Daily Archives: Friday, July 24, 2015

  • True Story

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rupert Goold (2015)

    As might be expected from the title, it’s based on real-life events and deceptions are a major theme.  In November 2001, the New York Times published an article on the African slave trade by Michael (Mike) Finkel, a rising, highly ambitious young journalist on the paper’s staff.  The article (‘Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?’) received plenty of attention, including from aid charities, which questioned its veracity.  Mike Finkel was forced to admit that Youssouf Malé was a composite character, based on the identity of several young men whom he’d interviewed in southern Mali.  The New York Times fired Finkel.  In January 2002, an Oregon man called Christian Longo was arrested in Mexico and taken into US custody in Texas, where he was charged with the murder of his wife and three children the previous month.  Soon afterwards, Mike Finkel learned that Longo, during his weeks as a fugitive, had claimed to be a reporter for the New York Times – by the name of Mike Finkel.

    According to True Story, which Rupert Goold and David Kajganich adapted from Finkel’s memoir of the same name, the real Mike (Jonah Hill), desperate to get his journalistic career back on track and sensing an opportunity to do so, visits Longo (James Franco) in prison.  They meet there on a number of further occasions while the latter is awaiting trial; Longo agrees to the interviews on the understanding that Finkel will not disclose what gets said until the trial is over.  There’s one further condition:  Longo has sent to Finkel eighty pages of autobiographical material, listing all the mistakes he’s made in his life and entitled ‘Wrong Turns’.  He tells the journalist that he greatly respects his writing and would like to be a writer himself.  Finkel agrees that, for each question that’s answered in the course of their conversations, he will give Longo a note on how to improve his prose.  Finkel is increasingly intrigued by Longo and increasingly doubtful that he is guilty as charged.   Longo indicates that he will plead not guilty.  By the time the trial begins, Finkel has sold his idea for a book about Longo to Harper Collins, for a $250,000 advance.

    Finkel is shocked – so too the prospective publishers – when Longo pleads not guilty to the murder of his elder daughter and his son but guilty to the killing of his younger daughter and his wife.   (The pairs of corpses were found in different locations.)  In the witness box, Longo explains that his wife, Mary Jane, had slain the two elder children and, he thought, the youngest, Madison, too; that he strangled Mary Jane to death in uncomprehending rage at what she’d done; that he was then shocked to see Madison showing slight signs of life and killed her too, as an act of mercy.  The jury doesn’t believe Longo’s story.  He is found guilty on all charges and sentenced to death.  Finkel goes back to visit him, on Death Row, and Longo eventually admits to Finkel that he committed all four murders.  Finkel’s True Story has now been published and is a success.  The book’s author is unnerved to be told by its subject, however, that his name as a writer will forever be linked with Longo’s – and that, if Longo ever suggests that they meet again, Finkel will always come back for more.  The legends at the end of the film, summarising the subsequent real lives of the protagonists, appear to vindicate Longo’s prophecy.   We’re told that Finkel has never since written for the New York Times; that Longo, who is still on Death Row, has had several pieces, written from the condemned cell, published by the paper; and that the two men still speak on the phone regularly.

    The film needs a script much better than the one it’s got in order to be effective – and distinctive.  Although this may be a true story, it’s also well-trodden faction and non-fiction territory:  the set-up and the journalistic ethical issues involved evoke, in particular, In Cold Blood and The Journalist and the Murderer.  (The fictional news story element also recalls Shattered Glass.)   The Truman Capote-Perry Smith dynamic is recalled both in the writer’s growing obsession with the killer whose life and crimes he sets out to exploit for his own literary ends and in the final outcome – or, at least, the epilogue on screen.  (At the end of Capote (2005), Bennett Miller and Dan Futterman note that In Cold Blood made Truman Capote the most famous writer in America but that he never finished another book.)   The opportunistic starting point of Mike Finkel’s relationship with Christian Longo calls to mind Janet Malcolm’s study and the exploitation of the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald by the journalist Joe McGinniss; what then happens in True Story, with Finkel manipulated by Longo, is virtually a reversal of The Journalist and the Murderer scenario.  Another challenge in bringing the material to the screen is that True Story is essentially about different verbal means of spinning a line, oral and written, and it’s difficult (as usual in films) to give the written element dramatic life.  For example, when Longo’s voice reads extracts from ‘Wrong Turns’, the screen shows his unsophisticated handwriting but his prose doesn’t sound in dire need of Finkel’s expert advice.  It’s not surprising that Longo’s pictorial marginalia, including images representing his dead wife and children, overpower his words on the page and on the soundtrack.

