Movie Review: "Still Alice"

"Still Alice": B.  Of the six major categories for this year's Academy Awards, only one nominee was considered a lock: Julianne Moore as Best Actress for her portrayal of Alice Howland in the film Still Alice.  When that prediction came true, I had to see it for myself even though doing so would violate my self-imposed rule to avoid depressing movies.

When the story opens, Howland is a nationally celebrated professor of linguistics at Columbia University, New York City's Ivy League school.  The first signs of memory trouble seem like minor glitches, such as being unable to come up with the right word while making a presentation which she had delivered to large audiences many times before.  Ironically, one of Alice's favorite pastimes is playing the game Words With Friends on her cell phone with her adult daughter, Anna (Kate Bosworth).  If finding the perfect word to express her ideas should be in anybody's wheel house, it would be Alice's.  Another revealing scene of minor consequence shows her forgetting that, just minutes before, she had already been introduced to her son's girlfriend at a family dinner party.

The next, more serious level of mental glitch occurs when she finds herself lost while jogging in the heart of the Columbia campus.  As we end up doing many times throughout the story, we feel Howland's frustration, anxiety, confusion, and later embarrassment, fear and despair, all states of mind expertly facially exhibited by the talented Moore.  The jogging episode convinces her to consult with Dr. Benjamin (Stephen Kunken), a matter-of-fact yet gentle neurologist.  Initially, Howland hopes to keep her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), a medical doctor, in the dark.  In an attempt to replicate tests administered by the neurologist, she writes random single words on a blackboard in her kitchen, covers them up with a paper out of her own and John's sight, and then challenges herself to recall them.  Eventually her deteriorating condition manifests itself at an accelerated rate to the point where she has no choice but to advise John of her lamentable diagnosis.  There is his expected disbelief, but all doubts are erased with a subsequent joint visit with Dr. Benjamin.  At age fifty, Alice has early onset Alzheimer's Disease.

As if things could not get much worse, Alice learns that her sickness is "familial," meaning that not only did she inherit the high probability of contracting Alzheimer's from a parent, but that her children are possibly likewise susceptible to the same malady.  The scene where Alice breaks the news to her three adult children, shortly after Anna has happily announced her pregnancy to the family, is something that I've thought about even two days after viewing.

There are other challenges.  Youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), the only one of Alice and John's children who did not attend medical or law school, is a free spirited independent adventurer, who lives in LA in hopes of becoming an actress.  Were it not for John's beneficence (initially unbeknownst to Alice), she would be a starving artist.  The dialogue between Lydia and Alice, unsuccessfully trying to hide her disappointment in her daughter's career path, is sharp and real.  Lydia loves her mother, but is not afraid to tell her, "You can't use your condition to try to control my life."  Nevertheless, Stewart is at her best when her character shows verbal restraint versus the inner emotion she would prefer to express.

Another challenge arises when John receives a once-in-a-lifetime offer from Mayo Clinic.  Alice is getting more confused by the day even in her familiar NYC surroundings.  Uprooting her to Minnesota, away from her two oldest children, seems cruel.  Of course, the flip side is that eventually Alice won't know what state she's in, so why shouldn't her husband accept the dream job?

There are a number of things to admire about this film, the superlative performance by Moore being at the top of the list.  I liked the way directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland are able to convey the passage of time without the use of on-screen subtitles, such as "Three months later."  Their tactic is to use clues like holiday occasions, an advancing pregnancy, or conversational references to things which we know were to have occurred in the past.  The early scenes in which Dr. Benjamin asks Alice a series of questions in an attempt to pinpoint a probable cause of her problems are extremely well done, showing that the writers have thoroughly researched their subject.

In spite of these positives, the movie comes across more like a documentary than a fictionalized story.  Having witnessed Alzheimer's up close, I can vouch that even a character study of someone victimized by that disease has room for a portion of humor.  There is none to be found in Still Alice.  That omission surprised me a little, especially after reading a St. Cloud Times account of how Julianne Moore struck a friendship with Sandy Oltz, a fifty year old Sartell, Minnesota early onset patient with whom Moore spent a great deal of time preparing for her role.  Oltz came across in the paper as someone with a great sense of humor and a positive outlook on life.  Furthermore, Baldwin is a versatile actor with undisputed comic abilities.  The opportunity for inclusion of humor was there for the taking, but not utilized.  Perhaps showing that lighter side of dealing with an Alzheimer's patient would be too risky, from a political correctness point of view, for the film makers to incorporate.  But without the balance of a few funny respites, I found myself drained after witnessing the gradual decline of the leading lady.

