Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • Don’t Look Now

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Nicolas Roeg (1973)

    When it was released in 1973, The Sun proclaimed that it featured the-act-of-love-as-it-has-never-been-filmed-before, or words to that effect (except they should all be in capital letters).  That’s what sent my friend Ian to the cinema to see Don’t Look Now and it maybe explains why I struggled to take it seriously at the time – even though it was lavishly praised by more serious critics than The Sun’s.  Nicolas Roeg’s reworking of a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, with a screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, is now accepted as a horror classic.  It’s soon clear that Roeg’s priority is to create images that are elaborate, startling and brilliantly cut (the cinematographer was Anthony B Richmond, the editor Graeme Clifford).  He undoubtedly succeeds in doing this but the eeriness is incontinent, laid on the narrative rather than connected with the characters.  As a result, I don’t find Don’t Look Now scary.  At the start of the film, John and Laura Baxter’s young daughter, Christine, drowns in a pond in the grounds of their home in England.  The child is wearing a red plastic mac when the accident occurs and the garment sets the primary colour scheme of much of what follows in Venice, where John (Donald Sutherland), who works in church restoration, has accepted a commission.  Roeg’s depiction of the city in winter – a Venice which seems not so much etiolated as rotting, a beautiful corpse – is one of the two memorable elements of the film.  Laura (Julie Christie) meets in Venice a pair of sixtyish sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania), one of whom (Mason) is blind but claims to have second sight and to be able to see the deceased Christine. It’s after the suddenly hopeful Laura tells her sceptical husband about this meeting that the-act-of-love-as-it-had-never-been-filmed-before occurs, and this is the movie’s other memorable element.  The sexual coverage looks remarkably extensive even now, in spite of Roeg’s repeatedly intercutting it with the couple dressing for dinner afterwards and Pino Donaggio’s twinkly musical accompaniment.

    By now, the beautifully fractured images and rhythm are dominating the story that Roeg is telling.  The imbalance between the two becomes increasingly pronounced as Don’t Look Now goes on.  It’s beyond me why the film is admired as a penetrating study of the psychology of grief at the death of a child.  It seems more and more a piece of design:  when John Baxter finally catches up with the tiny, fugitive figure in red that he has kept glimpsing at Venice street corners and is stabbed by what turns out to be not his daughter but a grinning, homicidal crone-dwarf (Adelina Poerio), what you mainly notice is that the blood pouring from his neck looks more like raspberry mousse.  Does John meet this grim end because he has denied his own second sight?  Who knows or cares?  Surely not Nicolas Roeg, and Donald Sutherland is rather dull as John anyway.   Julie Christie’s sheer beauty never fails to take you by surprise; here she looks especially great wearing a pair of knee length boots (red, of course) and, when she’s expected to create a mood through her face and body, she’s expressive.  As usual, though, her line readings are not.  There’s a moment in Don’t Look Now when Laura reminds John that it was he who insisted their children (the Baxters have a son too) should play just where they wanted to at home; Christie’s voice is so bland that Laura seems not at all upset, let alone accusatory.  Yet this blandness – like the toneless (post-recorded?) sound of the voices in the film more generally – contributes to the remote, disorienting atmosphere.   For many people, not being able to get a purchase on Don’t Look Now probably makes it more spooky  There is one, presumably unintentional laugh, when John Baxter throws up and says, ‘I haven’t been sick for ten years’.  Donald Sutherland makes it sound as if a decade of vomit has been building up in him.  Reading Pauline Kael’s review afterwards made it worth watching Don’t Look Now again after an interval of nearly forty years but I think I’ll leave a similar gap before I return for a third helping.

    2 March 2013

  • Shotgun Stories

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jeff Nichols (2007)

    Jeff Nichols’s first feature is, like Mud, set in Arkansas, where Nichols was born and brought up.  In the opening shots and sequences, he and his DoP, Adam Stone, establish the geography and social context of Shotgun Stories with economy and clarity.  The main characters work the land or in a fish factory in a nearby town.  The plot centres on a feud within the extended Hayes family – a feud re-animated by the death of the father of two sets of half-brothers.  The film’s score, by the country-punk band Lucero (whose members include Jeff Nichols’s brother, Ben) and the indie-rock group Pyramid, helps both to localise the piece and to convey foreboding.  The elder Hayes offspring – Son (Michael Shannon), Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) – have been taught by their resentful mother (Natalie Canerday) to hate the father who walked out on them.  Her sons hate her too:  a large part of their enmity towards their father and half-brothers is down to being left to be raised single-handed by a woman both bitter and callous.  The trio turns up at the father’s funeral just in time for Son, the eldest son, to articulate their loathing of the dead man and to spit on his coffin.  There’s a graveside punch-up with their half-siblings.  In the aftermath to the funeral (I wasn’t clear as to the exact timeframe), the bad blood develops new, and what threatens to become inexorably lethal, force.

