Daily Archives: Thursday, July 9, 2015

  • Boyhood

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Linklater (2014)

    Sometimes when I’ve seen a film I don’t rate highly but which has got excellent reviews, I anxiously search online for a dissenting voice or two to reassure me that I’m not alone, and I can usually find them.  (I don’t do the reverse of this:  when I like a film that’s been badly received, I don’t need kindred spirits.)  Boyhood presents an exceptional challenge:  as of today (exactly three months after its release in America), Richard Linklater’s ‘indie epic’ has a 100% approval rating on Metacritic and is 99% ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes, where only two of the 204 critics’ reviews (from Rebecca Cusey in Patheos and Matt Pais in RedEye) are ‘rotten’.  As well as these dissenters, Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times thinks Boyhood ‘at best, OK’, writing perceptively about both the film itself and how it feels to be a critical contrarian.  But these negative comments are a drop in the ocean of praise.  Many of the favourable reviews see Boyhood not just as a fine film but as a great one – perhaps the best of the decade or even the century.  The budget was $4m and the box office takings currently stand at $38m.   Boyhood is clearly going to receive many awards to add to the Silver Bear that Linklater won at Berlin earlier this year.

    Boyhood is (as far as I know) unique in terms of how it was made:  describing the life of a Texan boy, Mason Evans, Jr, from the age of six to the age of seventeen, Richard Linklater, his cast and crew came together for three days’ shooting each year from 2002 to 2013 inclusive.  Ellar Coltrane plays Mason throughout these growing years; Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei, plays Mason’s elder sister, Samantha.  Boyhood is a dream come true for people who think:  wouldn’t it be great if the people in films could actually age?  The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is no – I enjoy watching an adult actor and the make-up people take on the challenge of presenting the same character over the number of years that Boyhood spans, and well beyond.  But there’s no arguing that young people in films are a particularly suitable case for the Linklater treatment:  it would be highly unusual for a director to use the same child actor in the role of someone who progressed from infancy to adulthood in the course of one movie.  Boyhood has prompted comparisons with Michael Apted’s Up series, still better known as Seven Up!, in honour of the first of these television documentaries, screened in 1964[1].  The comparison has some validity in terms of Linklater’s approach but none in terms of the viewer’s experience.  For those who’ve watched it over the decades, Seven Up! has gained substance through viewers’ memories of earlier interviews with the participants, as well as through resonances with the viewers’ own lives (perhaps particularly if, like me, you’re about the same age as the people in the Apted films).  The audience of Boyhood doesn’t have a relationship with the characters any richer than one that develops in the course of any two- or three-hour film that’s watched in a single session.  Linklater’s Before trilogy – where the nine-year intervals between films correspond to the number of years the two principals, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, have aged since we last saw them – are more truly closer to Seven Up! than Boyhood is.

    The film relies, though, to a considerable extent on being viewed as if it were a documentary.  It’s clear after not too long there won’t be many big dramatic climaxes within particular years of Mason’s life story.  When the characters reappear after a move forward in time, you’re struck by changes in appearance, by when Mason’s voice is breaking, and so on; but most of what then follows doesn’t aim to be exciting in the way of a conventional drama.  Much of the praise for Boyhood is that it’s ‘like real life’; how much you get out of the film – and, perhaps, how much affection you feel towards Mason Evans’s world – also depends on how much this ‘real life’ chimes  with your own experience, either as a child or as a parent.  I may have been at a disadvantage in that, apart from a bit where Mason and another kid look and laugh at photographs of underwear in a mail order catalogue, I didn’t find anything in Boyhood which made me think, ‘Yes, that’s just what it was like’.  Worse, I was always very relieved, as I watched, that I hadn’t had a life anything like this:  I kept thinking how terrible it must be to grow up in a lower middle-class family in Houston – being subjected to ritual social gatherings, expected to whoop support for your team at a baseball game, and so on.

