Daily Archives: Saturday, May 23, 2015

  • The American

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anton Corbijn (2010)

    ‘You’re acting strangely’, says the prostitute Clara to Jack, the eponymous American, as he gets up from their bed and dresses, ‘as if you were thinking about something …’  Clara describes George Clooney’s performance as Jack very well.  There must be a clause in Clooney’s contract with the cinema audiences of the world which entitles him, every so often, to play someone who never smiles.  Watching him on occasions like this is both frustrating and like an extended version of the yes/no interlude on Take Your Pick:  will Clooney lose concentration and allow his face to crack?  Occasionally, during the first hour of The American, a smile seems to threaten but he keeps it in.  When Clooney plays superficially superficial men (as in Up in the Air), he’s brilliant:  he’s peerless in empathising with a shallow charmer and revealing him to be more complex than you expected.  When he plays someone serious on the surface (in Michael Clayton and here) he’s inexpressive without suggesting hidden depths.  Jack is a professional arms maker and international assassin, hiding out, for most of the film, in a small town called Castelvecchio in the mountains of Abruzzo.  Jack’s coming to the end of his career and apparently regrets every moment of it.  (One of the few affecting elements of Clooney’s portrait is the fact that, although he’s still in excellent shape in his fiftieth year, he’s nevertheless showing his age.)  But to reinforce the poker face, he’s removed every bit of warmth from his voice to speak Jack’s lines – he sounds abrupt and toneless.  Clara is spot on:  Clooney acts as if he’s thinking about something – he appears to have a lot on his mind but you never discover what.    Clara, needless to say, is no ordinary prostitute and Jack finds himself developing feelings for her.  They go out to dinner at a local restaurant and, with a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in his hand, he grins.   The difference it makes to Clooney’s expressivity is startling (an actor and director as acute as he is must be aware of this):  once he’s flashed the smile he’s able to register Jack’s spiritual bankruptcy in a way he couldn’t before.   Then the shutters come down again.

    The American has a screenplay by Rowan Joffe, adapted from a novel of 1990, A Very Private Gentleman, by the British writer Martin Booth (who died in 2004).    The main character in the book was British too and you naturally wonder about the significance of his being made American in the film.  Is Jack’s nationality symbolic?  Is an American of today someone who’s practised in a role he no longer believes in?  The explanation is probably simply that Clooney got involved in the project but the film’s title is shallowly thought-provoking, like the butterfly that Jack (‘Signor Farfalla’ as Clara calls him) has tattooed between his shoulder blades.   Nick James’ piece on The American in this month’s Sight and Sound illustrates how much pleasure film lovers like him (unlike me) can get purely from spotting references to other movies.  Anton Corbijn too seems pretty comfortable with this kind of approach.  The American looks expensive, moves slowly, is proficiently made and up itself.  Its subject seems to be making a film of the kind that it is.  You’re struck that things have never been quite the same for this genre since the Cold War ended (when Jack phones an associate and reports what ‘the Swedes’ are doing the effect is comically bathetic).  Even I could see The American was meant to evoke the heyday of this kind of story:  the sequences of Jack making weapons recall The Day of the Jackal – and the climax to the action, which takes place during a religious procession, echoes the Liberation Day episode in Jackal.  (The interaction between what’s happening in the foreground and background is feeble here compared with the Zinnemann film – let alone with what Coppola makes happen during the saint’s day procession in Godfather II, which Corbijn also brings to mind.)  Other reminders of the way they used to make secret agent stories are the quantities of naked female flesh on show (mainly Violante Placido as Clara, also Irina Bjorklund in her brief appearance as another of Jack’s girlfriends).   In case we thought Jack and Clara were going to live happily ever after, the ending is a kind of twist on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (one of the few Bond films I’ve enjoyed).   And there are resonances with protagonists in more recent movies played by Clooney’s friend Matt Damon – Jason Bourne of course and Tom Ripley.  ‘Tu Vuo Fa’ L’Americano’, performed by Jude Law to the Damon character’s delight in The Talented Mr Ripley, is heard on a radio here.   (Damon is probably better equipped to incarnate an elusive or anonymous figure:  Clooney isn’t naturally well cast as someone you don’t notice.)  With Thekla Reuten as a hit woman, Paolo Bonacelli as a dodgy priest (the faux-Catholic exchanges between him and Jack may be the worst bits of writing in The American because they’re the only purplish ones) and Filippo Timi, magnetic in the minor role of the priest’s illegimitate son.   The skilful pastiche score is by Herbert Gronemeyer and the elegant photography by Martin Ruhe.

