Disappointing... yet brilliant

35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum)

Director Claire Denis Stars Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue 2008 France/Germany Language French and German (with English subtitles) 1hr 40 mins Colour

 Slow-moving but engrossing suburban drama

 There’s nothing very romantic about suburban trains. Unlike long-distance ones, they aren’t promising to whisk you away to anywhere, just to and from work. And they lack the urgent urban feel of the underground. So it’s an interesting choice for 35 Rhums to open with a rather lovely extended sequence of trains running around the outskirts of Paris.

One is being driven, we eventually work out, by Lionel (Alex Descas). Eventually, because director Claire Denis likes a bit of ambiguity. Read more than one review of this film and you will find major discrepancies in the description of events and relationships. As far as I understand it, the film centres on Lionel, his university student daughter Jo (Mati Diop) and two of their neighbours, Gaby (Nicole Dogue) and Noé (Gregoire Colin). They all live in a big block in a landscape of big blocks, out in the deep burbs where Paris has parked most of its population. But this isn’t a riot-torn estate - these are solid folk: Gaby is a taxi driver, Noe’s job is unspecified but he owns the big penthouse, which he inherited from his parents. He keeps threatening to leave but is clearly keen on Jo. Gaby is painfully in love with Lionel, and feels desperately maternal towards Jo. Jo, who already has an overly co-dependent set-up with her father, doesn’t appreciate this.

It probably tells you a lot of what you need to know about this episodic film is that the longest section involves a group outing where they never reach their destination. And if that sounds a bit like a Mike Leigh film, this feels a lot like one of Leigh’s better efforts. The cast is more uniformly good looking than Leigh would allow, with the exception of Lionel’s unhappily retired mate Rene, who looks like James Baldwin. And there are lots of little things that make it a bit cooler, like a fine score by Tindersticks.

It’s a bit slow, more than a little oblique – especially at the beginning and end – but 35 Rhums is quietly absorbing.

My Favorite Wife

Director Garson Kanin Stars Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Gail Patrick, Randolph Scott USA 1940 Language English 1hr 28mins Black & white

Classic screwball with an emotional tug

Because their films were sold on the fact of their easily identifiable presence, it is easy to assume golden-era Hollywood stars just did the same thing in every movie. That idea, as I tried to suggest in my look at Sight & Sound’s Top 10, has led to certain films - Vertigo and The Searchers, in this case - being overpraised for letting us see the dark side of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, as if either of those men had only played one-dimensional heroes before the mid 1950s. Bogart may not have done different voices or dyed his hair to help us distinguish between, say, The Big Sleep and In A Lonely Place, but his performances are very different.

Likewise, while I would say that Cary Grant’s Cary Grantness is central to the pleasures of both My Favorite Wife and Notorious, what we get from him is not the same thing each time. Oh, he is funny and elegant and charming in both, but in Notorious he is also assured, competent, looks capable of professional violence and is - I can’t think of a better way of putting this - manly.

In My Favourite Wife, Grant’s lack of manliness is a running joke. He has to wander around in the ill-fitting leopard print dressing gown from the hers-and-his set his second wife has bought. A psychoanalyst brought in to examine him catches him holding up women’s clothes against himself in the mirror. He’s forced to compare himself to muscle-bound Randolph Scott*. And the fact that he ends up paying for suites for two women at the same honeymoon-favourite hotel isn’t - as the staff imagine - because he is a super-smooth Casanova but because he is a coward.

He is a bigamist by accident, but stays one for a couple of days through indecision. The accident is the unexpected return of his (first) wife Ellen (the terrific Irene Dunne) who he has just had declared dead seven years after she went missing in a shipwreck off Indochina. Ellen discovers that Nick has taken his new wife Bianca (Gail Patrick, who specialised in haughty beautiful women) to the same hotel they went to for their honeymoon and follows him there…

In a lot of ways, My Favorite Wife is a classic screwball comedy, full of rattling dialogue, scheming, misunderstanding and perplexed authority figures (the hotel manager, the long-suffering judge). It is very funny, and Grant and the quick-witted Dunne had already proved themselves as an excellent pairing in The Awful Truth three years earlier. This essay about Leo McCarey, who directed The Awful Truth, points out that his screwball comedies aren’t as full tilt as those made by Howard Hawks (or PrestonSturges, for that matter) and have more of an inclination towards more openly emotional moments. This is true too of My Favorite Wife, which McCarey produced and helped come up with the story for. While Nick is afraid of telling Bianca the truth, Ellen is can’t bring herself to reveal her identity to her children, who were too young to remember her when she went missing**.

