Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • Take Shelter

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jeff Nichols (2011)

    It’s a good film but you suspect from quite early on that the writer-director Jeff Nichols (whose second feature this is) has boxed himself in – and that, unless he’s a genius, there’s no satisfying way he can bring the movie home.  The main character, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon), is a husband and father in his mid-thirties, who lives in a small town in Ohio, where he works as an engineer.  Curtis starts having terrible dreams and becomes convinced that an apocalyptic storm is coming.   To the consternation of his wife Sam (Jessica Chastain), he takes out a hefty bank loan to build a storm shelter in a field beside their house – depriving the family of the money they need to fund medical treatment for their deaf mute daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart).  Curtis’s mother (Kathy Baker) was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic when he was a teenager:  there’s mental illness in the genes.   Is Curtis a case study or a seer? If it turns out to be the former, that will limit the film’s dramatic reach; if the latter, its final credibility.

    For the audience of Take Shelter, the strength of this psychological drama depends on how much Curtis’s state of mind rings a bell with us.   Maybe people always feel they’re living in an age of anxiety (and that it’s followed an age of relative innocence and security) but it’s hard to argue that we’re not living through one now, thanks to the triple global threats of recession, terrorism and warming.  Like Curtis, many people feel at some level that there’s a bad thing coming; the fact that his fears are focused on the weather has a particular resonance.  Yet although the film is set in 2010 no one else in it appears to share Curtis’s apprehension of Armageddon.  Except for him, present day Ohio is free of the vague fears that we in the audience may have, and which Jeff Nichols feeds off.  Curtis starts going to a counsellor; he mentions later that he’s seen her ‘a few times’; but we witness only a brief part of their first meeting.  In other words, Nichols contrives a situation in which Curtis is isolated, a voice in the wilderness who doesn’t, in what we’re privy to, have anyone to talk to about his terrors.  (I’m not sure why Nichols has him go for counselling at all; if Curtis were resolutely opposed to doing that, the excision of his conversations with the counsellor wouldn’t stand out so much.)

    A tornado eventually arrives one night.  Curtis takes Sam and Hannah into his underground shelter from which they eventually emerge the next morning when the storm has subsided.  The long scene preceding their return to the outside world is compelling.  The fiercely loyal wife pleads with her husband to believe that the weather has cleared; she tells him that it will do no good if she takes the lead in unlocking the shelter and venturing back above ground – Curtis has to do it himself.  The concentrated acting of Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain reaches its peak in this sequence and the moment when Curtis finds the courage to turn the key is the emotional climax of the film.  The world to which the family returns seems reborn, paradisal; the sky is blue and calm.  Yet there’s an edge of unease in the quietness:  the neighbours are clearing up debris with a kind of stunned cautiousness.  People and houses have survived for now but there’s a sense of reprieve rather than of restored safety.  It’s a considerable irony that, if Jeff Nichols had ended Take Shelter at this point, he would just about have brought it off.  We might have felt that Curtis had fought back against his demons, had been restored to normality (and mortality).  Nichols clearly thinks that a we-have-come-through ending of this kind would be too easy, however:  there has to be a more explicit sting in the movie’s tail.   Curtis, who’s now lost his job, goes on a seaside holiday with Sam and Hannah to convalesce.   While the family were in their shelter, Curtis, convinced the storm was still raging, asked Hannah, through signing, if she felt the thunder.  She shook her head but now, after happily making a sand castle with her father, she makes the sign he made to her underground.  Sam comes to the door of their beach house and nods assent.  They all look out to sea and the sight of another tornado on the horizon.  This one really does look as if it’s bringing with it the end of the world.

    There’s no denying that this final scene is, as it’s happening, effective.  And the performances in Take Shelter – which make you root for the LaForche family all the way – give these last moments some depth.  Yet although the tone of the finale is solemn, the conception of this just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe slap in the face for the audience seems to belong to a different kind of film – made by a director who likes to manipulate us in a more amused, shameless way than Jeff Nichols does here.  These are big reservations and Take Shelter is a smaller film as a result; even so, it is mostly very well done.  I felt before seeing it (and I still feel) that Michael Shannon needs to broaden the range of roles he’s taking:  this is the third time in as many years that he’s played a decent man torn apart by some kind of obsessive mental illness.  Yet Curtis isn’t evidently disturbed to start with and the convincing details of his home life mean that, even when he starts losing it, he still has one foot in a normal world.  Directors and actors are often so eager to get to the unravelling of minds that they fail to show you what’s being lost:  Nichols and Shannon certainly can’t be accused of that.  This makes Curtis’s mania more powerfully upsetting – when he conceals from Sam that he’s wet the bed after one of his nightmares, or when he pens up his much-loved dog (the way the animal shakes in this sequence is distressingly suggestive).   When Curtis asks his mother how her illness started and, a little while later, she asks him if he’s OK, Shannon shows fine control in his determined show of sanity.