Rebalancing, The Forgotten Facet Of The February Four

We are now entering the last week of February, the month known for four things: the Super Bowl, Groundhog's Day, Valentine's Day and rebalancing.  Rebalancing?  What's that?  Rebalancing is the exercise you should all be doing once a year to make sure that the retirement savings you've accumulated are being maintained in the proportions you have earlier decided are the correct ones for you.  If you don't rebalance, it is easy for your savings to become furtively unbalanced, and that would be a bad thing.  To be honest, the important thing is to rebalance annually.  The month in which you choose to do so is not so important, as long as it's the same month each year.  I prefer February, as explained in Section VI below.

I. What it means.  Let's say that after consulting your Uncle Hubert, reading tea leaves, discussions with the boys and girls around the water cooler, throwing darts at a board and perusing the Wall Street Journal, you have decided that the percentages your retirement savings should "be in" are 70% stocks, 20% bonds and 10% cash.  Stocks, bonds and cash are the three main categories of most retirement portfolios.  (Others might include real estate, commodities and alternative investments, but for purposes of this post we are only going to consider the main three.)  The percentages you choose will be based on a number of factors, including your age and your risk tolerance.  If you start out the twelve month period with $10,000 in savings, the 70-20-10 ratio you chose would result in you having approximately $7,000 invested in stocks, $2,000 invested in bonds, and $1,000 in cash.

Now let's say that the stock market has a banner year, and your stock portfolio grows by 15%, while the bond portion dips 10% and cash portion of your savings remains stagnant throughout your selected twelve month period.  You now have $8,050 in stocks, $1,800 in bonds, and $1,000 in cash, for a total of $10,850.  But what has happened to the 70-20-10 allocation you so carefully had decided was right for you?  It now looks like this:  74.2% stocks, 16.6% bonds and 9.2% cash.  There are worse things in the world than having your allocation out of whack by just a few percentage points, such as in the foregoing illustration, but a preferred discipline is to do an annual rebalancing anyway.  The older you get (or put another way, the closer you get to when you'll need your money) and the more money you have saved, the more important rebalancing to your desired allocations becomes.  Your immediate goal (subject to what I've written in Section V below) should be to get back to the allocation you started with for that period.  That's what is known as "rebalancing."

II. Why bother?   There are at least two reasons why taking the time to rebalance annually is worth your while.  First and foremost is risk management.  Do you remember the term "false prophets" being used in the Bible?  There are also false prophets in the investment world.   Don't believe anyone who claims she can "time the market."  That person is the modern day version of a false prophet.  Any time you invest in anything other than cash or federal government securities, you are taking a risk.  But if cash and fed securities were all we invested in, we would never make any real money.  In fact, if you take inflation into account, you'd be losing money (buying power) in some years.  The only way for most folks to make real money with their investments is in the stock market, either by being a picker of individual company stocks, or by investing in one or more mutual funds which concentrate on stocks (sometimes called equity funds).  Of the three main categories identified in Section I, stocks have, by far, the most upside potential, but also carry the most risk.  So, when we set our desired allocation percentages for the year, we are managing how much risk we are willing to take.  The higher the allocation for stocks, the more risk we are taking.  The percentages we set at the beginning of the annual period should not be drastically different from those we had set at the start of the immediately preceding period.  Thus, if we started out Year 1 with a stock allocation of 70% and end up with 74.2%, we should probably scale down our risk to something closer to that 70% for the beginning of Year 2.  (Note: Some gurus' advice is to wait until one of your portfolio's components gets seven to ten percent away from your desired allocation before rebalancing.  I do not agree with that approach because it's too easy to put your savings on automatic pilot and do nothing.  Inertia is a powerful force.)

It has often been said that the best advice one can receive regarding investing in the stock market is to "buy low and sell high."  Ah, yes, if only it were that easy!  But you don't know exactly when a stock which you'd like to buy is going to hit its nadir, nor do you know exactly when a stock you're willing to sell will hit its peak.  Remember, no one knows for sure how to time the market.  That gets us to our second reason why an annual rebalance is a good thing:   It forces you to buy low and sell high.  This concept is often overlooked when financial columnists write about rebalancing, probably because of risk management (the reason discussed in the immediately preceding paragraph) being so important.  If you need to trim, say, 4.2% of your stock holdings to get back to your desired allocation percentage, simply pick the stock(s) that has been the best performing and you will undoubtedly be selling high.  (Now is a good time to relay to you some advice I received from a trusted financial advisor:  Once you sell, don't look back!  In other words, if you sell a stock and the next day its price goes up, don't kick yourself.  No one can time the market! (There, that's the third time I've written that!)  Do a good job deciding which stock to sell, and then once you do, be confident you made a smart choice no matter what transpires down the road.)

