Daily Archives: Sunday, July 19, 2015

  • God’s Pocket

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Slattery (2014)

    The UK premiere of God’s Pocket at BFI was an unhappy experience.  The film is John Slattery’s debut as a cinema director and features one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last screen appearances so it’s a double pity that it’s not good.  To make things worse, the screening was followed by a Q&A chaired by Jonathan Romney.   It was pretty clear he didn’t think much of the film but that was no excuse for the tetchy questions Romney put to John Slattery and Christina Hendricks, who has the main female role.   Too many of these questions were about Mad Men (which evidently and reasonably exasperated Slattery), including the obvious and, for good actors, insulting ‘When you play a character in a long-running television series, do you find them taking you over?’  When Romney, after hogging the interview for twenty minutes, turned to the audience in NFT1 and demanded questions in a half-condescending, half-peremptory tone, I decided it was time to go.

    One thing the Q&A did convey strongly was that this was a labour of love for John Slattery but that’s probably part of what’s wrong with the film.  Adapted by him and Alex Metcalf from Pete Dexter’s first novel, God’s Pocket is set in the late 1970s in a working class area of Philadelphia (clearly based on ‘the Devil’s Pocket’, part of the real Philadelphia.)   Slattery, born in 1962 to an Irish-American Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts, explained that he felt a connection with the people in the story although his own upbringing had been more comfortable than theirs.  Jonathan Romney was right that the film’s register ‘keeps slipping around’ – from grim, lower-depths realism to black comedy and back.  Slattery in response insisted that these shifts mirrored the original novel and he’s clearly anxious to treat the characters generously; but it’s difficult to realise the locals as anything other than a dismal, often menacing tribe – especially when the protagonist and most sympathetic person in evidence, Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman), isn’t a God’s Pocket native (as others keep reminding him).  Mickey and his friend Arthur Capezio (John Turturro) are meat-packers but their work regularly brings them into contact with organised crime.  It’s the people who prop up the neighbourhood bar, rather than the mobsters, who most lower the spirits, however.

    Lance Acord’s muddy lighting, which obviously matches the mood of the piece, is monotonous; my eyes aren’t good but I don’t usually need to peer to make out the faces on the screen.  The black comedy provides some of the better moments – particularly a sequence involving Mickey, who has to arrange the funeral of his stepson Leon, and the mortician Smilin’ Jack Moran (Eddie Marsan).  Mickey’s unexpected entrance makes Jack jump just as he’s applying the finishing embalming touches to Leon’s corpse; later in the scene, the two men come to blows and Jack falls over, accidentally banging the coffin lid shut.  There’s physical abuse much more garish and gory than this in the course of God’s Pocket; for example, when Joyce Van Patten (John Slattery’s mother-in-law), as an elderly florist, whips out a gun and dispatches two hoods.  Van Patten plays the scene straight and makes it work but even when the violence verges on the cartoonish, it sits uneasily within a film that’s largely realistic.  Slattery handles other comic bits rather lamely:  a shot of an advertising sign missing a letter; a sequence in stalled traffic where the celebrity local journalist Richard Shelburn (Richard Jenkins) is trying – audibly – to compose deathless prose, to the amusement of the blue collar man in the car alongside.  God’s Pocket would have been a more coherent piece of work – although probably more dislikeable – if it had been directed by someone as confidently misanthropic as the Coens.

    Philip Seymour Hoffman’s presence dominates.  This isn’t just because of his recent death although that inevitably affects how you see him on screen – especially as Mickey spends a good deal of God’s Pocket dealing with the funeral.  (The bit in which Hoffman chooses a coffin is hard to watch.)  It was interesting to hear from John Slattery that he first approached Hoffman about playing Richard Shelburn rather than Mickey Scarpato.  Hoffman understandably felt that Mickey would be a greater challenge but Slattery’s original instinct was probably right.  In the Q&A Slattery quoted the opening of Pete Dexter’s novel:  ‘Mickey Scarpato was forty-five and didn’t understand women … the way poor people don’t understand the economy’.  Mickey in the film is powerfully oppressed and struggles to communicate but he never seems uncomprehending: Hoffman had an extraordinary ability to suggest different kinds of intelligence but he’s a shade too sharp-witted here.  Richard Jenkins is always witty and shows how Shelburn has come too easily to accept his faults but it’s hard to credit how this man has become a big name in the neighbourhood (and not just through his daily newspaper column – he’s someone whose face is recognised by the locals in the bar).  I wish Philip Seymour Hoffman had played Shelburn; he would have been so good (as he was in Doubt) at distinguishing the journalist’s public and private faces.  Christina Hendricks is barely adequate as Mickey’s wife Jeannie, who’s convinced that the death of her borderline psychotic, coked-up son Leon wasn’t the work accident it’s supposed to be.   The audience, having witnessed what happened, knows that Jeannie’s intuition is right but it’s never proved to be right.  That makes it all the more important for Christina Hendricks to suggest that it’s this gut feeling that keeps Jeannie going in the immediate aftermath of Leon’s death but she’s blank.  Eddie Marsan is just right, though, as Jack Moran and Peter Gerety is admirably nuanced as the bar owner McKenna.  As Leon, Caleb Landry Jones does the kind of make-the-most-of-it overacting which makes you pretty sure the character isn’t long for the film – or makes you hope they’re not anyway.

