Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • Walk the Line

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Mangold (2005)

    Many scenes are formulaic in the legendary-singer-biopic tradition.  There’s the childhood trauma that’s meant to explain most of what happens in later life.  There’s the first audition that seems about to end in failure until … There are irreconcilable tensions between fame and family life, drug hell, cold turkey, resurrection as a human being and popular success.    (It’s ironic that the whole premise of a biopic is the remarkable individuality of its subject but that the conventions of the genre tend to make famous showbiz lives all seem somehow the same.)   Hardly anything surprising happens in this story of the first half of the life of Johnny Cash but it’s wonderfully enjoyable.   What distinguishes Walk the Line from similar films is that it has two main characters – and that Cash’s courtship of June Carter is as engaging a part of the story as the progress of his singing career.   It happens to be true that, after several failures, he successfully proposed marriage to her while they were singing together onstage in Ontario;   in any case, the fact that this is the climax of the film makes perfect emotional and dramatic sense.

    Joaquin Phoenix gives a tremendously committed performance as Cash:  that you can see the effort it’s taking actually makes it more winning.  There are moments when Phoenix’s brooding intensity isn’t particularly expressive but his physicality always is:  he uses his body to get into Johnny Cash’s soul and it’s this that gives colour and depth to his singing and, what’s more, allows his performance of the songs to build.   He doesn’t sound particularly like the original (and can’t quite get the way that Cash held his guitar) but it doesn’t matter – because Phoenix’s singing voice seems a true expression of the character he’s created and his characterisation of Johnny Cash is convincing.   There’s not much resemblance either between June Carter’s gravelly voice and Reese Witherspoon’s more crystalline one – and you accept this for the same reason.  Witherspoon gives the film (and Phoenix) a lift as soon as she appears and she sustains this level all the way through.  Her June is not only tough, sweet-natured and humorous – this is also a truly brilliant portrait of a woman who understands and uses her public image as a form of protection.   Witherspoon is extremely convincing as someone who’s  taught herself to keep pain hidden from the world but there are tiny shifts of expression that show the audience the strain of her doing this (as when June, recently divorced, is upbraided for her immoral behaviour by a woman in a store and a tiny frown fractures Witherspoon’s smiling mask).   Her singing has terrific verve – you sense the character’s release onstage from the pressures of life offstage, as well as the actress’s delight, in the performance of her duets with Phoenix.

    The larger supporting parts suffer worst from the constraints of biopic formula:  Ginnifer Goodwin as Cash’s first wife and Robert Patrick, as his father – both of whom the script presents virtually as the villains of the piece – give overemphatic, one-note performances.   Some of the actors in smaller roles register more convincingly:   Sandra Ellis Lafferty and Dan Beene as June’s parents; Dan John Miller and Larry Bagby as the droll Tennessee Two who accompany Cash; Dallas Roberts, as the Memphis record producer Sam Phillips, who plays the clichéd first audition scene with real intelligence – his face never cracks but his eyes tell you when Cash’s singing has convinced and excited him.   And Cash’s concert in Folsom jail – with some amazing faces among the inmates – is certainly the highlight James Mangold wants it to be.  The musical director (including coaching of the two principals) was T Bone Burnett.

    18 July 2008

  • The Paperboy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lee Daniels (2012)