The same general idea follows if you need to buy in order to rebalance.  Using our original example, if you need to buy bonds (or mutual funds which concentrate on bonds) to get back up to the desired 20% allocation, there is a good chance the bond market is down.  (Otherwise your bond portfolio may not have shrunk.)  That is the time to buy bonds rather than when bonds are soaring.

III. How to rebalance.  There are two ways rebalancing can be accomplished.  The most common way is what I've already described above.  You can sell the assets in those categories which have an excess allocation, and use the proceeds to acquire assets in the categories which have a deficit allocation.  If cash is a deficit category, then the proceeds from the sale of surplus categories would simply sit as cash.  After consummating these sell and buy transactions, the aggregate amount of money in your overall portfolio will be roughly the same as before your rebalancing transactions.

The second way to rebalance is to use new money to bolster your deficient asset categories by buying assets of that type, without selling assets from your surplus categories.  "New money" can include a redirection of dividends and/or interest generated from assets already in your portfolio.  Obviously, "new money" can also mean money which is not currently connected to your portfolio, such as money from future pay checks, an inheritance or winning the lottery.  Also obvious is that rebalancing with new money results in the aggregate amount of your overall portfolio being greater than before you rebalanced.

Some financial institutions offer automatic rebalancing for their clients.  I don't have a problem with that although I would have two words of caution.  First, don't opt for more than an annual rebalance.  Anything more frequent is sheer falderal, and could make the fees associated with your retirement account(s) higher.  Second, if you do opt for auto-rebalancing, make sure you understand how the rebalancing is accomplished.  You may someday have your money with an institution where the auto-rebalance is not offered, so you need how to DIY if need be.

IV. Choosing the right account.  When you decide the percentages in which your retirement funds shouId be allocated, you must take into consideration the funds in all of your retirement accounts, including pre-tax accounts (e.g., 401(k), 403(b) or traditional IRA), taxable accounts (e.g., a brokerage account) and Roth accounts.  If you have more than one of those types of retirement accounts, when it comes time to rebalance you will be faced with the decision of which of them to choose for said rebalancing.  It almost always makes the most sense to choose the account for which the sale of an asset will not, of itself, trigger an immediate taxable event.  For example, if you sell appreciated stock out of a traditional IRA, and kept the sale proceeds within that account, there would be no immediate tax impact.  You don't pay taxes on traditional IRA funds until they are withdrawn (which, ideally, would be after you retire).  Contrast that with what happens when you sell appreciated stock out of a brokerage account.  That is a taxable event, meaning that you will pay taxes on the gain at the end of the current tax year.  (Gains made from the sale of securities in a taxable account are taxable, either at capital gains or ordinary income rates, depending on how long you've own the security prior to unloading it.)

V. Selected ratios are not static.   One point of clarification with respect to the second-to-last sentence of Section I.  The desired allocation percentages you choose will change over time.  Conventional wisdom dictates that the older you get, the more you should rein in your riskier investments.  Some people might change their percentages every year. For example, a thirty year old might have 80% of her retirement funds in stocks, then ratchet it down to 79% for the year in which she turns age thirty-one.    When you rebalance at the start of a given year ("Year 2"), the percentages you hope to reach via rebalancing should be those you've selected for Year 2, which may be different from those you had selected for Year 1.

VI. A plug for February.  I select February as my rebalancing month mostly because (i) it is near the beginning of the calendar year, and I like to have all my ducks in a row for the year, (ii) January tends to sneak up on people, and having a goal of rebalancing in January might prove to be a little too optimistic or aggressive (similar to keeping New Year's resolutions), (iii) I like to reserve the month of March for working on my taxes, or at least accumulating and organizing my documents, and (iv) February is a relatively boring sports month, so the time it takes to do the rebalancing exercise is not pulling me away from ESPN-watching.