    In spite of her distinctive features and colouring, Jessica Chastain has been remarkably physically different in each of the three roles I’ve seen her in this year.  She’s completely convincing here as a blue collar wife, keeping the home going and making a bit of cash selling bags and other things she’s made, at a market where she has a regular pitch.  Chastain plays the gallant wife with extraordinary taste.  Sam’s love for and exasperation with her husband both run deep; she also has a very credible childishness playing with the child.  They sometimes seem like sisters, and Tova Stewart has a nice blend of gravity and giggliness as Hannah.  The cast is good all the way through – Kathy Baker, Shea Whigham as Curtis’s workmate and Ray McKinnon as their boss, the actors in the small parts of Curtis’s doctor and counsellor.  The sustained momentum of the acting and Jeff Nichols’ direction is impressive even if the claustrophobia of the script – as distinct from that of the characters’ situation – tends to be oppressive.   Curtis’s bad dreams are frighteningly alive and there are fine images, shot by Adam Stone, of variously ominous skies.  In one extraordinary sequence, as birds fall like missiles from the sky, Nichols momentarily fuses Hitchcock’s avian horror story with the rain of frogs in Magnolia.   There are less spectacular but still unnerving sights and sounds too, such as the quietly relentless noise and movement of sand churning through an industrial machine that’s like a monstrous egg-timer.

    6 December 2011

  • The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Davies (2011)

    Why did I go and see it?   I suppose for reasons similar to those of the woman in the queue for The Exorcist who’s alleged to have said, ‘I want to see what everyone’s throwing up about’.  Critical encomia are being spewed on Terence Davies’ latest and, without sitting through The Deep Blue Sea, I can’t argue with them.  The film opens with Hester Collyer’s failed suicide attempt and a summary of the events that have led up to it, all scored to Samuel Barber’s violin concerto.   This goes on for the best part of ten minutes and is described by Geoff Andrew in Sight and Sound as (of course) ‘bold’.  It might be if The Deep Blue Sea was expected to make millions at the box office but the prologue is safe and unsurprising given the type and size of audience the film’s designed for.  Using the Barber music for so long at the outset shamelessly cons viewers/listeners into feeling there’s emotional depth in the carefully composed images which accompany the music (I think that’s the right way round).   Davies was approached by the Sir Terence Rattigan Charitable Trust to do a screen version of one of his plays to mark Rattigan’s centenary although, on the evidence of his S&S interview, Davies was more attracted to the idea than admiring of the older Terence’s work.  He tells Geoff Andrew all the things he doesn’t like about Rattigan’s plays and what he jettisoned here because it didn’t ring true with his own fifties childhood (although he was only five years old in 1950, when the story is set).  It’s this sort of I-remember-how-it-all-really-was egotism that wins Davies praise for being a deeply personal film-maker.

    Jonathan Romney’s review in S&S commends the lack of naturalism of this version of The Deep Blue Sea, likening it to a ‘cinematic opera’ and drawing comparisons with the best-known Douglas Sirk pictures of the fifties because of its uncompromising ‘feminine’ emotionality.  Hester Collyer is in a stifling marriage to an older man – a knighted judge who, in Davies’ adaptation, is dominated by his horrible mother.  Hester falls madly in love with a dashing ex-RAF pilot called Freddie Page, failing to repeat his finest hour in the Battle of Britain in post-war London.  One of the things Davies can do which Anatole Litvak couldn’t, when he made the first film version of the play in 1955, is put bare flesh on the screen, and the slowly revolving images of the lovers’ marmoreal bodies in Davies’ overture are very striking.  They suggest art history rather than passion, though, and indeed the rapturous part of Hester and Freddie’s affair is highly attenuated.   At least in the Sirk movies with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson the masochistic heroine has some moments of bliss:  the mood here is as relentlessly melancholy as the visual scheme (the film was shot and lit by Florian Hoffmeister).  Peggy Ashcroft played Hester Collyer in the original West End production of The Deep Blue Sea:  according to Wikipedia, she hated the part because it made her feel emotionally naked.  Vivien Leigh’s portrait in the Litvak picture isn’t easily separable, in retrospect, from her own mental health problems and the breakdown of her marriage to Olivier.  There’s no such confusion with Rachel Weisz in the role.  Weisz is very beautiful but she has no characterisation (try that test of listing the qualities of the person that the actor is interpreting).  Except in the last scene when she prepares herself for Freddie’s departure and breaks down after he’s gone, Weisz isn’t expressing anything more specific than ‘emotion’.