This side of the film dominates the final 15 minutes or so, after crashing around has finished. It’s played well, but I prefer the high velocity trading of insults and evasions. And that’s what you get for most of the running time. My Favorite Wife is a chance to see Cary Grant at his best, surrounded by a cast fit to be in his company.

* Considering the treatment they normally get in fiction, it’s interesting that Scott’s super-toned athlete is a strict vegetarian.

** Ellen vanished while covering a scientific expedition as a photographer. In the 1963 remake, Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner, the whole family had been caught up in the disaster but Ellen was the only one to go missing – was the idea of a professional woman leaving her young children for weeks at a time a harder sell in the early ’60s than 1940? Or was the change prompted by the fact that Move Over, Darling was a Doris Day vehicle?

The Human Factor

Director Otto Preminger Stars Nicol Williamson, Iman, Robert Morley, Derek Jacobi, Richard Attenborough UK 1979  Language English 1 hr 55 mins Colour

Uneven but intriguing late Greene adaption

Obscure films come in two broad categories: those whose low profile is easily put down to unknown actors, film-makers, source material and/or a small budget, and those whose lack of fame is a little harder to explain away. The Human Factor fits firmly in the second group – greatness abounds among the people connected with this movie. The book was by Graham Greene, adapted by Tom Stoppard, the director (admittedly long past his best) was Otto Preminger, responsible in 1940s and ‘50s for dark Hollywood classics including Laura, The Man With The Golden Arm and Anatomy Of A Murder, the cast includes Derek Jacobi, Dickie Attenborough (star many years before of the best adaptation of an already published Greene novel, Brighton Rock) and John Gielgud. There’s even a title sequence by Otto’s genius mate, Saul Bass.

For all that, it’s not hard to see why this one has stayed under the radar. There are problems of tone, of setting, of acting. It starts off feeling a lot more like Stoppard than Greene, as clever, satirical dialogue introduces to a highly dysfunctional MI6, whose bosses are in one of their customary searches for a traitor. What that will bring to mind for many viewers is the BBC’s mighty Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, made in the same year. This goes, initially, more for uneasy laughs, playing partially on the class gap between the service’s upper-class leadership and its middle-class functionaries – intrigued by the Maltesers he finds in the briefcase of Maurice Castle (Nicol Williamson), the new security chief (Attenborough) asks whether you can get them in Fortnum’s.

That brings us on the question of a setting, because there is no getting around the fact that this is a Cold War spy drama that spends a fair chunk of its running time in the sleepy Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted. That is where Castle lives with his South African wife, Sara (Iman*) and their son, Sam. As the film goes on, we learn that during his time working in Pretoria, Castle grew a little more sympathetic that the job called for with the anti-apartheid movement, and then fell in love with Sara. This brings a moment of crisis when MI6 is visited by Castle’s antagonist in South Africa’s notorious security agency, BOSS.

 Which brings us to the acting: there’s no question that there are a number of different acting styles going on here, from the fairy broad comedy of Robert Morley to Jacobi’s not-quite-there portrayal of a would-be hip bachelor who is actually a sad sack, and from the brittle anxiety of Williamson to the stilted, is-it-acting-at-all? work of Iman. In end, though, I found her performance quite touching.

In fact, for all its awkwardness, maybe because of its awkwardness, it’s an affecting film, bringing us back – as the title suggests – to personal considerations that drive decisions made by the smallest cogs in big world events. Betrayal, as often in the work of Graham Greene, is a central theme.

I find it interesting that Preminger and Greene, both in their seventies, should have been drawn to what was then the very current issue of South Africa’s place in the Cold War. It was a tricky one, one that most supporters of the anti-apartheid movement rather wished away. The democratic West officially disapproved of apartheid and the exiled ANC leadership was based in London… but the South African Communist Party, which despite a lot of interesting thinking within its ranks, remained officially pro-Moscow, was a major element in the ANC. With Portuguese Southern Africa now in Communist hands**, the apartheid regime was able to use its strategic position to dampen pressure on it from the US and Europe (It wasn’t a coincidence that the fall of the Berlin Wall was swiftly followed by the collapse of white South Africa).