VII. A bad scenario.  In case you're on the fence regarding whether you want to bother yourself with rebalancing, let me try ending this post with a horror story.  Don't be the guy who, for his entire working life, has never rebalanced.  His stock portfolio has reached 85% of his total retirement portfolio.  But at age sixty, the market takes a precipitous fall, and a long-term bear market begins.  His portfolio worth is a shadow of its former self.  Because of his age, he has little time to recoup (aka, a short investment horizon) to build his account back up to being close to what it was before the crash.  Had he rebalanced, and made the types of adjustments described in Section V, he would not be in this pickle.

You only go around once. Play it smart, and rebalance annually.

Movie Review: "The Theory Of Everything"

"The Theory Of Everything": B-.  Of the eight movies which are nominated for this season's Best Picture Oscar, four are biopics.  Two of them, American Sniper and The Imitation Game, take place during wars which loom large in the foreground and background, respectively.  Selma is the story of an important chapter in the mid-sixties' Civil Rights Movement.  The clashes with the Dallas County sheriff and Alabama troopers certainly qualify as a very real battle of a different sort.  Only The Theory Of Everything is a nominated biopic which lacks a built-in militaristic backdrop to support and supplement the tension surrounding the central figure.  Instead, the tension there is supplied not by the throes of battle but by the cruelty of biology, in the form of a debilitating motor neuron disease that afflicts one of the great geniuses of all time, Stephen Hawking.

In light of the foregoing, one might hypothecize that if a primary goal of filmmakers is to tell an interesting story, the task at hand here for director James Marsh is at least slightly more challenging without the backdrop of battle than it was for the directors of the other three biopics.  I am sorry to report that, despite some creditworthy aspects, the challenge is not met.

Although Professor Hawking is presented as a truly unique and gifted character, the film has too many consecutive minutes of stagnancy and too many repetitive scenes.   In The Theory Of Everything, the magnificent feats of the protagonist are realized in a university lecture hall, not a place typically lending itself to excitement.  Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a physicist whose primary field is the study of time, and particularly how time relates to an explanation of how the universe began.  Hawking's theories on that subject change over the years, sometimes espousing a singular moment of initiation and sometimes not, all the while balancing the mystery of the existence of God.  Later, he determines that the universe, as immense as it may be, does not occupy a finite space; it is ever expanding.

While there is no first person narration, the story is based on the recollections of his first wife, Jane (Felicity Jones), as written in her memoir, Travelling To Infinity: My Life With Stephen.  Therefore, one has to wonder if we are watching an impartial rendering of what really happened during their relationship.  Stephen and Jane meet at a stuffy party at Cambridge, a university where no male student would be caught dead without his tie, a buttoned vest and a tweed jacket. The  young couple sequester themselves on a staircase for a quiet conversation.  He is bashful, so she takes the lead by handing him her phone number on a napkin. (I kept waiting for him to spill a drink on it, thus obliterating what she'd written.  Had he done so, that may have caused the film to come to an abrupt, immediate ending after a running time of approximately twenty minutes.)   They start seeing each other, but shortly thereafter his disease strikes.  His doctor sympathetically tells him he has two years to live.  Stephen decides it's better to face it alone, but Jane stands by him.  Not only do they marry, but three children follow.

Most of the rest of the movie shows how his star rises in scientific circles, all the while becoming more victimized by his disease.  First he resists using a wheelchair, but relents when the conveniences of a motorized chair are displayed.  When Stephen realizes that Jane, alone, can't continue to "nurse" him and be a mother to their kids, he reluctantly accedes to accepting the help of Jonathan, a church choir director whom Jane has hired as their son's piano instructor.  The more Jonathan is in the Hawking household, the more his role evolves as he lends his vital assistance to the caring of Stephen.  After over an hour of treading water to that point, the movie's addition of Jonathan to the story supplies a much-needed dynamic.  The role of Jonathan is played perfectly by Charlie Cox.  Jonathan is a man of God, but still, just a man.  Jane is an attractive woman.  Will their closeness take them anywhere?

The last quarter of the movie is disappointing, almost as if a different script writer and director have taken over.  Things are rushed, abrupt changes are left unexplained, and unexpected outcomes have shallow roots.  In its totality, The Theory Of Everything leaves a little to be desired.  But Redmayne is a delight.  When Hawking peers up through those huge sixties style specs as he's slumped over in his chair, probably aching but nevertheless smiling, you just want to give him a hug.