    When the action in Boyhood reverts to more familiar dramatic territory, it tends to be crude.  At the start of the film, Mason’s parents, Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason Sr (Ethan Hawke), have split up and Olivia is a mature student at Houston University.  She marries her psychology professor, Bill Welbrock (Marco Perella) – a particularly badly written character.  By the time he and Olivia return from honeymoon in the second year of the story, this pompous bore might as well be an insurance salesman.  (Being a professor and being boring are, of course, not mutually exclusive but Bill, once he’s out of the lecture theatre, doesn’t remotely suggest an academic bore.)   It’s not enough for him to be a bore, though, and, as such, an unwelcome contrast to Mason and Samantha’s lively, boyish, absent father.  Bill must also become a violent drunk.  By the time he’s inflicting a savage haircut on Mason, he’s a tyrant stepfather to an almost Mr Murdstone degree – but easily contemptible too:  Bill misses a tiny golf putt and petulantly thwacks the green with his club.

    Another phoney big moment (although it’s been especially praised by some reviewers) comes near the end of the film, when Mason is preparing to leave home to start college.   Olivia decides to tell her son how disappointed she is with how things have turned out for her.  Are we meant to think she’s insensitively selfish, choosing this moment to moan (stupidly) about her life being more or less over, now that her younger child is starting higher education?   No:  it’s simply that Olivia has to have the speech to rhyme with her opening tirade, to a pre-Bill boyfriend, about being someone’s daughter then someone’s mother with nothing in between (and with the result, she bizarrely claims, that she’s never been able to choose what movie to go and see).  If this were ‘real life’, Mason would likely (and reasonably) be pissed off by his mother’s parting shot, and she would likely apologise for the unfortunate timing.  The very end of Boyhood is artificial in a similar way.  Mason arrives at college and immediately goes hiking in Big Bend National Park with his dorm roommate, this boy’s girlfriend, and another girl, called Nicole (Jessi Mechler).   Mason and Nicole take an instant shine to one another – enough for Mason to look happily, wonderingly up into the sky, in the film’s closing shot, as his six-year-old self did in its opening one.  Boyhood isn’t short of clichés or cloyingness.   Mason peeps out from behind a door to listen to his mother’s initial outburst about her lack of independence (although he’d be able to hear her from miles away:  why do grown-ups in films never keep their voices down in scenes like this?)  When Mason’s had the vicious haircut, courtesy of the academic psychologist, a girl in his class passes Mason a note that says she thinks he looks ‘kewt’.

    Sometimes, the eschewal of conventional dramatic shaping does pay off.  One summer, Mason goes away with his father on an overnight camp.  You’re primed to expect some kind of decisive bonding, which, thank goodness, doesn’t materialise.  I liked the way that twelve-year-old Mason, in this sequence, expressed reservations about a sort-of girlfriend because of her lack of feeling for what he considers ‘the films of the summer’ (of 2008:  The Dark Knight, Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express) – and how eager and determined he is to respond enthusiastically to his father’s humour.  Richard Linklater also conceives some sequences which shouldn’t work but do.  Later on, Mason spends a birthday, with Samantha, at the home of the gun-and-bible-toting parents of Annie, who is Mason Sr’s new wife.  Although Linklater slides over the tensions inherent in the marriage between Mason Sr, who doesn’t seem in the slightest God-fearing, and a practising Christian from this kind of background, Ethan Hawke and Jenni Tooley, as Annie, convince you that these two people love each other and want to make things work.   It’s also effective in this part of the story that, when Annie’s father (Richard Andrew Jones) shows Mason Jr and Samantha how to shoot a rifle, they’re both – whatever they make think about the use of guns – spontaneously excited by getting a shot on target.  (This celebration also nicely calls to mind a sequence much earlier in the story, when the children and their father go to a bowling alley.)  There’s a scene in which Olivia, in conversation with a plumber’s mate, who’s come to repair a sewer pipe at the family home, encourages the man to get some further education.  Years later, she and her children bump into Enrique (Roland Ruiz) in a restaurant that he now manages, thanks to the qualification he earned as a result of Olivia’s advice.   The moment is contrived but enjoyable – except that, when Enrique says the family’s lunch is on him, there’s virtually no reaction from the dreary Olivia.

