Daily Archives: Wednesday, July 8, 2015

  • Slow West

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John McLean (2015)

    This first feature by John McLean is a meta-western or an anti-western or some kind of revision of a western that turns out to be even more boring than westerns in their heyday usually were.  Slow West is short on the energy but long on the violence of the traditional horse opera.  The climactic shoot-out is especially protracted and bloodily aestheticised.  It helps McLean, who also wrote the screenplay, to create a final, startling montage of shots of corpses, resulting from this and earlier death-dealing episodes in the film.  The body count is impressive:  the viewer is reminded, in case s/he thought otherwise, that the late-nineteenth-century American west was a violent place.   According to Mark Kermode’s Observer review, McLean has described Slow West ‘as “a European road movie” with “fairytale” inflections that is “mostly about young love”’.  The starting point of the story does give it a ballad-like quality (as do elements of Jed Kurzel’s score).  Jay Cavendish, a sixteen-year-old Scot, is parted from Rose Ross, the girl he loves, when her father crosses the Atlantic to escape the law.  Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) follows the Rosses to America and embarks on a mission to find Rose there.  Armed with nothing more than a guide book to the west, he encounters a group of former soldiers in pursuit of a Native American and whose leader threatens Jay too.  A world-weary but mysterious bounty hunter called Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) turns up at this point, kills the baddie leader, and takes the clueless Jay under his wing, in exchange for money.  They travel on across Colorado, with Silas aware and Jay unaware that there’s a $2,000 bounty on the heads of Rose (Caren Pistorius) and her father (Rory McCann).  The Rosses have set up home in an isolated prairie house, which is the epicentre of the concluding gunfight.

    John McLean is interested chiefly in composing mythicising images of the vanished west.  He succeeds, with the help of Robbie Ryan’s lustrous cinematography, although, as with McLean’s exposé of western violence, you may wonder why he bothers:  this landscape has already been mythicised to death.  There’s one genuinely amusing visual conceit.  At one point, Jay and Silas get soaked but don’t have time to stop:  they trot on in their long johns, their outer garments drying on a line slung between their horses.  McLean is also fond of pithy-verging-on-smart-arse dialogue, whatever the circumstances.  At the climax to Slow West, Rose fires on whoever happens to get too near her home.  Jay bursts in unannounced and, not realising who he is, she wounds him fatally.  When Jay dies, Silas (also shot and wounded but he’ll live) tells Rose that the lad loved her with all his heart.  With her father, her Native American lover, assorted bounty hunters and other antagonists all slain in the shoot-out, Rose isn’t so traumatised that she can’t deliver the well-turned riposte ‘His heart was in the wrong place’.  Earlier on, Jay has tried to find out more about Silas, who reveals that his parents are in their graves, his father in Ireland and his mother in Canada.  Jay then asks Silas, ‘What’s stopping you joining them?’  This may not be, in the existential territory that these characters inhabit, a ludicrous question but it comes as a relief that Silas responds as if it is and tells Jay to shut up.   (Silas is shaving him with a cut-throat razor at this point so Jay isn’t well placed to argue.)  It’s as if the people in McLean’s story had foresight (and there is at least one clairvoyant dream) that, 150 years in the future, the time and place in which they lived and died would be the subject of movies like Slow West so that it makes sense to talk fancy.  I wouldn’t mind this if the characters had any life in their mid-nineteenth century setting but they don’t.

    Kodi Smit-McPhee, who turned nineteen last month, has been acting professionally for ten years now.  (His best-known film role to date was as Viggo Mortensen’s son in The Road.)  Child actors, as they reach adulthood, are sometimes anxious to compensate for their past appealingness.  That’s the kindest explanation of Smit-McPhee’s blank-faced, vocally challenged interpretation of Jay ­– it’s not surprising that Rose doesn’t recognise the boy who loves her.  I liked Caren Pistorius as Rose, though, and it’s pleasing that, at the end of Slow West, the two best performers are just about the only two adults left alive.  Michael Fassbender is several cuts above anyone else in the film.  He has a couple of brilliant moments:  the slight but strongly expressive shift in his facial muscles when Jay says that he thinks Silas is lonely; the odd, homoerotic charge that he gives to a drunken conversation with another bounty hunter (Ben Mendelsohn) with whom Silas used to work.  I’m getting impatient, though, for Fassbender to prove again that he’s the major actor he was in Jane Eyre and Shame – both more than three years ago now.   Since then, he’s given some fine and varied supporting performances (Prometheus, 12 Years a Slave, Frank) but I hope his upcoming lead roles in Steve Jobs and The Light Between Oceans ­– and Macbeth! – will deliver more.

