"The first night I felt like I had jumped off a 20 story building and landed flat on my butt." That’s Mother Prioress Dolores Hart, describing her first night in the Regina Laudis Abbey, after taking her vows as a novice in the Benedictine order. Hart had it all: an exploding Hollywood career, a contract with famed American film producer Hal Wallis, and a handsome fiancé. She appeared in 10 movies. Often compared to Grace Kelly, with the same willowy blonde beauty, she, too, ended up walking away from her Hollywood life in 1963, to enter a convent. She has lived in an abbey in Bethlehem, Connecticut, a cloistered monastery, the only one of its kind in the United States, for 48 years. Her journey is the subject of God Is the Bigger Elvis, a new Oscar-nominated HBO documentary, which aired last night. Directed by Rebecca Cammisa, it is a moving and intimate portrait, not only of the contemplative monastic life, a world we rarely get access to, but of the personal journey of one woman who seemingly had it all but gave it up to find something higher and deeper.
The documentary is made up of current interviews with Dolores Hart and the other nuns and novices in the Abbey, as well as clips from old home movies of the Abbey's history. We see grainy footage of nuns working in the garden, herding cows, riding in the back of a pickup truck waving to the camera. Any preconceived notion you may have had that nuns are stiff and uptight will be completely shot to pieces when you watch this beautiful documentary. The nuns speak openly about their pasts and their own doubts. They say that living a monastic life requires a constant renewal of their vows. Submitting to the rigors of communal life and the order is not easy for many of them.
Born to teenage parents, Dolores Hart felt called to be an actress. She speaks now of the series of "strokes of good luck" that came her way early on in her career, which eventually put her in the position of auditioning to be Elvis Presley's co-star in Loving You (1957). It was his second movie, and it would be her debut. Even after so many years, Hart still seems awe-struck that she got that role. Hart says, "I often wonder why the Lord gave me such an opportunity to audition for Elvis. There were so many of us in line that day. And I just can't believe that I got the part." When asked if she had prayed that she would get the part, you can still see the hunger and ambition of a young actress in Hart's response, "Did I pray to get the part in Loving You? You bet your sweet I did! Every role I got I prayed for."
She appeared again opposite Elvis, in King Creole (1958), directed by Michael Curtiz, a wonderful film featuring one of Elvis' best performances. In King Creole, Hart plays Nellie, the five-and-dime cashier romanced by a tough bruiser, Danny Fisher (Presley). God Is the Bigger Elvis opens with a clip from King Creole, showing Elvis as Danny singing in a New Orleans nightclub, with a beaming, teary-eyed Dolores Hart watching from the audience. She was an intense and natural actress with a deep capacity for emotion, and she enjoyed her career.
In 1959, Elvis Presley sent Hart a postcard from Germany, where he was stationed with the 3rd Armored Division. His greeting to her was, "How are you, hot lips?" Hart told the drooling press at the time that no, they were not in love, he called her that because she had the honor of giving him his first onscreen kiss in Loving You, thereby making her the envy of swooning girls worldwide. Hart has described how nervous the two of them were filming that kissing scene. They both blushed so painfully that the makeup department was forced to do some damage-control. She was a devout Catholic and went to Mass every day at 6 A.M.. before heading to the studio. In a 2002 interview, she said that she felt fortunate to get to know Elvis when she did, that he had "an innocence" to him that was very touching. There are home movies of the two of them at her house, he playing the piano, she jamming out on a clarinet, both of them laughing and free.
In 1958 and 1959, Hart was appearing on Broadway in The Pleasure of His Company and struggling with fatigue. A friend suggested Hart take a weekend retreat at an abbey in Connecticut, to get some rest. Hart was so taken with the life that she saw there amongst the nuns that she had a hard time getting it out of her mind, although she did return to her burgeoning career. She began dating a Los Angeles architect, Don Robinson. They ended up seeing one another for five years, before getting engaged. Preparations for the wedding proceeded at breakneck speed. The invitations were sent out. The legendary Edith Head designed Hart's wedding dress. But Don Robinson, who is interviewed in the documentary, could tell that something was wrong.
Hart finally came clean and told him that she wanted to join the Abbey. Robinson says, "I said to her, 'Dolores, are you telling me that you're going to become a nun?' And she said, 'Yes, I am.' I totally collapsed. I felt, in Catholicism, when you give yourself to a person – that's a contract commitment. Then an outside force comes in and breaks it up. Every part of my love for her was destroyed in a matter of seconds."
Robinson never married. And every Christmas and Easter, for 47 years, until his death last November, he would travel to the Abbey in Connecticut, to attend Mass and spend time with Dolores. We see them walking hand in hand on the abbey grounds, talking quietly. Robinson says baldly, "I never got over Dolores. I have the same thoughts today that I had 52 years ago. I love her. I've come to the abbey for 47 years. I think that says something."