    Ellar Coltrane has a genuinely ‘interior’ quality – from an early stage he gives you the sense that Mason is taking in more than he’s giving out, and it’s understandable that Richard Linklater wanted to explore and exploit this quality in the young actor.  This is fine to a degree but it seems linked to a facile idea that, when you’re a kid but only when you’re a kid, you’re on the receiving end of what adults have to say.  (In fact, if you’re naturally quiet and reasonably polite, you’ll probably find yourself, as you grow older, on this kind of receiving end more and more.)   It is convincing, though, when Mason is suddenly much more expansive when he’s talking to a girlfriend (Zoe Graham).  As he grows older, Coltrane develops an intriguingly careful walk – as if Mason is continually testing the ground before him.  Although I think Boyhood is being greatly overrated, I can understand why it has struck such a chord:  it’s been constructed in an extraordinary way yet it speaks to the experience of many people.  What I can’t understand is the enthusiasm for Patricia Arquette’s Olivia.  (According to the Gold Derby website, she is hot favourite for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.)  By the end of the film, I knew nothing about this woman, except that her whining voice could be part of why both Mason Sr’s successors in her life – Olivia’s professor, then one of her students (she progresses from undergraduate studies to an academic post very quickly) – have a drink problem.  It seemed to me surprising and, on the writer-director’s part, evasive that neither Samantha nor Mason Jr ever really take their mother to task for the instability of their home life – even if Linklater justifies this by making the son thoughtfully passive and suggesting that the daughter gradually distances herself.  Lorelei Linklater is very (I assume intentionally) irritating at the start but I got to like Samantha more and it’s credible that the girl reverts to childish petulance when she feels particularly insecure.

    Ethan Hawke’s performance as the father is being relatively underrated:  he’s never incongruously theatrical but he enlivens virtually every scene he’s in, right from the start.  An opening conversation between Mason Sr and his ex-mother-in-law (Libby Villari) expresses – naturally, economically and incisively – a long history of tensions between them.  (I wish Mason Sr’s genetic influence had been stronger in the vocal department:  Samantha has inherited something of Olivia’s voice; Mason Jr is also his mother’s son when it comes to monotone.)  The actors in smaller roles sometimes seem uneasy at first but settle in with repeat appearances:  Richard Robichaux, as the manager of a fast food place where Mason Jr has a summer job, is a good example – Robichaux does well with a little speech at Mason’s high school graduation party.  Photographed by Lee Daniel (who’s worked with Linklater several times before), Boyhood is, in the last analysis, interesting as a concept but underpowered as a drama.  You pretty well know what’s going to happen (and not happen) – and I didn’t find the characters interesting, or more than occasionally interesting anyway.  The idea that the film is deeply moving because you see before your eyes – and experience – the transience of youth defeats me.  Boyhood put me in touch with the past in a different way:  its 165 minutes are a reminder that, when you’re young, time passes rather slowly.

    29 August 2014

    [1]  According to Wikipedia, Seven Up! was directed by Paul Almond rather than Michael Apted but the latter has directed all the subsequent films in the series.

  • Hunger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve McQueen (2008)

