Daily Archives: Thursday, August 13, 2015

  • Dean Spanley

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Toa Fraser (2008)

    A truly charming film – it’s a great pleasure to see eccentric material done so intelligently.   And a pleasure that it’s found its way into cinemas at all:  Dean Spanley’s commercial potential is modest and it might have been judged more easily packaged for television as a ‘quality’ drama-comedy ‘starring’ Peter O’Toole – its U certificate and the Scrooge-style redemption of the central character making it seem natural Christmas fare.  If it had been, the piece would have been trailed so often that it would have been over-hyped – and possibly disappointing – by the time it was aired.   Without any such publicity, the film (a British-New Zealand co-production) has slipped into filmhouses unheralded.  That seems appropriate to its scale and unpretentiousness – and enhances the enjoyable surprise that it turns out to be.   (In any case, the picture is probably too subtle to be entirely successful as a family film.)

    The screenplay, by Alan Sharp, is adapted from the short novel My Talks with Dean Spanley by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany (who was writing in a range of literary forms in the first half of the twentieth century).  The main characters are the narrator, Henslowe Fisk (‘Fisk junior’), and his misanthropic father Horatio (‘Fisk senior’), whom he visits every Thursday.   The son engages in uneasy and unavailing attempts to find pleasurable things for them to spend the day doing.  We learn there was another Fisk junior – Henslowe’s brother, Harrington.  He was killed in the recent Boer War (the film is set in the first decade of the last century); his grief-stricken mother never recovered from the loss and died shortly afterwards.   One Thursday, father and son attend a lecture by a visiting swami on the transmigration of souls.   Also in the small audience is a local clergyman, Dean Spanley, whom Fisk senior disparages, vaguely but vehemently (‘Not quite sound, Spanley’).  After the lecture, the Fisks go for a drink at the old man’s club; Spanley is there, imbibing tokay (‘Hungarian treacle’, according to Fisk senior).  When Fisk junior asks for the same, he’s told that it’s unavailable – that Spanley orders tokay from a private collection of the stuff he holds at the club.

    Fisk junior is struck by Spanley’s open-mindedness about reincarnation then, on his way home that same day, by seeing the Dean taking a keen interest in a cat up a tree in the grounds of the Dean’s church.   (One of the questions from the audience at the lecture has been about the souls of pets.  The lady questioners, cat owners, are disconcerted by the swami’s assertion that it’s dogs which have a special place in the spiritual scheme of things because they ‘amplify’ man’s perception of himself whereas cats ‘diminish’ it.)  Fisk junior persuades Spanley to come to dinner, clinching the deal with the offer (‘Not so much a lie as a truth deferred’) of a bottle of 1891 tokay.   It transpires that tokay can be purchased only with the permission of the Hungarian royal family; Fisk junior turns to Wrather, a resourceful Australian dealer in all sorts (and another member of the lecture audience), to supply the goods.  At his first dinner with Fisk junior, the Dean rhapsodises about the aroma of tokay; once he’s started to drink it, he starts to talk in equally enthusiastic terms about canine sense of smell.  (He says that dragging a dog away from sniffing at a lamp-post is tantamount to parting a scholar from his book in the British Library.)  With two glasses of tokay (his self-imposed limit) under his belt, the Dean begins to reminisce more expansively – about his past life as a dog.

    The presences and acting styles of the small cast are strongly complementary.  Peter O’Toole is still only in his mid-seventies but his skeletal thinness and blue eyes, now as startling for their rheumy look as for their colour, make him appear ancient.   O’Toole may have a few years in him yet but his performance here – and the way that Toa Fraser photographs him – isn’t quite free of what was a larger problem in Venus two years ago:  the sense that the actor is being commemorated before our eyes.   (It’s true that decrepitude is essential to the part he’s playing here, as it was in Venus – but O’Toole seems a bit too self-aware on this score, and his reverential directors are underlining it.)  O’Toole rather telegraphs the broken heart that lies beneath Fisk senior’s heartless irascibility but he’s very funny delivering his anti-social putdowns and in his velvety, pedantic carping in his early scenes with his son.  You get a sense that the old man feels he may as well insult the world with élan because that’s as much pleasure as he’s going to get out of life now.  And O’Toole’s final scenes are worth waiting for as Fisk senior listens to and comes to understand Dean Spanley’s story, and in what then follows.   (When Fisk junior puts his hand on his father’s arm to restrain him emotionally at the climax of the Dean’s narrative, and when Fisk senior then puts out his hand to Spanley, it’s touching in both senses of the word;  it makes you realise the lack of physical contact there has been between the characters up to this point.)

