Monthly Archives: May 2015

  • A Thousand Times Good Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Erik Poppe (2013)

    An Irish-Norwegian co-production, A Thousand Times Good Night means to dramatise the dilemma of a war photographer who is also the mother of two young children.  How does Rebecca Thomas (Juliette Binoche) reconcile her responsibilities as a wife and parent with the moral imperative of bringing to public attention what’s going on in conflicts around the globe?  A serious question:  in case the audience forgets how serious, the director Erik Poppe shows a good deal of what Rebecca’s camera records – in the form of live action as well as photographs.  This is a dubious tactic but it makes sense from Poppe’s point of view.  If he didn’t exploit these grim situations and, as a result, wipe the smile off viewers’ faces they might well be laughing at the feebleness of Harald Rosenlow Eeg’s screenplay, which assumes Rebecca’s predicament is so inherently dramatic that it doesn’t need character development or believable plotting to sustain it on screen.

    Rebecca is critically injured in a suicide bomb explosion in Kabul; once out of hospital, she returns home to Ireland.  (I think she’s meant not to be Irish:  that’s what you infer anyway, both from Binoche’s accent and from a remark Rebecca’s friend makes to the effect that Ireland is claiming her for its own.  It’s not clear what her nationality is – probably all that counts is that she’s a citizen of the world.)  Her husband Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a marine biologist who looks after the house and the kids, tells her he can no longer stand living in fear that Rebecca will be killed doing her dangerous work:  he says he’ll stay around only until she’s fully recovered from her injuries.  Rebecca and Marcus don’t have any discussion about this – about what it would mean, for example, for their two daughters, Steph (Lauryn Canny) and Lisa (Adrianna Cramer-Curtis), to lose the parent who provides the stability in their lives.  And Marcus isn’t even giving Rebecca an ultimatum – certain what her priorities are, he simply says that he’ll leave.  Rebecca treats it as an ultimatum nevertheless and decides to give up war photojournalism.   (She’s meant to be a big name in the field but her decision attracts remarkably little interest outside the family circle.)  Needless to say, Rebecca has no other interests in life and she’s no good at domestic stuff, making a hopeless attempt to make breakfast for her daughters on (it seems) just one occasion.   The world of the film includes only two positions for Rebecca:  if she’s not on the front line she’s in an absolute backwater.

    The elder girl Steph, who’s prickly and distant from Rebecca when she first comes home, is doing an ‘Africa project’ at school.  Mother and daughter both want to get on better and Rebecca’s photographs, which Steph can use for the school project, are the key to developing their relationship.  When, in order to get further material, they visit Steve (Mads Ousdal), an old colleague of Rebecca’s at the Norwegian Refugee Council, he offers Rebecca an assignment in Kenya.  She refuses but Steve assures her the area in question is perfectly safe and those words register with Steph.  Not only does she think Rebecca should take the job, she wants to go too and, when Marcus says no, Steph turns on her father.   It’s implausible that Marcus changes his mind – he appears to do so because he and Rebecca have discovered a new closeness now that she’s given up work – but Rebecca never questions his volte face.  It’s clear by this stage that Erik Poppe and Harald Rosenlow Eeg have no interest in grounding their story in credible motivation.  They just want to keep their repetitive description of Rebecca’s dilemma going and they’re not fussy how they get from A to B to C.  The area in Kenya that Rebecca and Steph go to is, of course, not safe and, as the refugee camp is attacked by an armed group, Rebecca plunges headlong into the mayhem, even though Steve orders her, and the terrified Steph begs her, to get back into their car.  (This is essentially the same movie scene as the reformed alcoholic falling off the wagon as soon as temptation arrives.)  Mother and daughter get back safely to Ireland, Steph having decided that Rebecca should say nothing to Marcus about what happened.  The girl doesn’t smile or speak once they’re home.  After what seems ages, Marcus notices ‘there’s something wrong with Steph … I don’t know what’:  he stays in the dark until the moment arrives when he comes across footage, shot by Steph, of the violent incident at the refugee camp.

    By this point, the characters have developed collective amnesia or a collective inability to express remorse.  Marcus never voices regret that he changed his mind about the trip to Africa (although you’re meant to think Rebecca wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t).  Steph’s resentment of her mother now comes out in full bloom but the girl seems to have forgotten that she dissuaded Rebecca from coming clean with Marcus about what happened in Kenya.   The lack of follow-through extends even to minor elements of the story.  After a distressing exit from the family home and spending the night with friends, Rebecca returns while the others are out and discovers the younger child Lisa’s lost kitten, which she rescues from a tree and puts indoors.  When Marcus returns with Lisa, he opens the door (I wanted to shout at him to shut it in case the cat got out again) and Lisa goes inside.  You never even get her reaction to the kitten’s return; perhaps this is too happy an event for the ponderously glum film to accommodate.  The climax of A Thousand Times Good Night is a sandwich designed both to confirm Rebecca’s commitment to war photojournalism and to resolve the tensions between her and Steph.  (Marcus barely appears at the business end of the picture.)  In between the hard crusts of the admission that work comes first is a sentimental spread:  when Steph makes a presentation at the conclusion of the school Africa project, showing her mother’s photographs and acknowledging her courage, Rebecca, who turned back from the airport at the last moment in order to be there, stands tearfully in the shadows of the school hall.