    In view of the importance of the written word in True Story, it’s unfortunate that the screenplay is so full of holes.  The nearly exclusive focus on Finkel and Longo is a reasonable pretext for omitting any of Longo’s interactions outside the courtroom with his defence attorney; the sketchiness of the relationship between Finkel and his wife Jill (Felicity Jones) is much more of a problem.  It’s confusing too that Finkel’s planned book appears to be complete before Longo’s trial begins.  (When Jill picks up a thick stack of papers, with ‘True Story’ typed on the top page, her husband tetchily warns her to be careful with the manuscript, as if he’d written the whole thing in longhand and hadn’t another copy.)  It’s impossible to understand how Finkel has produced so much material on the basis of the prison interviews with Longo that the film has shown (and the Wikipedia article on Mike Finkel implies that he wrote True Story at a later stage of his relationship with Longo).  Rupert Goold, currently the artistic director of the Almeida Theatre, hasn’t directed a cinematic feature before and you doubt his attentiveness from an early stage.  Most of the first part concentrates on Finkel but does include an introduction to the as yet unnamed Longo, while he’s on the run in Mexico and visiting a church there.  It’s a bit lame that, when a young German woman asks his name, he gives Finkel’s.  (We could easily pick up there was something suspicious about Longo from the second Mexican sequence, after he’s been to bed with the German tourist and watches from a hotel room window as police arrive, no doubt to apprehend him.  We could then make the connection with this mystery man at the point at which Mike Finkel finds out about being impersonated by a murder suspect.)  Once he’s told about Longo, Finkel does a Google search.  We can see from one of the links that appears on his laptop screen that Longo has said that he pretended to be Finkel because he admired the latter’s journalism – yet Finkel is then shown as baffled as to Longo’s motives for taking his name until they meet.

    Longo tells Finkel that he was never happier than when he’d assumed the latter’s identity:  we’ve no idea what Longo means by this and we want to know what he means (even if it was a flat lie).  It’s surprising that the investigative journalist Finkel doesn’t ask Longo what he means.  At one point, Finkel develops an idea that there’s a spooky kinship between him and Longo, pointing out to his wife the similarities between the doodles in Finkel’s notebooks and the drawings in Longo’s ‘Wrong Turns’ manuscript.  Here too, a bizarre statement isn’t probed by the person on the receiving end of it; the kinship thing is then dropped.  Repeated lost-Eden flashbacks, featuring Longo’s wife (Maria Dizzia) and their three children (Charlotte Driscoll, Connor Kikot and Stella Rae Payne), are such a cliché that you think there must be more to them than meets the eye – and wonder if Longo’s claim that Mary Jane killed the kids might be true.  Perhaps Rupert Goold did intend these inserts as a red herring.  By the end of the film, though, I suspected they were merely padding.

    I was attracted to True Story purely by the trailer and the cast.  I knew nothing of the source material and I’m glad I was so uninformed:  ignorance gave the film a measure of suspense and, even though its major weaknesses were increasingly obvious, the story and the valiant main actors just about held my interest throughout.  As Longo, James Franco keeps you guessing, with clever use of his eyes and smile.  (It’s hard to tell if the light in the eyes goes out when the smile disappears or if they’re always dead but the deadness is concealed by the smile.)  Franco is fascinating to watch yet it remains unclear as to why Mike Finkel was fascinated by Christian Longo.  Jonah Hill is good as Finkel only within the severe limits of the role as written:  since Finkel is presented almost entirely as a patsy, there’s not a lot more that the actor playing him can do.  The part of Finkel’s wife is even worse, although Felicity Jones manages to give it a bit of substance.  One of the stronger scenes in True Story comes when Jill Finkel takes a call, while Mike is away at the trial, from Longo on a prison pay phone:  you do get a sense here of how Longo is getting to the Finkels (and enjoying it).  Unfortunately, the positive impression is more than cancelled out by a later, stupidly lurid sequence.  Jill visits Longo in prison, plays him music by the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), and tells how Gesualdo murdered his wife, her lover and, subsequently, her and Gesualdo’s young son.  If this prison visit did happen in real life, Rupert Goold manages to convince you that it couldn’t have.

    The what-happened-next summaries at the end of the film explain that Mike Finkel still lives in Montana with Jill and their three children:  it’s not clear when these children were born – there’s no sign or mention of them in the film.  The neat irony that Finkel has never again written for the New York Times but Christian Longo has, would be weakened if the closing legends also mentioned that Finkel went on to win a National Magazine Award for photojournalism for a National Geographic piece in 2007.  The film-makers’ omission here serves rather as confirmation of Mike Finkel’s instinct, when he wrote the African slave trade article in 2001, that you can up the impact of what you tell people by not telling them the whole truth.

