Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • The Hunt

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jagten

    Thomas Vinterberg  (2012)

    The Hunt is set in a small Danish town.  Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a nursery school teacher, is accused by a little girl – the daughter of one of Lucas’s best friends – of sexually abusing her.  The accusations catch fire and Lucas is ostracised and, more than once, on the receiving end of physical violence meted out by members of the local community.  The subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s film is the spread of hysterical rumour and suspicion – a well-worn theme of stage and screen drama.  (Examples that come instantly to mind are The Children’s Hour, The Crucible and A Cry in the Dark.)  Vinterberg, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tobias Lindholm, also makes use of the subsidiary cliché of the hunter hunted (Lucas and the bluff, hearty friends he has at the start, enjoy deer hunting).  Perhaps you’re meant to think the setting of the story is so out in the sticks that the inhabitants have never seen this kind of thing at the movies.  If they had, they’d be more aware of the overwrought predictability of the film they’re part of.  (In fact, the town’s residents include some evidently well-off and sophisticated individuals, who react in the same way as the less refined.)   People in the audience at Curzon Soho were regularly exclaiming in outrage at what they were seeing on screen as the burghers turned on Lucas.  I was with them in one sense but it was the filmmaking I was outraged by.

    Here’s another new film that depends for impact on the reality of the protagonist’s unenviable circumstances but has no interest in taking time and effort to create a believable series of events or reactions to those events. Thomas Vinterberg wants to show the violent and distressing effects of the town’s hysterical prejudice but the outbreak of that prejudice is based on a shaky foundation.  Six-year-old Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) accuses Lucas shortly after her elder brother and his friend have shown her a picture of an erect penis and Lucas has carefully distanced himself when Klara tries to kiss him during playtime at the school.  We hear repeatedly not only from her parents that Klara never lies but also from the head of the nursery school that ‘children tell the truth’.  The parents’ assertion about their own child is reasonably believable.  The head’s axiom is incredible.  (It would be more credible coming from the mouth of someone who had no contact with children – whose rose-coloured view was insulated from reality – than from a woman earning her living working with them.)  Although Lucas is briefly in custody we don’t see the police interviewing him; if we did, Vinterberg would have to produce evidence more substantial than the initial story that Klara tells.  Indeed, Klara herself soon seems doubtful about that story – even as she’s encouraged by her parents to stick to it.

    The Hunt might be persuasive if there were variation in the ways in which Klara’s family, and Lucas’s friends and work colleagues, and locals who know him less well, form their view that he’s guilty.  There’s no such variation, however, nor any sign of ambivalence.  Vinterberg doesn’t explore either why people should (as it seems) be determined to think the worst.  Why doesn’t Lucas go to the police when his dog is killed by avenging locals, and he’s brutally assaulted in a supermarket by staff who refuse to serve him there?  The answer is because that would force the director to address whether the police were part of the community’s aggressive intolerance or able and willing to keep it under control.  In a typical but especially melodramatic sequence at a Christmas Eve church service, the desperate, exasperated Lucas staggers in and sets about Klara’s father, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen).  None of the congregation intervenes – or even asks the visibly shaken Theo if he needs a doctor.  The priest gawps like everyone else, doesn’t even acknowledge that the service has been interrupted.

    In this crudely determined set-up, it’s not surprising that the few people who believe in Lucas’s innocence – or are unhappily doubtful – are a relatively believable relief.  Shortly before the non-event at the nursery school, Lucas, whose marriage has recently ended (and who also lost his job teaching older children when another local school closed down), learns that his teenage son Marcus is going to come to live with him, instead of with Lucas’s ex-wife.  What happens as a consequence of Klara’s untruths is obvious enough (although here too Vinterberg and Lindholm’s writing is sketchy) but Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom) is determined to defend his father.  In one of the film’s rare moments of quasi-humour, Lucas, released by the police, and Marcus are reunited and embrace:  ‘Don’t hug your son!’ calls out Lucas’s loyal friend Bruun (Lars Ranthe), ‘They’ll take you back into custody!’  The break-up of Lucas’s relationship with Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), the one person at the nursery school who doesn’t instantly take against him, is genuinely painful.  The other character with mixed feelings is, of course, Klara and Vinterberg directs Annika Wedderkopp skilfully:  she’s very convincing in how she registers uncertainty – about not only the story she told but why she’s expected to continue to insist it’s true.  You can hardly not sympathise with Lucas, considering what he has to go through, and this feeling fuses with admiration for Mads Mikkelsen (who won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his pains).  Lucas’s story is full of florid false notes but these are remarkably absent from the performance of the actor playing him.