    It looks as if Erik Poppe thought he needed only to keep the camera on Juliette Binoche and all would be well.  There are few actors whose facial intelligence and expressivity could hold your attention for as long as Binoche does but she’s playing an idea and this inevitably defeats her.  The same is true of Lauryn Canny, good as she is, as Steph.  Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is pleasantly sensitive as the dreamboat husband although anger doesn’t seem to come easily to him.   (He resembles Aaron Eckhart in this respect, as well as facially.)  There’s a lot of solemn-pretty music by Armand Amar and the bleakly beautiful beaches and cloudscapes of the Irish coast provide a suitably elegiac physical correlative to Rebecca’s unhappy situation.   The script does include one strong line, when Steph tells her mother, ‘It would be easier if you were dead:  then we could all be sad together, once and for all’.  Although Steph later says she didn’t mean it, you know that a part of her did.  The line can’t be unsaid and its resonance overpowers the mechanical ending of A Thousand Times Good Night.

    7 May 2014

  • The Criminal

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Losey (1960)

    You soon know what you’re in for.  The introductory shots of the prison and the opening exchanges among the inmates are, respectively, portentous and overemphatic (with Robert Krasker’s camera close in on the actors).  Joseph Losey takes no time to establish the place and the peopIe in a realistic way – it’s clear from the word go that he’s intent on making an important statement about prison as an institution.  Because the trio playing cards in the first scene includes Murray Melvin, who lets us see his native eccentricity without pushing it at us, I was briefly optimistic that the gratingly insistent playing of the other two men might be an aberration but it was evident within a very few minutes – after several more spasms of overdone character acting – that Melvin was the odd man out.   There are some congenitally crude performers in The Criminal (one of the other card players is Patrick Wymark) but some of the cast are not as bad as Losey has directed them to be.

    The picture isn’t long (97 minutes) but would be nearly unwatchable without Stanley Baker in the main role of the eponymous criminal, Johnny Bannion, released from prison half an hour into the film and back inside half an hour later after being shopped following a robbery at a racecourse.  Baker isn’t the subtlest of actors but he’s physically ideal for this part – handsome, tough face, a suggestion of real bodily strength and potential violence, and, when Johnny’s on the outside, the ability to wear his natty clothes with style.   Baker also has the instinct and good taste to try and get inside Johnny, instead of interpreting him as part of the social critique.  There aren’t many people worth watching apart from Baker (and Melvin, in his small role).  Patrick Magee, as a prison guard, inevitably makes an impression but, as usual (in my experience), it’s a ludicrous one:  he’s irredeemably fey and a good deal more homicidal than any of the prisoners.  (Magee does have one genuinely strong moment, when we see him spiritually transported during a religious service in the prison.)  Sam Wanamaker’s presence in the cast has a political resonance beyond the story (like Losey, he was blacklisted in Hollywood in the early 1950s) but he’s not good:  he’s overeager and, unlike Baker, seems to be commenting on, rather than inhabiting, the crook he’s playing.  It’s no surprise that the beautiful Margit Saad, as the girl Johnny comes to love, hasn’t been much heard of since.  As one of the (many) Irish prisoners in the jail, that striking actor Neil McCarthy (a very good Joe Gargery in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations later in the decade) comes through.

    You root for Johnny Bannion not because of the character that Stanley Baker creates but because he’s giving an honourable performance.  When Johnny gets released from jail, I hoped he would locate a world where people didn’t overact the way they did inside but no such luck.   On the evening of his release, his friends have organised a party for Johnny at his flat.  Losey, through what seems to be a remarkably sexist perspective, has the (few) women guests overact being drunk – they sway and totter, collapse and writhe decoratively around the men’s feet.  That is until Jill Bennett, as an old flame of Johnny’s, arrives:  she’s self-possessed, icily alluring.  It’s an effective entrance but within a few lines Bennett has turned hysterical enough to upstage everyone around her.  Most of the accents at this gathering sound very middle-clarse – whether intentionally or not isn’t clear – but the whole sequence is just as overwrought as the prison scenes and to the same effect.  Losey can’t show a prison as a community or a party as a gathering of human beings and trust the audience to infer larger social meanings.  He has to force each milieu into an illustration of some larger societal malaise.  He fails to make the situation believable at any level – as a result, he fails to make it matter.  The party sequence calls to mind a Fellini without imagination or wit – and with a leaden social message to replace those qualities.  The Criminal exhibits essentially the same defect as The Boy with Green Hair, which Losey made twelve years earlier:  his concentration on scoring political points makes for a picture that’s bombastic but lifeless as drama.

    The Criminal may have seemed daringly edgy and modern at the time (although it’s hard to believe).   It has a jazz score by Johnny Dankworth and a ‘prison ballad’ (which, for better or worse, has stayed with me more than a week after seeing the film), sung by Cleo Laine.   There are semi-pornographic paintings on the walls of Johnny’s flat and a brief (clumsy) flash of female nudity.    The ineffectual prison governor reads the New Statesman (this gives an idea of the level of political satire at which Losey and the writer Alun Owen are operating).   Johnny is presented as an individual struggling hopelessly against the power of the particular corporate world of which he is part.  It’s striking – given that the picture seems to have been noticed as a Searing Indictment of the prison system of the time – that this theme eclipses the issue of Johnny’s recidivism, which doesn’t appear to be blamed on ‘the system’.   For all its modernist emblems, the film has some bits which are laughably inept – not least the racecourse heist.  The producer Nat Cohen may have owned the 1962 Grand National winner Kilmore but that doesn’t prevent our seeing a sequence in which horses are jumping fences and hurdles in the same race.  It looks to be good going (the sequences appear to have been shot at Sandown or Kempton) but, when Johnny makes his getaway from the course, he’s immediately in a landscape which is well and truly snowbound.

    14 June 2009

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