In any case, the politics of thankfully long-gone regimes aside, does The Human Factor deserve to at least be rescued from complete obscurity? I’d say yes, there’s something compelling about its low-key take on the intelligence world and its perverse logic.

*I hadn’t spotted her name during the credit sequence, so I keep puzzling over this oddly familiar yet clearly out of place figure.

**East German agriculture advisers were doing enormous damage in Mozambique around this time.

La Vida Util

Director Federico Veiroj Stars Jorge Jellinek, Manuel Martinez Carril, Paola Venditto Uruguay/Spain 2010 1hr 10mins Language Spanish Black & White

Lovely look at the life of a professional film obsessive

 Jorge (Jorge Jellinek, a real Uruguayan film critic) works at Cinemateca, a serious-minded (overly serious minded, one might argue) art-house film theatre in Montevideo. They rely on charitable donations to stay afloat, unsurprising as the audiences for screenings seem to barely creep into double figures. Before each film, over the PA comes an appeal by Jorge insisting, ‘You need Cinemateca, Cinemateca needs you’.

It would be easy to slip into regarding Jorge as a sad sack  - he’s a big, middle-aged man who lives with his dad and doesn’t look like he gets out much. But I think that sells him short: he’s good at a job that keeps him connected to the thing he loves, and allows him the chance to do a weekly radio show about movies, although admittedly one I think I’d struggle to stay listening to. And those big photo-reactive glasses and slightly long hair were probably considered cool in Montevideo back when he started the job in the 1980s.

Still, the film takes a big shift half way through, when Jorge has to step out of Cinemateca into the city. But the cinema doesn’t leave him, it’s just that instead of spending a day watching and talking about film, he spends it living as if he if were in the movies. It’s so much more subtle than that sounds - this isn’t, say, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid or Pleasantville. It’s mostly a series of small, joyful, liberating moments of the kind most of us have dreamt of having at some time or other. In some ways (and I’m sure this is a comparison those involved would relish) reminded me of the great silent movie, Sunrise.

It’s in black and white, which doesn’t make feel like a truly vintage movie, or at least not until near the end, more 1970s art house b&w - Wim Wenders’ Alice In The Cities, maybe. It looks terrific. But just as important, probably more important, is the combination of the sound design and the score, which does a look of the work in setting the mood. It’s a sweet, funny, sometimes sad movie that is deeply in love with films but knows there is life outside of a Manoel de Oliveira retrospective.

The Ryan Gosling Sort-of-Paradox, or why it’s surely possible to gather your girls together, eat Ben & Jerry’s and watch one guy stomp another to death on screen

[There are spoilers ahead. Also sexism, probably.]

There are women I know who have only seen one film starring Ryan Gosling. For them, he will always be the cute guy in the 2004 weepie The Notebook. As they have warm memories of that movie, and continue to see pictures of Ryan looking handsome on the red carpet, or incongruously bemuscled in photoshoots, they wouldn’t mind catching him on screen again. But reviews of his later work don’t really promise a comfortingly teary experience. Someone I work with learnt how true this was when she saw Drive. Not that she didn’t like the film – no, she really enjoyed the synth-and-neon saturated thriller. But she was also still in shock the next day about some of the things done by Gosling’s character in that movie.

Many years ago, I wrote a Winona Ryder-inspired piece titled Actors Aren’t Indie Bands. My point was that it is generally wrong to look for some kind of unifying aesthetic vision behind a actor’s career choices. They can end up in a flick because they like a bit of variety, because they wanted to work with a friend, because their agent is putting pressure on them, because they have a debt to a bookie or the taxman, because they want to be in something their kids can see, because they want to be 2,000 miles away from their husband or the back-room pick-up who keeps calling. Or because they genuinely feel that Goodfellas and My Cousin Vinny are of equal worth.

But Ryan Gosling seems to be unusual on that count. Since his post-child actor career effectively began with him playing a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, Gosling appears to have steered away from obvious crowd pleasers, and only made an incursion into biggish budget movies for the all-guns blazing Gangster Squad.

He’s played a bloke in love with a sex doll. He once starred as an idealistic white middle-class teacher working in a school full of impoverished black and Latino kids… which could sound like Dangerous Minds until you discover that Gosling’s character is addicted to crack (and also a left-wing intellectual rather more attuned to the massive contradictions of his situation than your standard Hollywood inspirational educator). 