Movie Review: "The Imitation Game"

"The Imitation Game": A.  I have been waiting since October 2013 to attend a movie worthy of an "A" rating.  At last, The Imitation Game fills the bill.  It is the true story of Alan Turing, the most unlikely of war heroes, whose painstaking efforts to crack the Nazis' codes for encrypted messages during World War II finally paid off after months of trial and error attempts.

The Brits referred to the German encryption system as "Enigma."  The system was used to direct German manpower, machinery and equipment all over the theater of battle, from the Russian front to the North Atlantic.  As if the encryption wasn't hard enough for the Allies to decipher, what made the task nearly impossible was the German protocol of changing their codes every twenty-four hours.  At the stroke of midnight, a new code would be employed, and the Allies would have to start all over again with the proverbial "blank sheet of paper."

Turing isn't on the job long before he is put in charge of the effort.  He builds a machine, which he dubs "Christopher," that looks like a combination of an old telephone switchboard and an engineer's control panel in a recording studio.  His hand-picked team includes Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), the only group member of the female persuasion.  Joan is also the only member who can solve brain-teasing puzzles more quickly than Turing himself.

Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch who, according to many reports, is one of the two most loved young male stars in England, the other being Eddie Redmayne of Les Miserables fame.  Turning is cerebral, introspective and driven, while at the same time displaying moments of wit, humor, kindness and abrasiveness.  Cumberbatch is able to channel all of these characteristics, and more, quite convincingly throughout the story.  Yes, Turing is a wonk, but a very interesting, complex wonk!  Several of the scenes take us back to his days at Sherborne Preparatory School, where he first discovers his uncanny ability to crack (and write) codes and solve puzzles.  It is also where his attraction to other males is manifested.  The young actor who plays schoolboy Turing, Alex Lawther, is tremendously skilled.  I found myself just as interested in what happens to young Turing as I was in what happens to him in adulthood.  When a filmmakers's flashbacks are that compelling, the movie as a whole is almost always extremely good.  The Imitation Game fits that description.

Turing is up against the clock in his quest to solve Enigma.  Most of the pressure comes from Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), Turing's nominal supervisor, who reluctantly hired Turing but later sees his operation as a money pit with not a shred of hope of accomplishing its mission.  Every time the calendar flips to another day, Enigma remains unsolved, the Germans change their encryption program, and more Brits become casualties of war.  Luckily for Turing, he has the support of none other than Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself, who conveys that support through an intermediary, Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong), to whom Denniston reports.

The story is ultimately heartbreaking, but Norwegian director Morten Tyldum does mix in humorous moments.  The funniest scene in the film occurs early on when Turing interviews with Denniston for the top secret job at the undercover operation fictionally labeled as "Bletchley Radio Manufacturing."  To this point Denniston has interviewed and rejected dozens of mathematicians such as Turing, but what sets Turing apart is his uncanny ability to solve puzzles.  Denniston almost throws Turing out of his office, due to the applicant's superiority complex which he barely tries to hide.  The staccato back-and-forth combined with the facial expressions of Cumberbatch and Dance is acting at its finest.

It is not giving anything away to reveal (as I did in the first paragraph) that, eventually, Turing and his team accomplish their mission impossible.  The manner in which they do it, if we can believe the relevant episode we witness on the screen, is ironically random.  The person who unwittingly utters the words of revelation to Turing is totally unaware of the consequences.  Even after the breakthrough, life and death dilemmas immediately face the Brits. How can they take advantage of cracking the Germans' code without having the Germans find out that they had, in fact, done so?  The Brits need to play their cards close to the vest.

I typically do not care for movies in which computers play a central role in the story.  (That's one reason I avoid NCIS and other television shows of its ilk; too many scenes with characters looking at a screen.)  If you feel the same way, you may be disinclined to attend a movie about a guy who builds a contraption for the purpose of deciphering encrypted messages.  I urge you to make an exception for The Imitation Game. "Christopher" is key to the story, but not to the point where "he" becomes a character.  

Seventh Annual Movie Ratings Recap

It is now time for my annual Movie Ratings Recap.  This is the fourth MRR I've posted since I started The Quentin Chronicle in November 2011, and the seventh consecutive MRR I've put together since 2009.  I actually had this ready to publish yesterday, but in honor of today being the fifty-first anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, a personal watershed moment, I decided to wait twenty-four hours before pushing the "Publish" button.  It seemed the symbolic, if not appropriate, thing to do.