    5 December 2010

  • A Matter of Time

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Vincente Minnelli (1976)

    Watching A Matter of Time was saddening in more ways than one.  It’s Vincente Minnelli’s last movie; it was notoriously hacked about by the studio that made it (American International Pictures); and what may have been the visual glories of the original, which was photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, were obscured by the muzzy print that was the best the BFI could find.  Booking for this rarely seen movie was mysteriously problematic – perhaps the film was temporarily removed from the online booking system because of difficulties getting hold of a watchable print.  (It was described as ‘fragile’ in the careless pre-screening apology by Fraser McLean, who seemed more anxious that we knew his name than about the film – plain to see who his mentor is among the BFI’s front of house team.)   Saddest of all is that, while it’s hardly surprising that Minnelli wanted to make a film that was a vehicle for his daughter, this labour of love – given the story and the type of performer Liza Minnelli is – was almost bound to be a failure.  Her filmography on Wikipedia includes twenty-five items – starting with her uncredited appearance as an infant, with her mother, in In the Good Old Summertime in 1949.   In ten of the films in the list Minnelli appears as ‘Herself’ and the truth is that she appears as the same character, who we think of as herself, in many more.  She hasn’t had a big film role in more than thirty years (and that’s counting her role in Arthur (1981) as big).   Liza Minnelli tends to do too much on screen and she’s such a strong presence that it’s next to impossible for her to play a character who might pass through this world unnoticed.  This works perfectly in Cabaret.  As Sally Bowles eventually admits:

    ‘I’m self-centered, inconsiderate, and what was the third adjective? Oh, yes, and I have this infantile fantasy that one day I’ll amount to something as an actress.’

    Sally’s charisma – her dazzling numbers on stage at the Kit Kat Klub and her behaviour in her life away from the footlights – is her self-image, her fantasy.  But in A Matter of Time, as Nina, a nineteen year old Italian country girl who comes to Rome to work as a hotel chambermaid, Minnelli is meant to be unpretentious, invigorated by new experiences in the metropolis however modest these might be.  Her personality makes a nonsense of the conception.  In a supposedly climactic scene, Nina, who’s been spotted by a big time film director, does a screen test.  The sequence is meaningless:   Minnelli is so intuitively, intensely aware of the camera all the time there’s no way that she can suggest a different quality being transmitted at this particular moment.   Nina’s rise to international screen stardom is meant to be amazing but Liza Minnelli is irrefutably a star from the start.  The world’s recognition of Nina is only, and more than anything else in the movie, a matter of time.

    Minnelli’s intensity in the role may well be sincere but it’s mostly excruciating.  The only times when her hyperbolic enthusiasm isn’t a pain are in her scenes with Ingrid Bergman, which may say something about her respect for the older star (and much more versatile actress) or may be a consequence of Bergman’s own magic.  The fearfully ageing, increasingly gaga Countess Sanziani – living in a daze of memories and delusions, of old lovers and friends dead or disappeared – is a cliche but Bergman’s effortless vocal depth and power and the passion that she gives to the role transcend the cliche.   There’s meant to be some kind of spiritual kinship between the contessa and the chambermaid:  the old woman dresses up the young one in some of the clothes she used to wear and Nina starts to fantasise about living the countess’s past in opulent, glamorous settings (Liza Minnelli is somewhat better in these sequences, for obvious reasons).  Vincente Minnelli emphasises the connection between the two women through Bergman’s heavy kohl eye make-up.  She looks to be the panda-eyed Minnelli’s grandmother rather than fairy godmother but Bergman is too compelling to avert your eyes from.   Charles Boyer features briefly as Countess Sanziani’s ex-husband – the fact that this was his last screen appearance brings another note of melancholy to the proceedings.

    In her screen debut (as a nun at the dying contessa’s bedside), Bergman’s daughter Isabella Rossellini makes a stronger impression than anyone other than Minnelli, Bergman and Boyer.  It may well be that no one else is up to much (although the cast includes Fernando Rey) but the English dubbing of the voices is so bad that you can hardly blame the actors.   The chopped-up film is a terrible, arrhythmic mess; the impersonality of bits of Roman travelogue that the studio clumsily inserted destroys any mood there might have been in what Minnelli originally shot and cut.  The title song written by John Kander and Fred Ebb is very far from their best; the other music by Nino Olivierio is one of those scores that seem to carry on regardless of what’s on the screen.  The screenplay by John Gay is adapted from a 1954 novel by Maurice Druon called La Volupté d’être.  The script includes dubious insights like ‘People only die because we stop caring about them’ and ‘Be yourself – because life worships an original’.

    29 May 2012

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