In Drive, Gosling plays a Hollywood stunt driver who turns his particular skills to profitable criminal ends, has a capacity to be extremely violent and is a lifelong loner who experiences a brief moment when he feels part of a family. In The Place Beyond The Pines, by contrast, he plays a carny motorbike stunt rider who turns his distinctive skills to criminal ends, has a capacity for extreme violence, and is a lifelong loner who experiences a brief moment feels he’s part of a family. You can tell the difference  because in Drive he has light-brown hair and sports ’80s-does-’50s bowling alley chic while in TPBTP he has a bleach job, wears his T-shirts inside out and has the kind of DIY prison tats usually seen on someone drinking Special Brew in a Glasgow park at 11am. 

(The poster above severely undersells them).

The common ground between Gosling’s roles (rather than the two movies themselves, which are in some ways very different, although both terrific) suggests he is aiming for a persona that is a chunk Steve McQueen, a seasoning of Lee Marvin and a side order of the young Mickey Rourke. It’s admirably minimalist, pleasingly unshowy and reactive.

At least in The Ides Of March, a fairly high-minded film about the dark inner workings of an election campaign, he looks presentable. As it also stars George Clooney, I suppose  it could serve as a tub-of-ice-cream at home movie, although the only tears obviously on offer are those mourning the inherent corruption of American politics and the media.

Blue Valentine (obviously) has the word ‘valentine’ in the title, is a relationship movie and contains, as showcased in the trailer, a cute scene with Ryan playing a ukulele as Michelle Williams dances. But the song he sings is, ominously, You Always Hurt The One You Love. The presence of Williams, too, is a hefty clue to abundant gloom on offer, culminating in a sex scene of somewhat terrifying bleakness. 

So The Notebook is an outlier in Gosling’s career, a red herring. Basing your impression on what he does in that film is like only having seen Tom Cruise in Magnolia* or indeed Michelle Williams in the perky-teens-unravel Watergate comedy Dick, before her career fully became a (frequently impressive) slough of despond. 

And yet, Gosling remains a favourite with the more excitable parts of the showbiz media, suggesting one of two things - people are happy to fancy him despite not seeing his movies (making him, in a strange way, something of a male counterpart to Scarlett Johansson, whose dried-husk screen anti-presence surely makes her only attractive to those who never see her films, or not post-Lost In Translation, anyway). Or, alternately, and this is what I am going with, many of the women who loved him in The Notebook also love him in the movies he has made since, even when (especially when?) he crushes a man’s skull with his boot or stabs someone in the face with an Allen key. Of course it’s possibly to be enthralled by both weepies and moody ultra-violence.

Meanwhile, I still feel I like Gosling’s films more than I like him. Oh, he is usually good, and was very good in Half Nelson. I like how quiet he is on screen. But I don’t think I have ever thought he is the only person around who could have done what he did in a film. And when he arrives on screen, I don’t get that subliminal sense of looking forward to what he is going to do for the next two hours in the way I do with, say, Jeff Bridges or Philip Seymour Hoffman.

He makes good choices, though. You could fill a decent weekend mini-festival of interesting Ryan Gosling films. I’m looking forward to Only God Forgives, his second film with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, the man who made Pusher, Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands, Pusher III: I’m The Angel Of Death, Bronson, Vahalla Rising and the not inaccurately named Bleeder. That’s the cinematic company Gosling keeps. Yet no matter what atrocities he commits on screen, there always seems to somewhat ready to say ‘But he’s soooo cute!’

I think that’s probably Gosling’s blessing, but I suspect he might see it as a curse.

*Although as I’ve argued before, Frank TJ Mackey, the self-help guru peddling the art of using and discarding women played by Cruise in Magnolia, is just the inner creep at the heart of all other Cruise characters allowed out into the open.

The Gay Divorce

Director Mark Sandrich Stars Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton USA 1934 1hr 47mins Language English Black & White

 Fred & Ginger turn up in a wonderfully improbable 1934 Brighton

Everything I know about Brighton in the 1930s comes from two novels, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938). Between, they evoke a seaside town that’s an exciting, dangerous, very British place – lively (in season), chaotic, sinister, seedy, and yet sometimes full of hope. Here’s Hamilton: ‘It was crowded everywhere, with the shelters and the deckchairs full, the blinding satin-blue sea glistening and purring on one side, and the tar and the dust and the people all smelling of heat. And behind, and mingling with all the noise and colour and heat and haze and smell, there could be heard, if you cared to listen, the distant church of people walking, or rather slithering about, on the difficult and crowded beach below – the characteristic noise of Brighton at the height of the season.’