    2 July 2015

  • Love and Death

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1975)

    At the start of Husbands and Wives, a man is talking on television and quotes Einstein’s remark that ‘God doesn’t play dice’ with the universe.  Woody Allen’s Gabe grumbles, ‘No, He plays hide and seek’, and switches the set off.   Provided you’ve seen a Woody Allen film before, you hardly need to be given your bearings in his universe – this moment in Husbands and Wives feels like Allen getting a dig in at God before proceeding with a story that’s not going to provide much in the way of opportunities to keep up the assault.   Love and Death, by contrast, provides an excellent setting for the meaninglessness of life and fear of death to be a main theme.  This is a skit (it runs less than ninety minutes) on the types, tropes and obsessions of nineteenth-century Russian literature:  spiritual crisis and metaphysical debate and speculation are part of the territory.  But the film’s comedy derives principally from the anachronism of the protagonist Boris Grushenko’s post-Freudian, urban-neurotic sensibility:   Woody Allen’s incongruousness as a bespectacled soldier/great lover in rural Russia during the Napoleonic era makes his egocentricity appealing here.  And when the cowardly, bookish Boris is forced to enlist in the army, Allen tops his own incompatibility with the circumstances by producing a black drill sergeant (Frank Adu).

    Sonja, Boris’s cousin and the only girl for him, is played by Diane Keaton, whose looks allow her to pass as a romantic heroine in this time and place:  the physical credibility contrast between her and Woody Allen makes the partnership all the more effective.  When Sonja, usually with Boris (but also in a scene late on with her cousin Natasha, well played by Jessica Harper), gets into philosophical discussion, Keaton delivers the mounting gobbledygook as if it were genuine, newly-hatched thought.  What Diane Keaton does here is a wonderful demonstration of how much funnier a performance will be if the actor never makes you think she thinks she’s funny.  The actors in smaller parts are remarkably disciplined too – no one looks to be straining to make his comic mark:  James Tolkan as Napoleon (and his double) is especially good.  Alfred Lutter III (memorable as Ellen Burstyn’s son in the previous year’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More) plays the young Boris – in his brief appearance he perfectly anticipates the cussedly anxious soul of Woody Allen.

    Love and Death marks the end of the first main phase of Allen’s film-making career.  From Annie Hall (his next movie) onwards, his comedy is rarely broad or light-hearted in the way this film is; the usual, though by no means invariable, setting is present-day New York.  It makes you almost regret that he deprived himself of opportunities to write other scripts like Love and Death.  The comedy is wantonly eclectic:  that’s a big part of what makes the film so enjoyable.   There are inspired things, like Boris’s riff, in the condemned cell, on Biblical descriptions of what makes, and will happen to, a good man and a bad man.  The sight gags are, of course, fewer than the one-liners but there are more of them than you later came to expect from Allen and the physical comedy is very funny (especially in the sequence where Boris and Sonja are trying to assassinate Napoleon).  When Boris, struggling to write a poem, invents and rejects as ‘too sentimental’ a line that turned up a century later in the mouth of J Alfred Prufrock, or goes into a rapid-fire punning exchange of Dostoyevsky titles, it doesn’t make you laugh – bits like this seem more designed to allow people in the audience who get them to feel smug that other people won’t.  But the rate at which Allen tries things out, then drops or repeats them, is dazzling – and the sense of an abundantly brilliant comic intelligence in overdrive is elating.   The BFI programme note included an(other) excerpt from Stig Bjorkman’s interviews with Woody Allen, and the latter’s perfect summary of his approach here:

    ‘Sure, we just used anything we wanted in those days.  We took Russian books and Swedish films and French films and Kafka and French existentialists.  Whatever gave us an amusing time, we did.’

    It’s amusing too, at this distance in time, that Woody Allen’s preoccupations and cinematic allegiances didn’t change much with the switch to a different locale and mood.  Sonja and Natasha go into a two-face Persona composition near the end and the very last shot of Love and Death nods to The Seventh Seal:  the killed-by-firing-squad Boris and the shroud-clad, sickle-wielding figure of Death (who appears regularly throughout and is voiced by Norman Rose) gradually disappear in a receding pas de deux down an avenue of trees.   This routine, like the rest of the film, is scored by Prokofiev – mainly ‘Troika’ from the Lieutenant Kije suite, one of the jolliest pieces of music I know.

    12 January 2012

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