    O’Toole is the centre of attention but his magnetism doesn’t obscure the performances of Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill, although Northam’s, in particular, is likely (not for the first time) to be underrated.  He’s doing something difficult – animating the first-person narrator of a novel, a narrator whose job it is to record extraordinary events and colourful characters but who, because these other elements absorb our interest, is himself is a relatively undefined, neutral presence.  (I’m guessing at this but, if the screenplay is anything like a faithful adaptation, it seems obvious.)  Northam does this with typical sensitivity and skill.   He reads the voice-over narration with a perfect blend of humour and melancholy, which immediately draws you into the story and tells you that it’s going to be amusing but something else too.  Northam, who’s now forty-seven, looks middle-aged in a way he hasn’t been on screen before; Fisk junior, it turns out, is an art dealer and publisher, a well-to-do and not unsuccessful man, but he wears an air of defeat.  (Northam has been skilfully dressed – in a hat and a coat down below his knees that seem to depress him physically.  I guess this is the same sartorial trompe l’oeil that was used to diminish Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.)  As with his masterly performance as Knightley in the 1996 Emma, Northam is quiet in his effects and patient enough to avoid doing anything obvious;   I expect this quietness will seem to some indistinguishable from dullness – but holding himself in like this really pays off at the picture’s climax (as in Emma), when his character expresses emotion.  (Northam keeps you aware of Fisk junior’s native restraint even in these moments.)

    Sam Neill is a good actor but I wouldn’t have expected him to engage with this kind of material so fully and wittily.  Perhaps Neill’s portrait of the Dean in his everyday persona could use a touch more satiric edge – but perhaps not;   maybe it’s the fact that Spanley is so innocuously pompous that makes old Fisk’s antipathy to him more puzzling – and the Dean’s dinner monologues so engaging.   Neill’s olfactory transports are not just entertaining but also convincing as an expression of Spanley’s thought processes; he moves between his past and present incarnations with a nice imperceptibility.   And this role allows Neill to bring out what has tended to remain implicit in roles he’s usually been cast in – the comical aspect of his good looks.   Bryan Brown is a much broader actor than either Northam or Neill and a much less flamboyant one than O’Toole but Brown’s easy, amused down-to-earthness as the canny Wrather gives flavour to the film.   (Whether the colonial Wrather is a reincarnation of the dog-Dean’s mongrel pal is an increasingly enjoyable question that is never fully resolved.)   If Judy Parfitt sometimes seems a bit too busy and effortful as the housekeeper, Mrs Brimley, she more than delivers at the emotional cruxes of the story.  Art Malik, as the sharply-dressed swami, looks better than he acts, as usual.   In the small part of an elderly waiter at Fisk senior’s club, Dudley Sutton has a good bit as he offers his sympathies to the old man and is brutally rebuffed.

    There’s a risk, when you like a small film as much as I like this one, that you’ll praise it too highly – in a way that’s false to the spirit of the piece.   But I do think Dean Spanley is eloquent about a particular kind of failure to communicate between father and son.  When Peter O’Toole determinedly cranks up the vitriol engine to make sure Fisk junior knows he’s discontented and Jeremy Northam registers and suppresses exasperation, you get a powerful sense of the impacted, unhappy routine of their lives – and how long this could go on without anything really being said.   And Toa Fraser, directing his second feature, brings out the comic potential of lack of communication at this human level when another character is speaking from two different lives.   The themes of missing loved ones and post-mortem communication are built up through the signs that the two Fisks, in their different ways, are grieving their wife/mother and son/brother; in Fisk senior relating how, years ago, his favourite spaniel Wag disappeared, never to return (in canine form); in Mrs Brimley, sitting with her sewing on one side of the fire and chatting familiarly with the empty chair – on the other side – in which her late husband used to sit.    Dean Spanley also offers a likeably different take on the dramatic convention of revealing an event in a screwed up character’s past life which explains the person he’s become.