What do the Beatles have to do with this latest MMR?  Nothing, really, except for the fact that my top-rated movie for the twelve month period ending January 31, 2015 is Jersey Boys, the story of the Four Seasons who, along with the Beach Boys, were dethroned by the Fab Four as kings of Top 40 radio beginning with the British Invasion of 1964.  This does not mean that the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys disappeared from the charts.  As I pointed out in my June 25, 2014 review of Jersey Boys, those two American bands continued to chart during and after the British Invasion.  But, teen taste predominately shifted to the English sound, especially the Mersey Beat sound, beginning with the Sullivan show.

2014 (in other words for purposes of this MRR, the twelve month period ending nine days ago) was a down year, both in quantitative and qualitative terms.  I only got to the theater twenty-five times, the second smallest amount in the seven year history of MRRs.  Of those twenty-five films, I did not rank any at the "A" level (only the third time that's happened); and, I only deemed nine of the twenty-five to be worthy of a B+ or better, the resulting 36% being the lowest percentage for that category in the seven year period.  Still, there were only a handful of clunkers I attended, as shown in the chart below.

I have seen all but two of the eight films nominated for the upcoming Oscars.  Those two are The Theory Of Everything and Boyhood.  Momma Cuandito and I might go to the former this week.  As for the latter, I haven't decided whether I want to sit through the one hundred sixty-six minute running time.  If Boyhood does win the Best Picture Oscar, I'll probably give it a try.  I did see The Imitation Game after January 31, 2015, and therefore it's outside the scope of this MRR.

It's time to pull back the curtain and show you my list.  To refresh your memory, within each letter grade set, the movies are listed in my order of preference.  The month of my review accompanies each title.

A:

None

A-:

Jersey Boys (June '14)

Draft Day (April '14)

Finding Vivian Maier (May '14)

Omar (March '14)

 

B+:

 

The Judge (December '14)

Joe (April '14)

Unbroken (December '14)

Selma (January '15)

Whiplash (November '14)

 

B:

 

The Grand Budapest Hotel (April '14)

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (February '14)

Words And Pictures (July '14)

Get On Up (August '14)

American Sniper (January '15)

Lone Survivor (February '14)

A Most Wanted Man (August '14)

Birdman (January '15)

 

B-:

 

The Monuments Men (May '14)

John Wick (November '14)

Calvary (August '14)

The German Doctor (May '14)

 

C+:

 

Gone Girl (November '14)

Cold In July (June '14)

 

C:

 

Fury (December '14)

 

C-:

 

Big Eyes (December '14) 

Beauvoir

Looking to the left as Momma Cuandito and I drove east along the Gulf Coast on scenic Mississippi Highway 90, we saw mile after mile of vast lawns behind which beautiful mansions once stood.  Before Hurricane Katrina's landfall on August 28-29, 2005, the wealthy residents of those manors could peer from their front windows and porches across the road to the south, and look out beyond the strand to the gulf.  The devastation of Katrina changed all that.  In the ten years which have elapsed, only a very small minority of land owners have chosen to rebuild.  One reason might be their lack of insurance coverage before the storm.  More likely, many simply do not want to take the gamble that another storm of Katrina's magnitude will not occur in the future.  Even for those inclined to roll the dice, the exorbitant premiums which insurers would charge to provide coverage for new dwellings on those vulnerable real estate parcels could be prohibitive.  It is prudent not to dare Mother Nature.

Miraculously, Beauvoir withstood the wind and water surges of Katrina, even though it, too, is situated on 90.  Beauvoir is the name of the estate in Biloxi where Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, lived with his wife and children in the last eleven years of his life.  Before the war began, Davis was a lieutenant in the United States Army, the Secretary Of War under President Franklin Pierce, and a congressman and senator from Mississippi.  Although he was a slave owner and politically championed what he considered to be individual states' rights, he argued against the secession of the thirteen confederate states from the Union.  His powers of persuasion were inadequate, however, and when the rebels fired shots at Fort Sumpter, South Carolina, the War Between The States was on.

Davis' legacy has not been granted nearly the same level of respect and admiration by historians as has the South's highest ranking military officer, General Robert E. Lee.  As a leader of men and a strategist, Lee's description is usually rendered with glowing terms by Civil War buffs.  Davis, on the other hand, is judged to have been an ineffective president, probably the wrong man for the job.  Some of the knocks against him include the failure to address the economic problems of the Confederacy, his off-putting personality, his tendency to promote friends over better qualified candidates for important positions, and his meddling in the minutia of military affairs.  He knew how to run a successful political campaign, but once elected, was not a good deal maker.