    22 July 2015

  • Cloud Atlas

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lana and Andy Wachowski, Tom Tykwer (2012)

    The novel is a tough read but what kept me going – as well as increasingly bloody-minded determination to finish the thing – was how David Mitchell develops and holds interest in each of the six stories that comprise Cloud Atlas.  If memory serves (it may not), Mitchell inserts details to connect these narratives; his larger themes emerge from them gradually.  In the book, five of the stories are divided into two parts.  The sequence in which their first halves are told is reversed with the telling of the second halves; the one story told uninterruptedly is placed after five of these ten sections.   The novel also follows a chronological sequence:  the six stories are set in the 1850s, the 1930s, the 1970s, the present day, the middle of the twenty-second century, and an undefined, post-apocalyptic age.  The structure of the journey back means that Cloud Atlas ends where it began temporally.  The piece in the middle is narrated by an old man, Zachry, and is a memoir of his youth; the introduction of this self-conscious storyteller so deep into the book has the effect of underlining the storytelling skills the novelist has already demonstrated.   The film of Cloud Atlas is in important respects diametrically opposed to Mitchell’s novel.  Zachry (Tom Hanks) is the first person to appear on screen and, nearly three hours later, the last.   Whereas Mitchell takes you deep into each story in turn, the Wachowski-Tykwer narratives (they also collaborated on the screenplay) are fragmented from the start so you never settle into any one of them.  The ‘big’ themes – of eternal recurrence, the transmigration of souls etc – are explained in voiceovers at approximately one-third and again two-thirds of the way through.   (I felt at both these points that the film might as well end there and then, even though I knew from my watch it had a long way to go.)   Having stated these themes, the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer can only reiterate the philosophical points they’ve already made:  since you’ve been told what the stories as a whole signify you can be engaged only by what happens within them.  But it’s hard to care because the stories have been fractured – their narrative substance has been subordinated to narrative style and the fracturing seems to betray a lack of confidence in the art of linear storytelling.

    Of course the film-makers (WWT for short) didn’t have to stick faithfully to the novel but the decisions they’ve made in adapting it are not only misconceived but surprising, given the level of commitment, and the stamina, they’ve needed to bring Cloud Atlas to the screen.  I guess they wanted to replicate an extraordinary narrative structure – but there’s nothing extraordinary about a movie travelling between times and places and the splintering of the stories is almost clichéd after the Inarritu pictures of recent years.  Kicking things off with an old man talking about the telling of tales immediately suggests this will be one of the subjects of the movie; showing a bit of each of the six stories makes immediately clear that these will have to be linked up.  In theory, having the same actor play different roles sounds like a good way of realising reincarnation but several people appear in more than one guise very soon so you get the point too quickly.  Then they appear in disguise – which is fundamentally contradictory to the persistence of a single presence.  After not very long, the main interest in Cloud Atlas is in trying to work out who’s hiding under an improbable exterior (the final credits, which reveal all, are more interesting than the ‘climaxes’ of the film itself) – and wondering who’ll get the worst wig and make-up job. (This is a keen competition but Tom Hanks, with a ginger toupee and sideburns, and Ben Whishaw in a bandeau, thick specs and various outgrowths of facial hair – both in the 1975 story – are leading contenders.)

    Film is as easily capable of supernaturalising the worlds it describes as it is of moving fluidly among them.  The CGI effects here are often spectacular and beautiful but this admixture of high-tech and daft disguises – the characters getting out the dressing-up box (and often choosing drag) – is very odd.  Jim Broadbent creates clear and vivid characterisations as the appropriative, past-it composer, the vanity publisher who gets locked in an old people’s home, and the ship’s captain in the 1850 section.  Ben Whishaw doesn’t spend too long as the bandeaued music-seller in 1970s California; he’s mostly the rascally composer’s amanuensis, who actually writes the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’.  The scenes between Whishaw and Broadbent are just about the only ones in the film with a real spark, although James D’Arcy, bad in Hitchcock, is good as the amanuensis’s gay lover.  David Gyasi has great dynamism as the Moriori stowaway on the Victorian ship.  Most of the better-known members of the cast – they include, as well as Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant – are remarkably uninteresting.

    There’s no denying that the novel is about enduring souls in different perishable bodies (although Mitchell has said this is meant to be ‘just a symbol really of the universality of human nature’) but WWT banalise the underlying theme.  In the book, the theme, whatever else you may think of it, is highly distinctive:  it’s presented on screen in ways that make it seem familiar from other movies.  This may be a line from the novel but, when a character in the film (Doona Bae’s twenty-second century clone) explains that, when death occurs, ‘I see it as one door closing and another door opening’, the effect isn’t even pretentious:  she sounds to have got the idea from  Maria von Trapp.   The film’s score, by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, is pretentious although there’s no arguing with the power of the sequence of chords nicked from Sibelius’s Second Symphony.  People who loathe the book may well feel the movie as a whole, and its music in particular, exposes the original for what it really is but, although I’ve mixed feelings about Mitchell’s novel, I think it’s been done a disservice by WWT.  The Odeon audience reacted to the most obvious and spectacular bits of violence and the stupidest bits of comedy but they were probably relieved to have something to react to.   At the end of the film, Zachry’s grandchildren beg him to tell them another story.  It’s one of the happier moments of the film when he declines.

    24 February 2013

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