    The Hunt runs 106 minutes.  There can’t have been many of them left when a fire alarm went off and we had to leave the cinema.  By this stage, I was too annoyed by the film to be willing to stand in the rain in Shaftesbury Avenue waiting for the all clear.  I headed home but wish now I’d stayed.  Sitting through most of this bad, overrated movie but not quite seeing it through has made the experience all the more irritating.

    6 December 2012

  • The Searchers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Ford (1956)

    Dominic Power from the National Film and Television School, at one point in his introduction, pretended to be lost for words:  ‘What do you say about one of the greatest films ever made?’   It’s not much easier to try to explain why I found The Searchers the third best of the three films I’ve seen so far this month at BFI (not counting Agonia![1]).  Power closed by quoting Jean-Luc Godard:  ‘How can I hate John Wayne [for his political views] and yet love him tenderly in the last reel of The Searchers?’  Godard’s famous remark seems to be widely accepted as proof of the exceptional quality of the film and/or Wayne’s performance but it’s a little puzzling.  Don’t we expect a good actor to be able, in what he does on screen, to transcend what we know of his personal views and behaviour (whether or not we like him as a result of those)?   Barbara Stanwyck, for example, was known to be staunchly Republican – but does anyone express amazement at liking or sympathising with (or even loving tenderly) the characters she creates on film?  No, because she’s a superb actress.  A main reason why Godard marvels at what he feels watching The Searchers is that John Wayne is barely an actor at all:  he always seems to be John Wayne.  You’re much more conscious of the real-life persona of someone who, as a performer, never convinces you they’re a different person.

    Power described Wayne’s portrait of Ethan Edwards as ‘the performance of his life’.   That phrase tends to be used about actors who don’t have a lot to choose from.  When Power added, ‘Greater even than Red River, I think’, I feared the worst but in fact Wayne does do some acting in The Searchers and bits of it are humanly persuasive.  It must be the fact that is so unusual that has caused many distinguished directors and critics lavishly to overrate the performance.  It’s striking that Wayne’s best moments come when he expresses weariness.  Even today, stars who are poor actors can sometimes register when they seemed to have emptied themselves – Leonardo DiCaprio in (just the) one sequence in Revolutionary Road, for example.   And Wayne’s eyes sometimes communicate Ethan Edwards’ isolation – the sense that this rabid Injun-hater also feels out of place in ‘civilised’ white society – convincingly.  On the whole, though, he does his standard thing of growling misanthropically, in the same unvarying rhythm.  His uttering the famous line ‘That’ll be the day’ (supposedly the inspiration for Buddy Holly) pays diminishing returns:  I counted four ‘That’ll be the day’s’ – the first two had some cynical bite, the latter two were well on the way to turning into a Wayne-ism.

    Ethan Edwards, a Civil War veteran, returns to the home of his brother Aaron.  It’s 1868, three years after the end of the War, and that interval is an early indication that Ethan isn’t naturally the settling down kind.  Aaron (Walter Coy) is married to Martha (Dorothy Jordan).  They have three children – Ben (Robert Lyden), Lucy (Pippa Scott) and the youngest, Debbie (Lana Wood, Natalie’s sister) – and an adopted son called Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who’s one-eighth Cherokee.  The day after Ethan’s arrival, he and a group of Texas rangers headed by Captain Clayton (Ward Bond), who also doubles as a man of the cloth when the occasion demands, are tricked into leaving to search for some cattle stolen from the Edwards’ friend and neighbour Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen).  While they’re away, Comanche Indians (the tricksters) burn down the Edwards home, after murdering Aaron, Martha and Ben and abducting Lucy and Debbie.  Ethan, accompanied by Martin, goes looking for the two girls, along with Lucy’s fiancé Brad (Harry Carey Jr) – Brad’s sister Laurie (Vera Miles) and Martin are sweethearts too, although he is, to her mind, infuriatingly tentative.  Brad’s mother (Olive Carey) has begged Ethan unavailingly not to let Brad risk his life by trying to exact revenge.  The men aren’t long into their quest before they discover that Lucy too has been murdered and, when Brad rides into the Indian camp to avenge her death, he’s killed as well.  Ethan and Martin continue in their search for the younger girl Debbie and five years later they find her (she’s Natalie Wood by now).  Debbie has gone native:  she’s one of the wives of the Comanche chief Scar (Henry Brandon) who captured her.  Ethan would rather see his niece dead than living with an Indian but Martin, although Ethan tells him that Debbie ‘ain’t your kin’, defends her.  In the climactic raid on the Comanche camp, Ethan thinks again.  It’s he who brings Debbie safely home.  ‘Home’ means the Jorgensens’ cabin and, in other words, Debbie’s own kind rather than ‘kin’:  Ethan, who after doing the right thing departs the scene, is her only surviving blood relative.  The end of the story also sees Laurie happily reunited with Martin, having narrowly avoided marriage to a dimwit suitor (Ken Curtis).