    Hunger is set in 1981, at the culmination of the series of protests made by Irish republican prisoners in the Maze Prison.   The film describes the ‘blanket and no wash’ protests (the ‘dirty’ protests) and the beginnings of the hunger strike which extended over several months and as a result of which ten prisoners died.  The first and most notorious of them was Bobby Sands, an IRA man who was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during the course of his hunger strike.  I would be surprised if Steve McQueen didn’t think of Hunger as a ‘political’ film.  Like a lot of political film-makers before him, McQueen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Enda Walsh, uses the maltreatment of characters making a politically motivated stand as a spurious short cut to asserting the rightness of their cause.  He equates the brutal and dehumanising punishments meted out by the Maze prison guards with the wrongness of the British government’s position.  The film is politically tendentious in very obvious ways.  It’s true of course that we remember the Maze hunger strike as Bobby Sands vs Margaret Thatcher and McQueen, to give the audience its historical bearings, plays extracts from Thatcher’s speeches inveighing against the prisoners’ action.  But it’s noticeable that the opening, scene-setting legends say that the British government had withdrawn political status for paramilitaries without mentioning that this was a situation inherited by the Thatcher government (according to Wikipedia, the British government actually abolished ‘Special Category Status’ for paramilitaries in Northern Irish prisons a few days before Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister in 1976).  There’s no mention, until the closing legends, of Sands’s election to the British parliament.  Those legends present the hunger strike as a success because it led to the Thatcher government ‘effectively’ acceding to the prisoners’ demands (that is, without formally designating them ‘political prisoners’).  A more important and far-reaching result of the strike was surely the extent to which it radicalised Irish nationalist politics, strengthened the standing of Sinn Fein and increased recruitment to the IRA.  It would take a film even more politically simple-minded than this one, however, to regard those consequences as, without qualification, a ‘good thing’.  Steve McQueen steers clear of this complexity but consequently misrepresents the true significance of the Maze protests.

    As an artist, McQueen is best known for his films but this is the first one made for cinema rather than an art gallery.  The composition of the images may be sophisticated; otherwise the picture seems to me primitive.  It begins promisingly enough:  a middle-aged man, Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), stares into his bathroom mirror with a look of glum self-examination.  Then we’re shown what we accept as the quotidian ritual of his leaving for work from his surburban home – the creak of his front gate, his checking under his car for bombs.  McQueen’s direction, however, soon begins to detach Lohan, a guard at the Maze, from his surroundings so that we focus on him exclusively.  In the prison washrooms, he does some heavy breathing and more gloomy stares deep into the mirror.  While the other guards chat and joke easily, this man sits alone, finishing his lunch, fixated on the foil his sandwiches were wrapped in.   No one else talks to him or even seems to notice his solitariness.   Hunger is remarkably but often pointlessly slow-moving.    A new prisoner arrives and announces to the Maze governor, ‘I refuse to wear the clothes of a criminal.  I demand to wear my own clothes’.  The governor’s silence evidently doesn’t mean consent:  he writes ‘non-conforming prisoner’ in the log book and the young man begins to strip.  He takes off his jacket, then his sweater, then his shirt excruciatingly slowly.  With each removal of a garment, he looks at the implacable guard at the door and the guard gives nothing away.  McQueen seems to think that this deliberate, repetitive approach will make the prisoner’s treatment more shocking – in fact it just comes over as falsely stylised:  more a case of the actor (Brian Milligan) being exploited by his director than of the character being humiliated by the prison powers-that-be.    (These ‘non-conforming’ prisoners were required to strip naked and given just a prison blanket to wear instead of a uniform.)

    Words, for most of Hunger, are a scarce commodity.  Then, from out of nowhere, comes a long passage of dialogue – not just dialogue but dialectic, between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham) visiting him in the Maze, shortly before Sands starts his hunger strike.  From the moment the priest enters the frame and sits down, the camera doesn’t move:  McQueen sustains a single two-shot until Sands embarks on a childhood reminiscence – then he is shown in close-up and the priest’s occasional interventions are heard from off-camera.  I remember reading about this sequence when the film was released last year and the Wikipedia article on Hunger describes it in statistical terms:

    ‘The film is notable for an unbroken 17-minute shot, in which a priest … tries to talk Bobby Sands out of his protest. In it, the camera remains in the same position for the duration of the shot. To prepare for the scene, [Liam] Cunningham moved into Michael Fassbender’s apartment for a time while they practised the scene at least twelve times a day, sometimes repeating the scene fifteen times in a single day. It is the longest scene in a mainstream film.’