It’s true that both Hamilton and Greene were naturally inclined to search for the darker side of life, but I’m also pretty sure that Brighton never resembled the extraordinary art deco fantasy conjured up in the first proper Astaire/Rogers movie (they had danced together in Flying Down To Rio, but they were not the stars of the film). You might at a stretch believe that Miami or Cannes might have been a little like this at their peak, but, bless it, never Brighton.

The funny thing, though, is that what brings Astaire and Rogers’ characters (Guy and Mimi) down to the South Coast is one of its grubbiest industries – the staging of the ‘discovery’ (and photographic documentation) of one member of a married couple and a person (hired for the purpose) who was certainly not their spouse in order to secure divorce on the grounds of adultery, this being a comparatively quick way out of unhappy marriages in the pre-permissive era. In The Gay Divorce, this miserable business plays as low-velocity farce in vast hotel suite, during which Ginger and Fred have time to nip out for the spectacular, lengthy sequence built around the song The Continental with a sizeable chorus line and a number of different singers having a go at the lyrics. It’s enchanting and enthralling.

The plot isn’t very important, but it goes like this: Guy meets Mimi in Dover, when her dress has become trapped in her aunt Hortense’s trunk. He’s instantly besotted by her – she doesn’t respond, for reasons that later become clear. She seeks legal assistance from Egbert (Edward Everett Horton), who, she doesn’t know, is Guy’s best mate (and, from a 2013 perspective, is desperately in love with him). And that leads them all to Brighton…

…where the movie comes to life. Fred and Ginger don’t even dance together until they get there, and that’s a good 50 minutes into the film. Brighton also means a showcase number from a teenage Betty Grable that looks almost enough to tempt Egbert into the obscure delights of heterosexuality, and a terrific turn by Edward Blore as the waiter. Blore became a regular in the Astaire/Rogers series, although his greatest moments come in the tremendous Preston Sturges comedy The Lady Eve. 

In the early part of the film, Astaire can seem a bit lightweight, and the whole thing seems flimsy. But as it gets going, it takes flight. As Graham Greene, in his other capacity as film critic, later wrote of Astaire: ‘He might have been drawn by Mr Walt Disney, with his quick physical wit, his incredible agility. He belongs to a fantasy world almost as free as Mickey Mouse’s from the law of Gravity.’

Like its star, this delightful movie turns out to be weightless in the best possible way.

 

Spring Breakers

Director Harmony Korine Stars Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, James Franco USA 2013 Language English 1hr 34mins Colour

Faux-exploitation movie set during bourgeois America’s tiny window of misbehaviour

The line above this was going to be ‘Disney chicks go Russ Meyer’. But although that is a useful starting point in some ways to this story of four college girls getting up to no good in Florida, it doesn’t quite get the essence of the movie. Spring Breakers conjures up lots of other films, but two for starters are Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey – his homage to time-fractured late 1960s cinema – for some parts of the style, and Quadrophenia, for the regret at the passing of youth’s most magical moment even while the moment is still occurring. And the scooters, obviously.

There are three potential notes of interest here. The first, the main commercial selling point, is that it stars two Disney child stars of recent vintage - Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical and Selena Gomez from the long-running TV show The Wizards Of Waverley Place – as girls gone wild. Indeed, one of them plays a character who not only gets involved with guns, violent crime, multi-player sex and drugs, but assorted complicated combinations thereof. She is involved in the only scene in the movie that actually manages to be halfway disturbing. But the idea of Disney starlets getting dirty is hardly a novel one – something the film acknowledges with several references to Britney Spears. As such, this angle is presumably mostly of concern to a) the kids slightly younger than them who grew up watching Gomez and Hudgens and might actually find their actions here either brain-scrambling or liberating and b) one or two grizzled gentlemen of my acquaintance who turn out to have suspiciously deep knowledge of Hannah Montana back episodes.