In any event, Davis is honored with what is labeled as a "presidential library," on the same grounds as Beauvoir.  It is not as grandiose as libraries honoring more modern day US presidents, such as Kennedy (Boston), Nixon (Yorba Linda, California) and LBJ (Austin).  Nevertheless, it is a must-see for anyone interested in learning more about the Civil War and the man who went from American statesman to renegade executive.  We spent less than a full hour browsing the modest library filled with admirable art and unique artifacts, then scampered on foot a hundred yards in the chilly Magnolia State air over to the Davis house, where a tour awaited us.

I have to admit that when I first walked into Beavoir, I figured the tour would take about twenty minutes, tops.  The living quarters is comprised of only four rooms in the interior of the one-story house, and four smaller rooms built on the large back porch.  A long commons area separates the two interior bedrooms on the east side from the parlor and smoking lounge on the west.  The four "porch rooms" functioned as "his" and "her" bedrooms, a tiny dining room for the children, and a larger dining room for the adults.  The kids were relegated to the smaller room until about age fourteen, when they may have been deemed to have acquired manners adequate to merit admission to dine with their parents in the main dining room.

 

My estimate of ten minutes was way off, thanks to the wonderful docent who hosted us, Jim Kalis.  Sporting a trimmed silver beard and wearing a black brimmed hat, a crisp white shirt and a string tie, Jim looked like he could have been a plantation owner straight out of an antebellum movie.  He told us he was a seventy-five year old grandfather, originally from Washington state.  Prior to his gig at Beauvoir he was a guide at other points of interest, mostly in the South.  Following Katrina he became deeply involved in the restoration and maintenance of Beauvoir.  Like many docents, he had a flair for spinning some interesting humorous yarns about the place.  What follows are a few things we learned from Jim.

 

Typical of almost all other mansions built in the mid-nineteenth century, Beauvoir's kitchen was housed in a separate building, located about fifty feet behind the main dwelling.  The two causes for such positioning were concern for fires and oppressive heat, both emanating from the kitchen.  A path dubbed the "whistle walk" connected the two structures.  At meal time, slaves and servants, depending on the period of history, transported the prepared food from the kitchen to the house.  According to Jim, said transporters were instructed to whistle as they were moving, so that the overseer could know that the subordinant wasn't eating any food on the way.  "It's pretty hard to whistle with a pork chop in your mouth," said Jim.

 

As the father of two daughters, just like Davis, I was amused by the curved mirror situated on the wall between the front parlor and the adjacent rear smoking lounge.  The southerners refer to it as a "chaperone's mirror."  When a gentleman came to call on one of the Davis daughters, propriety demanded that they not be left entirely alone.  Accordingly, the young couple would sit in the front parlor, while a chaperone could keep an eye on things from her vantage point in the back lounge by looking at the mirror.  The curvature enabled the chaperone to see what was going on in the parlor without actually being in the parlor.  How ingenious!  Jim did not mention if the  phrase "keep four on the floor" was used in that era.

 

Speaking of "curves," it is noteworthy that in the nineteenth century, homeowners expended an enormous amount of effort putting on the dog.  Impressing house visitors was important (maybe because the owners had no fancy cars to park in their driveways), so much so that a little chicanery was often utilized.  For example, the main commons area of Beauvoir has curved corners where the walls and the ceiling come together.  This was a sign of architectural craftsmanship found only in the manors of the wealthy.  The builders of Beauvoir took it a step further by painting the trim on the ceiling of some other rooms to make the corners appear to be curved -- an optical illusion, if you will -- even though the walls and ceiling of those rooms actually met at straight ninety degree angles.

 

Along the same lines, the Beauvoir doors were made of cypress, a relatively inexpensive wood.  But for the sake of appearances, the Davis family (and others before and after them) had the doors varnished, and painted grain lines into the wood to give the appearance of oak, a more valuable material than cypress.  The song "You're So Vain" comes to mind.

 

Fittingly, Jim shared this story with us near the end of our tour.  Jefferson Davis was the tenth of ten children.  Although his middle initial was "F," he rarely used it.  After some reporters failed to get an honest response from Davis to reveal his middle name, they went to his mother for the answer.  She told them that while she was pregnant with Jeff she realized he would be the last of her brood.  Therefore, she explained, the "F" stood for "Finis."