    Although the sequence is very well played by the two actors, they are in effect being upstaged by the fact that McQueen is determined to focus attention on the record-breaking length of the shot.  (Because we’ve already seen a good bit of Sands by this point, Michael Fassbender is less short-changed by McQueen’s technique than Liam Cunningham, who, to make life even more difficult for him, has his face in shadow virtually throughout.)  I assume that McQueen photographed the scene in the way he did to divert attention from the fact that he and Enda Walsh are falling back at this point on revelation and analysis of motive through theatrical wordage:  to deflect criticism that the scene is stagy, McQueen decides to make it ostentatiously filmic (and achieves that because the extended stasis is anti-filmic!).  But the exchange is crude and phoney not because it’s a conversation but because the words are written in a single voice – Sands and the priest are given a similar incisive wit and turn of phrase –  and in order to get across, in a sub-Shavian way, the moral arguments for and against the action that Sands is contemplating.  Sands’s piece of reminiscence is similarly, and obviously, morally instructive.  He recalls a school trip during which he and his classmates found a foal lying in shallow water, horribly injured but sensate enough to be suffering.   Only Sands has the presence of mind and nerve to put the animal out of its misery; he’s then punished by grown-ups who assume his killing of the foal is an act of vicious cruelty.  The memory is much too neat as a reflection of Sands’s current state of mind as he prepares to starve himself (the boy Bobby, like the man he’s become, ‘knew what I had to do’).

    A few moments in Hunger are effective through surprising quietness – particularly when the unhappy Raymond Lohan gets a bullet in his head while visiting his mother in an old people’s home.  The explosion of noise and terror in this becalmed setting is shattering yet Lohan’s demented mother responds only vaguely when she’s spattered with her son’s blood as his body slumps in her lap.   As Bobby Sands enters the last days of his life, the tender nursing he receives from one of the medical orderlies has what can only be described, in emotional terms, as a healing quality – although the effect is spoiled somewhat when there’s a change of shift and the nice orderly is replaced by a nasty one.  (The actor playing the latter telegraphs his character well before the orderly confronts the barely conscious Sands, who’s lying in a bath, with knuckles tattooed ‘UDA’.)   A doctor calmly, gravely describes the physiological changes occurring in Sands’s body as it degenerates through malnutrition.  Hunger really launched Michael Fassbender as a film actor and it’s hard not to be impressed by the commitment to the project that he showed in shedding weight to play Bobby Sands so painfully convincingly.  As with De Niro’s move in the opposite direction in Raging Bull, it’s the almost crazy courage of the actor – rather than the doomed hero he’s playing, or the skill of the characterisation – that compels admiration here.  That said, Fassbender has a charm and arrogance as Sands that suggest he could have gone a lot further with a better script.

    Some of the sights that McQueen and his cinematographer Sean Bobbitt linger on are extraordinary and arresting:  the abrasions on Lohan’s knuckles in the wash basin; the kindly orderly applying ointment to the bedsores on Sands’s back; the patterns of wire mesh on windows and on the shit-smeared walls of the cells; the pictures prisoners have fashioned out of their own excrement (lit at one point to bring to mind cave paintings); the deposits of chamber pots, emptied from under cell doors and pooling darkly in the corridor.  The images are less persuasive, though, when they become the explicit focus of the film-making.  A long sequence, in real time, shows a prison employee disinfecting and swilling the same corridor floor.  We can see how grimly futile his work is but McQueen keeps on showing it way beyond the point at which we’ve got the point.  It may well be that he’s wanting to make life difficult – and different – for cinemagoers; that he wants us to feel more like those watching one of his films in an art gallery, less like a lazy, passive movie audience.  If that is the intention, it’s undermined by the concluding part of Hunger.  In the closing days of his life, Bobby Sands’s mental life regresses to the cinematically conventional.  His boyhood self appears to him at the foot of his bed.  He experiences flashbacks to his childhood (one of these, with Bobby on a school cross country, isn’t just lame but inadvertently comical:  the shots of this figure in running kit, in combination with the chords in the accompanying music, make it seem like a Chariots of Fire pastiche).  As death approaches, birds are flying in his mind’s eye.   Steve McQueen may want to challenge cinema audiences with the visually unexpected but he’s shameless in resorting to clichéd images when he can’t think of anything better.

    19 December 2009

     

     

     

     

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