    Pete Dexter’s 1995 novel The Paperboy is narrated by young Jack James, working as a driver for his elder brother Ward and a fellow journalist on The Miami Times as they try to prove the innocence of a man on death row.   In the film of the novel, with a screenplay by Lee Daniels and Dexter, the narration is supplied by Anita, a black maid in the household of the Jansen family (as the James’s have been renamed).   Jack Jansen grew up to be a writer and wrote a novel based on the events that the film goes on to describe.  In a prologue, an interviewer asks Anita how much of Jack’s novel is true and she replies ‘All of it’, although it’s unclear from what follows how she knows this:  Anita isn’t witness to most of the scenes of the story.  The film-makers’ decision to retain a narrator but change their identity is bizarre for another reason too.  It means that Jack Jensen has to compel attention entirely through what the actor playing him does with the character on screen, and the actor in question is Zac Efron.   It soon becomes clear that Efron is in the role for entirely visual reasons:  in the first half of The Paperboy, his main purpose seems to be to appear topless as often as possible.  Efron was OK as the stagestruck teenage protagonist of Me and Orson Welles, orbiting the effulgent Welles and various other colourful theatricals.  But although the people Jack Jansen’s with in The Paperboy are also more eccentric than he is, Jack’s coming-of-age, as a person and a writer, involves a very different dynamic and Zac Efron is inadequate – he expresses nothing.  Because Jack should be the focus of the story and Efron is so weak, there is no focus at all.  I didn’t get whether Lee Daniels meant the audience to be primarily interested in the attempts to clear the condemned man’s name or in the interactions of Jack, Ward, the other journalist and the principal female character.  I knew that I wasn’t much interested in anything going on.

    This may be unfair to Dexter’s novel but The Paperboy looks, on the basis of the screenplay, to comprise the familiar ingredients of a Deep South crime melodrama and very little that’s new.  As well as the embryo writer, these ingredients include:  a long hot summer; redneck sexual prejudice and rampant racism; a man in the condemned cell for a crime he maybe didn’t commit (the murder of a local sheriff, a massively overweight racist-tyrant); a shopsoiled but spiritually pure piece of mutton dressed as lamb (with the vaguely symbolic name of Charlotte Bless);  covert, lurid homosexuality; white trash who make a living killing beasts (swamp alligators) and have a similar disregard for human life.  The concoction is a glop thanks to Lee Daniels’ messy and meaningless direction.  He lurches from one form of shallow attention-getting to another – from split-screen images to slow motion, from jump cuts to hand-held camerawork, as if he’s eavesdropping on the lives of the people in the story.  Michael Schulman, a staff writer on the New Yorker, has already called The Paperboy ‘a camp classic’ but it’s hard to enjoy when Daniels combines lack of taste and lack of originality to such a degree.  Human bloodshed is presented as impersonally as alligator innards.   The only thing that makes Daniels’ approach distinctive is that, because he’s African-American, he’s freer to present all the lowlife crudely, regardless of colour (whereas a white director might tend to be more restrained in a negative presentation of blacks).

    None of the cast other than Efron could be described as weak exactly but most of the characters are so one-dimensional that most of the actors seem overemphatic.  As the condemned man Hillary van Wetter, John Cusack’s sweaty intensity yields no surprises;   in his early scenes, Matthew McConaughey (as Ward Jansen) has a promising alertness and a secretive light in his eyes – he becomes less interesting as Ward’s homosexuality is revealed.   The proud, smartass black journalist Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) is a bit like the lofty lodger played by Don Warrington in Rising Damp – until he reveals that his posh English accent is a put-on and he’s really a local boy made good (the point being that he couldn’t have made good if he hadn’t disguised himself).   Macy Gray does well as Anita:  the character’s narration is a waste of time but Gray gets over Anita’s affectionate-verging-on-sexual feelings for Jack in ways which, by the standards of this film anyway, are nuanced.   Ned Bellamy is good as Hillary van Wetter’s brother and the Jansen boys’ father is played by the dependable Scott Glenn but Nealla Gordon has an impossible task in the thin, cliched role of the snotty, racist stepmother-in-waiting.  Viewers eager for camp enjoyment in The Paperboy are most likely to find it in Nicole Kidman’s Charlotte Bless – I guess especially in the scene on death row when Charlotte brings Hillary van Wetter to orgasm by pouting and sighing and semi-exposing herself a few feet away from him.    Kidman is, however, also the only good reason for seeing the movie.  She has the externals just right – the precarious walk on too-high heels, the practised sultriness – but she gives Charlotte an authentically tired soul, which counterpoints the tacky glamour.  Nicole Kidman’s performances in a variety of films during the last decade – Moulin Rouge!, The Human Stain, Cold Mountain, The Golden Compass, Australia  – made me dread her next appearance on the screen.  Her latest work, in Rabbit Hole, Stoker and now here, is making me change my mind.

    2 April 2013

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