Secondly, Spring Breakers is written and directed by Harmony Korine, who was once considered a shocking youth himself. Harmony is a venerable 40 now, but I guess his 26-year-old wife Rachel, one of quartet of bikini-clad women here, keeps him in touch with what the younger folk are up to. In his prime – the late ’90s – Harmony was something of a cult, a cause for several critics I knew and respected. Not just for his script for Kids or his debut Gummo* and Dogme 95 entry Julien Donkey-Boy, but his novel A Crack Up At The Race Riots, his collaborations with David Blaine and assorted other artistic projects/wind-ups. I didn’t buy into it all – I assumed Kids was a joke Harmony played on prurient older people including the film’s director, Larry Clark, all pervily interested in the supposed amorality of youth. I quite enjoyed Julien Donkey-Boy, but that might just be because I find Werner Herzog talking in English one of the greatest treats cinema has to offer. But I wasn’t moved enough to catch Harmony’s most recent films – Mister Lonely or Trash Humpers.

The third element is James Franco, actor/writer/performance artist/etc, who has pursued a similar path of provocation to Korine, most famously appearing as a mysterious artist on the daytime soap General Hospital while making a film about this experience that showed at the same gallery his characters was ‘showing’ at. Time describes him as ‘the 21st Century’s first great public intellectual’. I haven’t seen enough of the stuff he has done outside movies to know if it is interesting, but he can come across as a bit of a try-hard, studiedly weird. I have no problem with his film work. Here he is gangsta rapper Alien (with the stress on the first word), with braided hair and platinum grills. It’s all a bit obvious. In any case, if you are a fan, be warned that Franco doesn’t turn up until halfway into the film.

Before that, three amoral girls (Hudgens, Mrs Korine and Ashley Benson) and their God-fearing chum Faith (Gomez) find themselves short of cash to get out of their college town and off to spring break – leaving Faith behind, the others rectify the situation by holding up a diner. All four head for Florida, and join in the general business of getting beer poured on them, smoking, snorting, flashing and cavorting. Then it goes a little wrong, and Alien comes to their rescue, in return for…

As its 18 certificate suggests, Korine isn’t about to short-change his audience when it comes to tits and guns, gear and beer in paper cups, not to mention sizeable quantities of truly terrible dance music. But anyone coming to see the film for cheap thrills would probably swiftly run out of patience due to the way that shots, sequences and voice-over fragments of dialogue and phone calls home are looped and half-looped, so that moments are both foreshadowed and revisited, or repeated just because Harmony feels like it. Sometimes it is dizzying, sometimes it attains the poignancy that Korine seems to be reaching for, sometimes it’s just tiresome. It’s often beautifully shot (with a colour palette and sensibility that is often distinctly ’90s, it should be said), and when it’s not – the grotesque opening sequence of spring breakers doing their thing on the beach – that is clearly on purpose. The girls look alternately flawlessly beautiful and convincingly pale and blotchy. There is stunning scene of a darkened lecture theatre lit by the glow of a hundred laptops.

There are moments that I suspect Harmony thinks are just genius that instead remind me of what I found off-putting about his early work, like when Alien is sitting at a white grand piano by the water surrounded by the girls wearing pink balaclavas and they all sing Britney’s Everytime. Incongruous isn’t the same as intriguing.

The actresses are good, better than the script deserves, blank and moody and excitable and out of their depth. And fairly heroic considering the amount of time they have to spend in bikinis. This is not a bad film – it’s entertaining and sporadically clever and sometimes funny and it looks good. What it doesn’t do is get me any closer to understanding spring break, other than what I know already, which is that contrary to what was commonly believed at the time of Kids (and many determined moral panickers insist on clinging pn to in face of the evidence), young people in the US have mostly become steadily better behaved. Spring break seems to truly work as a carnival in the sociological sense of the word – these kids go absolutely sex & drink & drugs bonkers for one week at a time, four years running, and live the rest of their lives as model citizens. Go figure.

* One of the rare amusing moments in the wearying history of The X Factor occurred when during movie week, when Simon Cowell gave a contestant Roy Orbison’s Crying on the grounds that it was used in Gummo. Louis Walsh went apeshit, claiming this was a cheat because he, Louis, had never heard of the film. I rather suspect Cowell hadn’t seen it either, but that wasn’t the point. A cultural world limited by the staggeringly tiny amount that Louis Walsh knows would be a particularly bleak place.

Silver Linings Playbook

Director David O Russell Stars Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jackie Weaver USA 2012 Language English 2hr 2mins Colour

Rom (non com) with dubious mental health angle

Crazy guy meets crazy girl, bonds over the horrors of meds, eventually – it’s not easy! These are wounded people! – they creep towards love. Aw. Or something like that.

Except… here are some of my problems. My first is simple: SLP has been referred to as a twist on the romantic comedy – the primary twist being that there precious few laughs.