    4 August 2014

  • How I Ended This Summer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kak ya provyol etim letom

    Alexei Popogrebsky (2010)

    Two men – one in his twenties, the other about forty – work at a meteorological station on an Arctic island.  (The filming was done at the Valkarkai polar station on the Chukchi Sea in Arctic Russia.)  The place is deeply isolated:  Pavel and Sergei are stuck there with just each other for company, apart from the voice at the other end of the radio link when they’re filing their reports, and the landscape.  And the viewer is stuck with them, and the landscape – which is really breathtaking, because its beauty is so vastly implacable. The composition of the images, photographed by Pavel Kostomarov, and their colour-grading – the first time I remember seeing a credit for this (for Kirill Bobrov) – is superb.  There are wonderful shots of the land and sky darkening then moving into the light of the following day.  It’s not just the spectacular aspect of the visuals that makes this such a good film to look at:  details like fish, caught and smoked by Sergei and hanging on a line, are strong too.  Vladimir Golovnitsky’s fine sound editing is similarly unnerving – the radio, the helicopter, the sea, the wind, creaking floors and doors.  Dmitri Katkhanov’s score is played as music on Pavel’s walkman, as music inside the young man’s head – music which asserts his generational difference from Sergei and reminds him of a world outside the station.  It’s not hard to sympathise with Pavel:  this minutely observed film is a punishing match for its setting.  I was always wanting it to end (and it is too long) but it’s an impressive piece of work.

    How I Ended This Summer is about doing the wrong thing in the wrong place.  Pavel (whom Sergei often calls Pasha) is alone on the station when news come through the radio link that Sergei’s wife and child have died in an accident.  Pavel loses his nerve when Sergei returns and can’t bring himself to break the news.  Nick Hasted suggested to the writer-director Alexei Popogrebsky in an S&S interview in May that this panicky oversight might not have mattered so much in a different environment, and Popogrebsky agreed.  Pavel’s moral failure forces him into showing physical resourcefulness and daring:  he eventually tells Sergei and, terrified that the older man will kill him, goes on the run in this arctic wilderness.  The physical transformation of Pavel is one of the most remarkable I can remember seeing on screen.  Grigory Dobrygin appears to age decades, his face hollowed out by what he experiences (when he and Sergei eventually part, Pavel is hunched with shame).  The heavy-set, unsmiling Sergei comes to emotional life only when he’s responding to the text message from his wife, telling him that she and their child are going to visit him.  (It’s that text that sends Sergei out fishing for arctic trout and so away from the station when news of his loved ones’ death comes through.)  As the story develops, Sergei Puskepalis as Sergei uses his eyes – they express both threat and hurt – marvellously.  It’s to the credit of the two actors, and Popogrebsky, that you root for both men equally – and, at the same time, feel infuriated by Pavel’s cowardice and nervous that Sergei is going to turn into the bogeyman that Pavel fears.

    Pavel takes down the message about Sergei’s wife and child on a sheet of paper, which gets dropped on the floor shortly before Sergei’s return from his unauthorised fishing trip.  Once he fails to tell Sergei what he needs to know, Pavel rushes back into their cabin to recover the message.  This obvious melodramatic detail seems to come from a different kind of film – the too slow realisation of the voices down the radio link that Sergei’s still in the dark about his wife and child feels contrived too.  Minimising the background information intensifies the material, and strengthens the starkness of the men’s situation and opposition.  Even so, Popogrebsky would have done better to give us a clearer idea of why Pavel is working at the station in the first place.  Do we take literally Sergei’s sarcastic remark which gives the film its title – ‘You just want to write a swanky essay “how I ended this summer”’ – and assume Pavel’s a student doing a dissertation of some kind?   It seems unlikely:  Pavel doesn’t seem to be, even before the going gets tough, an adventurous, game-for-anything spirit, the kind of young man who would opt for such extraordinarily arduous fieldwork.  So is he simply a junior meteorologist who’s bored and a little careless in his work?  It limits our understanding of Pavel’s later metamorphoses when we don’t quite know where he started from.   (In any case, the title sounds more like an awkwardly-translated variant on a school child’s ‘what-I-did-on-my-summer-holidays’ than any more advanced education assignment.)

    Popogrebsky’s obliqueness works very well at the end of the film, however.  Pavel leaves the island – a helicopter arrives at last – and Sergei stays.  Why does he stay?   On a realistic level, I wasn’t sure; in psychological terms, it’s very clear.  He belongs in this bleak place, through long experience of it and now that he’s lost the only people he loves:  the end of the world is where Sergei lives.  (This place is also full of radioactive material, which plays its part in the story.)  It seems surprising at first that he doesn’t react more to the news of his wife’s and his child’s deaths, when Pavel eventually tells him.  But only at first:  you come to see Sergei as a man whose natural habitat is grim isolation and whose bereavement returns him to it.

    27 April 2011

     

     

     

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