The access Camissa was given is extraordinary. The nuns accept the presence of the camera. We see them at prayer, we see them observing the three periods of silence each day. The abbey itself is beautiful, with wooden walls and rounded doors. The nuns stomp around in work boots and work gloves, herding sheep, driving tractors. Dolores Hart always wears a jaunty beret placed on top of her habit, with three gleaming bird pins on the side. Her cluttered office is filled with chirping birds in cages. She plays music for one temperamental parrot named Toby, and smiles widely when he starts bouncing up and down to the beat. She counsels pained people who come to her, and she listens to the novices who express to her their struggles. In the clip of King Creole that opens the film, Hart's listening is so intense that it seems her heart is on the outside of her skin, which was one of her gifts as an actress. That listening power is still with her. You can see it in every moment she is interacting with someone else. Even her parrot gets her full attention.
She still gets fan mail. She goes through some of it in her office, showing the publicity photos for Loving You, with Hart and Presley looking at the camera cheek to cheek. She reads one of the letters out loud: "I enjoyed watching you and Elvis. He was such a sweet personable young man. I loved you in Loving You and Where the Boys Are. You were my favorite actress. What are you doing now?" At that last question, Hart stops, looks at the camera, in her full habit, and bursts into a hearty laugh.
In her early visits to the Abbey, she had expressed concerns to the Mother Superior about her career. "The concern that I had was that it was wrong as a Catholic to be in the movies because sexually – you could be aroused by boys, and you could get involved sexually with men. And my leading man was Elvis. She said, 'Well, why not? You're a girl. Chastity doesn't mean that you don't appreciate what God created. Chastity says use it well.'"
In one of the most emotional moments of the film, she and her old fiancé, Don Robinson, say goodbye. They have spent the afternoon together, talking. They embrace goodbye. He tells her he thinks about her all the time, that he loves her. She tells him she loves him, too. He holds onto her hand, and doesn't want to let go. But finally, with his halting elderly step, he walks away. Hart watches him go and suddenly, out of nowhere, her eyes well up with tears. A lifetime of emotion is in that look: what she gave up, what she passed on, the sacrifice she made to choose the life she chose. It is a breathtaking moment.
Early in the documentary, Hart says, with a mischievous smile, "I never felt I was leaving Hollywood… The Abbey was like a grace of God that entered my life that was totally unexpected. God was the vehicle. He was the bigger Elvis."
Sheila O'Malley is a film critic for Capital New York. She blogs about film, television, theater, music, literature and pretty much everything else at The Sheila Variations.
Something happened when they were young that was crucial to the development of their characters as men. They were about 10 years old, and playing in the yard, as their uncle looked on, talking on a giant phone the size of a computer modem. Their uncle was a bigwig in the family drug cartel, a behemoth with many tentacles, reaching into the United States. He was running his business from a lawn chair, as the boys played and taunted one another. To the boys, their lives were normal, of course. They didn't know that their lives were any different than anyone else's. One boy takes the other's G.I. Joe doll and holds it just out of reach, taunting his brother until his brother breaks into tears, shouting, "I wish you were dead!" This innocent comment gets the uncle's attention. He calls both boys over, taking in the situation wordlessly and then asks the boy who had taunted his brother to get him a beer out of the bucket of melting ice beside his chair. The little boy reaches in, grabs a beer and holds it out but the uncle rejects it, telling him to get him one that is really cold. Leaning over the bucket, reaching in deeper, the little boy is caught unaware when the uncle swiftly pushes his head beneath the water. A struggle ensues. The uncle remains imperturbable, and asks the boy standing in front of him, "This is what you wanted, right?" The panic of the boy being held under the water intensifies, and his brother, desperate, starts hitting his uncle ferociously. Just before the submerged boy would have drowned, the uncle lets him go, and the boys huddle together by the bucket. The uncle stares down at the boys and says, "Family is all."
As teenagers, they began working for the family business. While their uncle was a negotiator, the twins were the muscle. They killed enemies of the family with a breathtaking swiftness. They were perfectly suited, emotionally, for the job. They didn't experience an adrenaline rush like normal people in the face of danger. On the contrary, when faced with a dangerous situation, their blood pressure lowered. They were able to be very still. They had patience, they could wait. They had a deep coiled core of rage inside them, but their faces remained placid and flat. They liked to kill people with axes. Sure, you could shoot someone, but it wasn't as satisfying. They felt nothing as they chopped off the head of a man in the back room of a bar. He screamed, of course, but that didn't matter. They all scream.
After their cousin Tuco is betrayed by some meth guy in Albuquerque named "Walter White", the twins know what they have to do. They move forward inexorably, getting closer and closer to their target. In a makeshift shrine devoted to death and their enemies, they place a sketch of "Walter White" beside a skull. Gleaming in their silver suits, they stare at the sketch, glance at one another, and then stare back. They have him in their sights, like a hungry lion spotting a lame antelope, and waiting, patiently, until the time is right to pounce.