The second is with Bradley Cooper’s character, Pat. Pat is an asshole, quite apart from his mental health issues. This seems reasonable, to some extent, considering his upbringing as we can judge it from what we see of his parents (Robert De Niro, as a sports obsessive*, and Jackie Weaver, both pretty good). He’s been in psychiatric care after committing a crime that, although not acceptable, seems understandable to me**. And that’s fine for the first half of the film, or so, until the tone shifts and Pat’s redemption approaches. I don’t believe in Pat’s redemption. I think he would still be a jerk. That’s not a product of an unhappy time in his life – that’s the core of his character. His tedious belief in the power of positivity seems (to me) to proof of how far from having a grip he is. We’re meant to forget this because he is played by Bradley Cooper, I guess. But I have no investment in Bradley Cooper – by accident, as much as anything else, I’ve never seen The Hangover. The only thing I remember seeing him in was the quite atrocious A-Team movie, in which he was probably annoying but who could tell in the shadow of Liam Neeson giving what may well have been the most anti-charismatic performance ever given by someone who is purportedly a major film star, a black hole into which the rest of that misbegotten movie tumbled.

The third, which follows on from that, is that this isn’t about two equally damaged people at all. Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) has been acting out after her husband died. The movie wants it both ways, using her account of her behaviour then for titillation (the diner scene that was used as one of the promo clips for the film) and yet equating it with Pat’s capacity for sudden violence. But during the actual course of the movie, there is nothing wrong with Tiffany at all. He’s smashing things up, disturbing the neighbourhood – and her sole misstep during the running time of the film is to send one foolish text message. She is, in fact, one of those wise, nurturing, beautiful young women on hand in Hollywood movies to redeem immature pricks like Pat – I was very much reminded of Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.***

And that brings us to the tonal problem – a movie that starts off with a downbeat indie vibe takes an ungainly lurch into Hollywood romance with one of those big showstopper endings that you really have to earn, which I don’t this manages. Lawrence tries, she really does, but she can’t haul this poorly written movie by herself. As in David O Russell’s previous film, The Fighter, years of accumulated family pain and complexes seem to be fixed by one or two soul-bearing conversations. Really?

A few of small points – some of the same kind of British critics who kick up a fuss if a Scottish film is subtitled in the US were stumped by the American sports references, including the title (google it, you lazy bastards)… they’re really not a big deal: there is one scene where some of what Tiffany says might be confusing, but the meaning of the scene itself is clear. On the other hand, the film’s treatment of the Indian characters left me really uncomfortable. And Julie Stiles – how did she end up with sister-of-the-star roles? What did she do to deserve that?

*As an account of the intertwining of obsession with American Football and family dysfunction, this doesn’t begin to match up with Buffalo 66.

**[SPOILER ALERT] There’s a subtext that says, no wonder Pat is so wound up – it’s not just that his wife was cheating on him, she was cheating on him with a bald, middle-aged bloke. The horror!

***SLP could also be seen as a version of Punch-Drunk Love with all the interesting stuff taken out. 

Was it the beard wot won it?

So the 2013 movie awards season is over and within weeks I will have completely forgotten who won what. But shortly before I do, I would like to pay tribute to a major player in Argo’s eventual triumph, Ben Affleck’s (now departed) facial hair.

As beards go, Affleck’s was unremarkable. In Argo, it was period appropriate (even if the real Tony Mendez was a tache man). Off screen, it was at one with current fashion: beards haven’t been so common in the West since the 1970s.* Ben’s chum George sports one, as do the Bloomsbury-styled fops of Dalston and Williamsburg and so do many men of Affleck’s age, often to compensate for the dwindling hair on top of their heads.

Even so, Ben Affleck’s beard did an important job. It was a physical way of symbolising of the break with his unpopular past.** He had, of course, already surprised a lot of people by directing two terrific films, but he still looked like Ben Affleck. Tall, good cheekbones, thick hair, slightly plasticky skin, dimpled chin*** – Affleck has the kind of Action Man look that lazy people imagine makes a Hollywood leading man but actually more often characterises no marks like Chris O’Donnell or guys like poor George Peppard, who have to age into some personality. There is also something cruel about Affleck’s face – you’d cast him as a Nazi officer in a second, and he’s been well used as bullies in Dazed And Confused and Mallrats, a murderous outcast angel in Dogma and arrogant lawyer in Changing Lanes. Widowed dad you want see seduced back to happiness by Liv Tyler in Jersey Girl? Not so much. Let’s not even talk about Pearl Harbor…

The beard, then, helped in a simple way to say, I’m not quite the same guy who annoyed you any more. But as a trio of relevant precedents suggests, he might need to put on weight to continue the current goodwill if he wants to continue to act as well as direct.

