately makes your movie look at least 40 per cent more awesome than a film shot anywhere else. It almost doesn’t matter what it’s about; the place looks so full of greenery and life, like life so overwhelming and abundant, that it’s almost like Hawai’i was invented just to be photographed.

Like Iceland, people shouldn’t live there, but film crews should roam at will getting shots not possible anywhere else on this planet.

The old guy goes to a clinic, where he’s told he should give up smoking and drinking (he lights a smoke the second he gets out), and he and the dog wander home, to a rundown shack that is nonetheless in the lap of the green gods.

Who is this guy? We get hints and glimpses, but he himself doesn’t want to tell us or anyone shit. People are asking him questions all the time, and 99 per cent of the time he never responds. He potters a bit, drinks a bit, calls a son on the mainland that wants nothing to do with him, but mostly just lies in bed.

If I was to guess his age, I would say he’s in his 80s. If I was to guess anything else, I’d get nowhere. There’s no obtrusive voiceover explaining and excusing his life. It is a long time before any of the puzzle pieces, of objects in his house and their significance, the significance of a nearby tree, the appearance of a woman in a dress from long ago, make sense together.

He was asked by a medical type person if there was anyone who could look after him, any family, and at first you think he’s got no-one. But it turns out he has an abundance of family. A whole gaggle of sons, daughters and grandkids, none of whom seem to really like him that much, or whom he really seems to like.

Why is he like this, especially if he’s such a simple man?

The questions can only be answered in the past, or, as we’re going to be so lucky to see, a melding of past, present and future that maybe is his experience getting closer to death, or maybe some special quality that only Hawai’i allows its elders to experience before moving to the next realm.

From a tree emerges a spirit, who approaches the house. The old man fears the woman, and starts pouring out pink salt in a protective circle, but he eventually lets this woman through.

It’s his wife, Grace (Constance Wu). She doesn’t really speak much in the presence, but she does hang around for the rest of the film. While she sits in the shack or lies in bed with the old man, one of his daughters looks after him at first, and then I think her son, or one of the other grandkids looks after him for a spell.

That daughter Kati (Chanel Akiko Hirai), who seems like she might still have some affection for the old man, probably doesn’t, anymore, and then eventually we figure out why.

The wife died a long time ago, just before Hawai’i was so generously granted statehood in 1959. Masao (Steve Iwamoto, as the oldest version of the character), which is the name of the old simple man whose tale we are watching, isn’t particularly happy about his wife’s death, as you can imagine. Because of the time and place for some reason he chooses to abandon his kids, most of whom are pretty young, to be raised by an aunt, presumably one of Grace’s sister.

He never really explains why he abandoned his kids. A tattooed friend asks him what he intends to do now, and the young smiling man says he plans to drink until he becomes an old man and then dies.

I guess he stuck to his promise. We just saw him get into a pointless fight with a bunch of guys over a pool game, so we deduce, quite accurately, that he’s a bit of a loose unit. He breaks into his in-laws house and steals his wife’s ashes. Later we watch him, on an impromptu daddy / daughter day, where he takes her to shoot some pool, travel to that ominous tree in order to pour out Grace’s ashes.

It would not be accurate to describe these scenes as flashbacks, because the film completely becomes fractured in time, so that past and present occur simultaneously even as we see other flashbacks that depict the origins or at least early days of Grace and Masao’s relationship, and the hopes they held, most of which will never be realised.

When I say that there really isn’t much of a delineation between past and present, I mean there are scenes like where the dog, Masao’s dog, runs from the house in what we would call the present and runs down the road to a field where much younger, as in high school age Grace and Masao are hanging out, talking about what they would call their kids, debating whether to give them “strong” names or not.

Masao is Japanese American. Grace is Chinese American. They’re in freaking Hawai’i. Two native Hawaiian dancers dance for them on a beach, to a song.

Back briefly in the present, a grandson called Gavin (Kanoa Goo), helps his grandad to the loo, horrified at what it takes to look after an old man. So he should be. If anything he’s let off easy, but it’s still hard. He doesn’t even like his grandfather, and doubts the old guy likes him.

He goes off skating, meets up with some locals (I think he says he’s from the Big island), smokes dope, wonders why the local kids stick around.

He is horrified by the oldness of the old man, and of everything in his house. He isn’t watching the same film we’re watching, so he knows even less than we do about him.

I am making it sound far more linear than it actually is. There is a lot going on, visually and especially from the jarring, discordant score and sound design, which almost creates the haunting atmosphere of a ghost story, without the scares and without the horror, other than the natural horror of aging and dying.

I swear these films seek me out, and not the other way around.

I would be lying if I said I enjoyed watching this film. I acknowledge the beauty of the cinematography and of the place. I acknowledge the complexity of the construction of the story and the manner in which the director chooses to tell it all. I grant that it’s a contemplative meditation on life and death, on past, present and future, that it’s a strange and unique story about singular characters. It’s a singular kind of film. There aren’t many like it.

It’s just that…I didn’t really get into it, didn’t really care about any of the characters, especially Masao, who I didn’t really get to understand in any way. Beyond the necessity of accepting death, that maybe Masao’s inability to accept his wife’s death wounded him so irrevocably that he didn’t manage to live much of a life afterwards (60 empty years!), down to not being prepared to accept his own death, beyond that I didn’t really feel like I wrapped my head around any of it.

Which means I am somewhat baffled by why this flick was so lauded by the critics. It wasn’t even an enjoyable experience to watch it, on an aesthetic or emotional level. I found it completely lacking in profundity, poignancy, any of the virtues it is said to possess or any depth of meaning.

It’s baffling. If anyone should be a willing audience member for something like this, I’m telling you, it’s me. If you look at any other review I’ve written over the last two years about dying parents and such, you’d know that the slightest hint of this subject matter usually reduces me to a blubbering wreck.

This flick left me entirely cold.

5 times while I may be a simple man, I have many hidden shallows out of 10

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“Dying isn’t simple, is it?” - I Was a Simple Man