    I didn’t think the time would come when I was nostalgic for a Kenneth More performance but it’s happened, thanks to Tom Hiddleston as Freddie Page.  In theory, it seems hard to believe that Vivien Leigh would be helplessly in love with Kenneth More but his bluff breeziness made his Freddie genuinely inaccessible.  You believed in his immaturity, in the fact that he was stuck forever in 1940 – the one time in his life when Freddie was doing something that he enjoyed and which also helped other people.  Tom Hiddleston gives a baffling performance.  The forces lingo – ‘Old fruit, old darling’ – and phrases like ‘Let’s get some light on the subject’ sound quite foreign to him (and quickly get dropped).   In one (stagy) encounter with Hester and her husband Sir William, Freddie is meant to be offensively, recklessly drunk; Hiddleston merely seems a bit more animated than usual.  Davies appears to have encouraged him to try to give depth to a shallow man and Hiddleston’s eyes keep filling with tears but, since his acting is shallow, the effect is bizarre.  Simon Russell Beale does a great deal with the thankless role of the cuckold.  He gives Sir William Collyer a pomposity and an aptitude for being easily humiliated that are by far the best thing in the film.  Davies has invented the character of the monstrous matriarch:  she is atrociously overplayed by Barbara Jefford but Russell Beale’s reactions to the dinner table sparring between his mother and his wife are worth watching.

    Yet Sir William’s suppressive manner here, which Russell Beale conveys with such skill, exposes the incongruously over-explicit dialogue that Davies has written for the scene.   Hester and the older Mrs Collyer are verbally aggressive towards one other; it makes no sense for Sir William to respond as if there was tension in the air when there’s outright hostility.  This kind of nonsense will gain Davies points for exposing the social constraints of the 1950s (which we know he’s interested in doing) – but how can people be as openly rude as this and constrained at the same time?   The same thing happens when Hester and Freddie go to an exhibition of Cubist art:  she’s cultured, he’s philistine and they have a deafening row in the middle of the public gallery.   It seems implausible but perhaps it’s not really as loud as it sounds; perhaps Davies is expressing – in a brilliantly non-naturalistic, operatic way, of course – the intensity of the pair’s incompatibility.  Yet the scene’s punchline shows two middle-aged women looking at the departing lovers in shocked disgruntlement – to remind us how socially constrained people were in those days.

    Terence Davies appears to be more interested in evoking particular visual textures of the period (and of cinema of the period) than in bringing to life Hester’s amour fou:  he invests his feelings in shots of cigarette smoke or a telephone box.  The Deep Blue Sea includes, like most of his work, a few bits of ‘community singing’, mostly in pubs.  They seem meant, in this film, not to describe a way of life but to dramatise the situation yet they’re inert.  It says a lot about his approach that Davies has the characters in the pub singing ‘You Belong to Me’ but, for its climax, he cuts to a shot of Hester and Freddie dancing to Jo Stafford’s recording of the song.  In a sequence reminiscent of one in David Lean’s The Passionate Friends (although Davies says it was Brief Encounter-inspired), Hester in 1950 briefly considers throwing herself under a tube train but thinks better of it and opts instead for an extended flashback to the London underground during the Blitz.  The platform is lined with people, eventually including even Hester and her husband, singing along to ‘Molly Malone’.   The camera moves along the platform, picking up each detail of the meticulous period reconstruction. The scene is like the Dunkirk beach sequence in Atonement, showing off the set decoration but emotionally hollow.

    There are good cameos from Oliver Ford Davies (as Hester’s father, a vicar) and Karl Johnson (in the much reduced role of the struck-off doctor who brings Hester round from her suicide attempt).  Mrs Nelson, the landlady of the boarding house, is played emphatically by Ann Mitchell.  In what’s meant to be a key exchange, Mrs Nelson (who has a bedridden husband) tells Hester that love is ‘wiping someone’s arse and cleaning someone up when they’ve pissed the sheets and letting them keep their dignity, so you can both go on’.  This moment of verbal unconstraint is Terence Davies trying a bit too hard to make clear that not every word in his script was penned by Terence Rattigan.

    27 November 2011

Posts navigation