    Dominic Power suggested that the juxtaposition of tragedy and low humour in The Searchers demonstrates Ford’s complexity, the breadth of his artistic vision.  Of course the combination of seemingly disparate elements might do this but I don’t think it does here.  The humour in The Searchers is the same tedious stuff you usually get in Westerns and Power was pushing it in describing the character of the eccentric Mose Harper as a ‘Shakespearean fool’, even if Hank Worden does play the part in a way that seems meant to keep you guessing whether Mose is a half-wit or a seer.  (His lines don’t really have that complexity, though.)  Most of the acting too is Western standard issue, broad and wooden.  Honourable exceptions are, in addition to Worden, Henry Brandon, Olive Carey and, surprisingly, John Wayne’s son Patrick, as a greenhorn US army soldier (called Greenhill).   Admirers of the genre will describe the acting we see from the rest of the cast as ‘stylised’.  That’s at best a euphemism:  why should this kind of stylisation be peculiar to Westerns?  In a mid-nineteenth century drama with an urban or metropolitan setting, the actors may be just as likely to be playing types but they’re expected to give individuality to their roles.  Isn’t it a fact too that many actors best known for their appearances in Westerns are in fact known only for those appearances?  That obviously doesn’t apply to Natalie Wood but she’s glazed and superficial as Debbie:  I don’t understand how those who find the film’s climax deeply moving don’t find Natalie Wood getting in the way of that.  Thanks to Psycho, Vera Miles isn’t just a Western girl either but she’s a dull, limited actress.  As Laurie, perhaps Miles too gives the performance of her life; as with John Wayne, that doesn’t add up to much.

    A group of ‘very bright, very motivated American students’, to whom Dominic Power showed The Searchers years ago (although he didn’t say when exactly), pronounced it the ‘most sexist and racist’ movie they’d seen in a long time.  Power described how he kept asking the students after they’d delivered this verdict whether they’d noticed this or that subtlety or contradiction and the answer was always no.  It seemed they couldn’t see past John Wayne.  It wasn’t clear from the reactions last night that the NFT2 audience could either – but there are different kinds of blindness:  lots of people were clearly enjoying Wayne being Wayne.  Except for the treatment meted out to the Native American woman (Beulah Archuletta) whom Martin inadvertently marries (until she’s conveniently killed off), I doubt many people today are offended by the racial and sexual attitudes of the film.  There’s a confusion of reasons for that:  on the one hand, we accept that these attitudes are historically realistic; on the other hand, the Western is a largely obsolete film form (as I was leaving, I heard a youngish male voice in the row behind me say this was the first Western he’d seen).  So the presentation of these attitudes, which might have caused offence fifty years ago in that it was seen to be promoting racism and sexism, now seems as far distant in time past as the years in which The Searchers is actually set.

    The Searchers, although it was overlooked by critics (and the Academy), was a commercial success on its original release and you can see why.  John Ford makes the movement of the action sequences very exciting – the shoot-outs, men and horses sliding down steep slopes or through lakes, and so on.  Silence or near silence is used to varying effect – so is Max Steiner’s score.  There are fine images, like the tiny, lone figure watching from a mountain top the Comanche camp below, or Debbie on foot being pursued by Ethan on horseback.  The contrast between the small indoors and the great outdoors, between the interiors of the scattered homesteads and the vast Texas wilderness (dusty orange terrain and hard blue sky) that they look out on, is at the heart of The Searchers’ most famous image – with which it begins and ends (and which features at other points too).  The door of one these cabins is opened at the start and gradually closes on Ethan Edwards as he walks back out into the desert at the end.  (The image also suggests the opening and closing of a book – the screenplay by Frank S Nugent is based on a 1954 novel by Alan LeMay – or the opening and closing of a camera shutter or even the rise and fall of a stage curtain.)   The landscape looks to have epic possibilities and that no doubt increases the emotional power of the piece for those who find it psychologically complex too.  I imagine it’s because The Searchers combines John Ford’s trademarks with an uncharacteristic ambiguity that many of his admirers rate the film uniquely highly in his work – but this doesn’t seem to me essentially different from the reasons for enthusing about John Wayne’s acting here.  John Ford being ambivalent may well be preferable to his being unequivocal but I prefer directors who are in two or more minds as a matter of course.

    18 April 2011

     

    [1] See note on The Grim Reaper.

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