The meth supplier, realizing that he is in a world of trouble by saying "No" to the twins, sets up a private meeting with them in a vacant field outside of town. He acknowledges their family feeling and he acknowledges their need for revenge, but Walter White needs to stay alive. However, he must remind the twins that Walter White did not actually pull the trigger on the gun that killed their cousin. That job was done by White's brother-in-law, who was a DEA agent. One of the twins says, "We were told the DEA was off-limits." It is rare to hear either of them speak. The meth supplier assures them that this is his territory, and he calls the shots here. Go kill the DEA agent if that is what you need to do.
Season 3 opens with a surreal scene of a group of people crawling in the dirt through a rustic Mexican village. It seems that some well-known ritual is taking place. Nobody seems too surprised at the sight. A gleaming car pulls up and two men get out. They are bald, handsome, and dressed in immaculate suits. They are also identical twins. Without hesitation, they join the ritual, lying down in the dirt, despite their silk suits, and crawling along with the others. The destination is a run-down shack which has been built into some kind of shrine. Inside there are lit candles with dripping wax and bouquets and skulls draped in beads. The men in suits pin a picture up on the wall. It is a sketch of the chemistry teacher. Wherever we are in this opening scene is far from the sun-blasted streets of Albuquerque (the stomping grounds of the chemistry teacher), but it is clear that his fearsome influence is spreading.
This young man lives in isolation in a ratty room, spending most of his time playing violent video games, imagining his real-life enemies before him. He dates a pretty young woman, who takes him to a Georgia O'Keefe exhibit. He is singularly unimpressed, staring at one of O'Keefe's famous flower paintings and declaring, "That doesn't look like any vagina I ever saw." In the car afterwards, they talk about art, and repetition, and she tries to tell him what he is missing in his interpretaion of O'Keefe's work. In this scene he is almost fresh-faced. He kisses her gently. You really see how far this kid has fallen when you consider that in most other scenes he is either jacked up on meth, buying gas he can't pay for and then trading drugs with the cashier to pay for it, or beaten almost beyond recognition. There is a slow steady progression into hell with this character, and leaping around in time nails that point home.
Seasons 3 and 4 also deal heavily with the chemistry aspect of meth production (which is a propos seeing as how the opening credits sequence features a periodic table), as well as the ins and outs of running a successful drug dealing business. A local Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque called Los Pollos Hermanos is a front, and freezer trucks filled with crystals hurtle across the desert, with armed men crouched in the back, their breath showing in the cold darkness. Often these trucks are stopped by rival drug-dealers. Multiple shoot-outs occur. We also see the creation of the meth itself, characters in white suits and gloves moving the gleaming blue crystals along, bagging them up. Later, we learn that this particular brand of meth is 99% pure, and industry-standard appears to be around 96%. Others wonder what the secret is, how this meth can be so pure, and how it is done. That 3% gap in quality serves to "up" other people's games.
But the chemistry teacher has been living in two worlds for too long. As Season 4 progresses, that separation becomes harder and harder to maintain
First we have gas mask man, who is a chemistry teacher, on medical leave due to his fight with cancer. It is clear that he is living a double life. His wife, Skyler, appears to have no idea that he is also a Drug Lord running a meth lab out of a battered RV. They visit the oncologist. The prognosis does not look good. He is very ill, balding and thin (although he has a full head of hair in the first scene with the getaway RV). The FBI calls a meeting of the school board to discuss the recent theft of chemistry equipment. The teacher gets a round of applause because he is so ill and yet has the commitment to show up at the meeting. Little do they all know that he was the one behind the ransacking of the chem lab in the first place. He spends the meeting distracted, silent, and putting his hand between his wife's legs under the table.
We also see them back in the crashed RV in the desert, staring at the dead bodies in the back, one of which, horrifyingly, starts to move and moan. Flashing back, we see the two of them in a house, wearing gas masks, cleaning up after a brutal murder, body parts blown apart, flushing the meaty pieces down the toilet. They choke and gag at what they are doing. These two bodies are the missing Mexicans we've seen earlier, swimming across a muddy river.
A meth lab has blown up in a nice suburban home with a swimming pool. A charred pink teddy bear, with one missing eyeball, floats in the pool, before being lifted out by a looming figure in a Hazmat suit. Evidence is bagged and lined up on the concrete. There are two body bags in the driveway. These are recurring dreamlike images, filmed entirely in black and white, except for the teddy bear, which blazes in pink against the monochromatic background. The bear is shown floating through the water, one side completely burnt from the explosion. This scene is shown repeatedly throughout the series and takes on an increasingly haunting aspect with each insistent repetition. The floating lone eyeball peers up through the water into the blazing light of day before being sucked into the bowels of the pool.
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