    Some aspects of Jeff Nichols’s screenplay are very convincing.  Boy’s dog dies and Kid learns that it was fatally poisoned by a snake placed in the animal’s water bowl by Mark Hayes (Travis Smith), the eldest of the younger half-brothers.  Kid’s reaction makes good psychological sense.  The feud doesn’t dominate his life to the extent that he already suspected Mark.  When he finds out, from a third party, what happened, Kid isn’t seized by crazy fury yet he’s impelled, without a moment’s hesitation, to avenge the killing of the dog, and he kills Mark.  The mother’s two-pronged sustenance of her sons’ anger is succinctly expressed in a scene in which Son goes to tell her that Kid has died, at the hands of two of the other half-brothers, John (David Rhodes) and Stephen (Lynnsee Provence).  Although Son takes his mother to task here for being the source of the feud, his clear awareness of her influence doesn’t modify his own aggression towards the younger Hayes sons.  What’s less convincing is that the behaviour of the father’s second family, who are meant to have had a relatively stable upbringing, is so similarly governed by the feud.  Putting the snake in the water bowl is believable as something that Stephen, the most volatile of the younger sons, might have done as a reaction to what happened at his father’s funeral.  It’s harder to credit that Mark Hayes would have acted in this way – and it’s this act which is the catalyst for much of what follows.  The chain reaction of vengeance in Shotgun Stories comes across as a rather too abstract working out of Jeff Nichols’s central theme.

    This might be less of a problem if the characterisations were sharper than they mostly are.  Nichols made Shotgun Stories on a small budget:  the cast includes several non-professionals and some of the acting is not so much low-key naturalistic as weak (although it’s not always the less experienced actors who are the problem).  The sons of the second family, except for Stephen, aren’t individual enough; Glenda Pannell, as Son’s wife Annie, although she has a few effective moments, is uneven; and G Alan Wilkins, as Shampoo Douglas, is conspicuously weak in what is a crucial role.  In an interview with Filmmaker magazine in March 2008, Nichols was quoted as saying that he ‘didn’t sit down and plan out for Shampoo to be a Greek chorus necessarily’.  In fact, Shampoo calls to mind not the chorus of classical tragedy but the supporting character whose revelations, either intentionally or inadvertently, drive the protagonists to fateful action:  Shampoo spills the beans not only to Kid about the snake but also to Son about the involvement of John and Stephen in the death of Kid.

    Son Hayes is, however, a compelling and persuasive character – well written and very well played by Michael Shannon (who has gone on to appear in all Jeff Nichols’s features to date).  At the start of the film, Annie has walked out on Son, taking their young son Carter (Cole Hendrixson) with her.  She’s exasperated by her husband’s gambling losses, which the family can ill afford.  Annie and Carter return to Son shortly after his father’s funeral although Son continues to gamble, convinced there’s a system to winning that he’s on the verge of cracking.  He explains this conviction calmly:  it’s a particular strength of Michael Shannon’s performance that he balances with an impression of reasonableness the irrational force of Son’s drives and the pervasive obstruction of his and his brothers’ hang-ups.  He talks to Boy simply and honestly about his love for Annie.  Kid is sweet on a girl called Cheryl (Coley Campany); shortly before Kid’s death, Son has assured his brother that his future with Cheryl will work out fine.

    We see in the opening scene that Son has scars on his back.  We learn later on, from Boy, that these are from shotgun wounds, received when Son was protecting his younger brothers.  The circumstances in which this occurred aren’t explained (here too, perhaps, Nichols prefers to present the long-running feud in quasi-mythic terms) – but Michael Shannon embodies a latent ability, even propensity, to fight his corner and this helps you believe what Boy says about the scars.  In a showdown with John, Stephen and their elder brother Cleaman (Michael Abbott Jr), Son sustains a serious head injury.  He is lying unconscious in a hospital bed when the other surviving half-siblings agree to bury the hatchet, although Stephen expresses doubts as to whether Son, if he recovers, will agree to keep the peace.  In the final sequence of Shotgun Stories, the convalescent Son sits on the porch of his and Annie’s house with Boy and Carter.  Son looks relaxed – he sits back and stretches his legs.   It’s a peaceful image; maybe the violence that’s gone before has achieved catharsis.   But Michael Shannon has made such a quietly unnerving personality of Son that you wouldn’t put money on it.

    31 May 2015

     

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