Affleck and Vince Vaughn must surely have been up for the same parts more than once in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Vaughn arrived being funny in Swingers, but the fact that he was tall, thin and good-looking led to the mistaken notion he might be a dramatic leading man, and his appearance in a lot of forgotten late ’90s thrillers along with Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake. It was only when he got heavier that everyone remembered that being funny is what he did best. He’s now never short of work, if not necessarily good work.

Jason Lee, Affleck’s co-star in a number of Kevin Smith, was funny from the start, but also kind of creepy and sly. To play the endearingly haphazard eponymous pilgrim in the excellent sitcom My Name Is Earl, he needed a gut and a walrus moustache, which rendered him barely recognisable. These days, he looks rather weird - I think he needs to get back to the Earl look and grow comfortably old styled like Jimmy Greaves/David Crosby.

But most of all, there is the man who was Ben Affleck before Ben Affleck, a slim leading man with good teeth, siblings in the business, annoyingly vocal liberal politics and a relationship with a huge female star of the day that ended up clobbering his reputation. They (despite their political leanings) even both played charmless right-wing action hero Jack Ryan. Redemption for Alec Baldwin came when he reemerged as a big man, full of menace that could be played straight, as in The Cooler or, in the mighty 30 Rock, for laughs.

Bon apetit, M Affleck.

*One of the many unexpected developments post 9/11 has been the return to favour of the beard in fashionable circles.

**In retrospect, Ben Affleck’s sins - the pre-dues-paid Good Will Hunting Oscar, a few of lousy movies, a few months of tabloid overexposure - seem remarkably slight.

***Only acceptable for members of the Douglas family.

The Ghost of Jimmy Stewart weighs in on the digital v film debate

This week’s episode of Talking Pictures – the BBC’s dig into their vault of interviews with the great Hollywood stars – featured James Stewart. There were the inevitable appearances on Parky and Wogan, but also an interview in front of an NFT audience conducted by Joan Bakewell (wearing a strange tepee-like dress – this was 1972). During it, Stewart discusses his long-held theory was that what audiences take from movies are moments, rather than whole performances or even stories. This notion, he implied, came from encounters with fans who would rarely mention the name of film or even a co-star, but would describe their favourite bits, usually starting ‘You were in a room…’

My reading of what he was saying was that these moments can’t be forced, but film-makers and actors can stay alert to when they occur. He told a story about director William Wyler (who made Roman Holiday and the 1959 Ben-Hur, among many other films), and was notorious for insisting on lots of takes. On set one day, after the director had shot the same scene again and again, someone finally got up the courage to ask Wyler if they were doing anything wrong.

‘It’s all fine,’ he said.

‘Then why, Mr Wyler, are we doing so many takes?’

‘I’m waiting for something to happen.’*

Which brings us the long-running film vs digital debate among movie makers, critics and fans, one that’s even had its own cinema-released documentary, with interviews conducted by Keanu Reeves, no less. It’s an argument will eventually be settled not by aesthetics but by economics. I can see both sides of the argument: digital cameras have come an awful long way in a short period of time, but I’m still inclined to believe that they can’t match film in the hands of really gifted people, and I mourn the near-extinction of Super 16. On the other hand, it’s far easier now to make a decent-looking very cheap film.**

And although I suspect Mr Stewart would have been firmly in the celluloid camp, creating space for moments to happen has to be easier with digital, which has few limits (technical or economic) on the number or length of takes you can shoot, giving you so many more chances to stumble across the magic. Chalk up an unexpected spectral vote for digital?

Well, maybe. Because then again, the magic in those moments that Stewart was talking about is created by the interaction of acting, story, direction, light and whatever medium you are shooting in – it’s a mysterious process. And what you can’t measure is how important film itself was to that alchemy…

*This is a paraphrase of the anecdote – my ancient Mac is incompatible with the BBC iPlayer. 

**Perhaps weirdly, movies shot on digital that look fine on the big screen – I’m thinking of Michael Mann’s recent work in particular – look awful on TV.