    According to Wikipedia, Toa Fraser was born in Britain in 1975, of a Fijian father and a British mother, and emigrated to New Zealand in his early teens.  He’s written three plays and directed a screen adaptation of one of these, No 2, in 2006.   What’s so pleasing about Fraser’s direction is that he doesn’t see the whimsical basis of the story as dictating a self-consciously humorous approach; he directs almost as if this were a straight, character-driven drama.  As a result, Dean Spanley is almost entirely free of the archness which might seem implicit in the plot and emotionally rich – and funny – in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise have been.  (The versatile music, written and conducted by Don McGlashan, both reinforces the moods created by Fraser and his cast, and has a sprightliness which the director otherwise steers clear of, and which is palatable as a supportive counterpoint to what’s on screen.)   Sometimes Fraser seems to treat the material with almost too much integrity; it’s never less than pleasant but it’s occasionally slightly boring.  The Dean’s revelations under the influence of tokay keep you smiling but, until O’Toole joins the dinner party, they don’t build; the flashback at this point to the dogs’ adventure is uninspired; and the film’s heartwarming ending is a bit too extended.  Not all the details seem right – I wasn’t sure, for example, that it was correct, according to the social structure of Edwardian England, that Fisk junior regularly kissed the housekeeper when he arrived at and left his father’s home.  But these aren’t major faults.  Fraser’s avoidance of the potential pitfalls and his success in sustaining a blend of surreal comedy and human truthfulness amounts to a considerable balancing act, and he has a sure and sensitive touch with the actors.   Dean Spanley is one of the most satisfying films of the year.

    13 and 23 December 2008

  • The Children’s Hour

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1961)

    Lillian Hellman’s play was first filmed by William Wyler in 1936 (as These Three).  He made this second attempt presumably because the first one had been bowdlerised to such an extent that the alleged love affair between the protagonists was heterosexual.    The Children’s Hour made Hellman’s name but, if this version is anything close to the original, it’s not a very good play.  There are seven sizeable parts:  Martha and Karen, thirtyish spinsters who run the small private school for girls where the action takes place; Joe, a hospital doctor and Karen’s longstanding fiancé;  Lily, Martha’s aunt, a terminally resting stage actress, who in theory helps out with the teaching; Mary, a poisonous pupil whose whisper sets the real action of the plot in motion (the 1961 film was released in Britain as The Loudest Whisper); her grandmother Amelia (who is also – as a pretext for setting up a scene between them – a relative of Joe); and Rosalie, a kleptomaniac schoolgirl and Mary’s blackmail victim.    Only two of these characters (Martha and Rosalie) are coherent and reasonably convincing.   The others either keep changing in order to generate the next melodramatic twist in the story (Karen and Amelia) or are so crudely conceived they’re incredible (Lily and Mary) or are severely underwritten (Joe).

    In this film, the shortcomings in the writing are compounded by some acting so bad that it’s baffling that a director of Wyler’s stature let it happen.  You can only suppose he was focused on not repeating the thematic travesty of These Three and wasn’t sufficiently attentive to other things going wrong.  Miriam Hopkins played one of the young teachers in These Three; 25 years on, her garish, busy portrait of Lily is painful – the obsolescent form of stage acting that we assume has brought a deserved end to the character‘s career was probably something like Hopkins’ playing here.  (Physically, Hopkins looks a cross between Bette Davies and Joan Crawford – a weird anticipation of those two in the following year’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?)   The opening credits ‘introduce’ Karen Balkin, who plays Mary.  It’s not a surprise to learn from IMDB that she’s made few screen appearances since.  Like Hopkins’ bad acting, Balkin’s look-at-me performance fuses uncomfortably with what’s supposed to be wrong with the person she’s playing.  This is the kind of over-acting which amuses some people (there were several of them at this BFI screening) because it’s a child in the role – as if remembering lines and pulling faces is prodigious in itself, and the effect of the party turn on the film as a whole a minor consideration.  Balkin’s caricature little monster, as well as being gruesome to watch and hear, dilutes the startling malice which Hellman imputes to Mary.

    Some of the other girls playing the pupils aren’t much less histrionically over-eager than the pudding-faced Balkin – they’re less hard to take only because their roles are much smaller.  It’s ironic that the opening scene is of a comically clumsy piano recital in the school, enjoyed by some of the parents watching but which causes one father to fall asleep and Karen and Martha to exchange discreetly amused smiles.  Except for Veronica Cartwright, who has an unforced emotional rawness as the hapless Rosalie, the junior acting in this film invites you to react less discreetly.  It’s a relief once the scandal that engulfs Karen and Martha has broken, the outraged parents have removed their children from the school, and the three main adult actors are left virtually alone.

    Lillian Hellman is credited with the ‘adaptation’ and John Michael Hayes with the screenplay.  The BFI handout comprised an extract from a biography of Wyler, which explained that he and Hayes had invented a scene between Lily and Amelia to give a bit of credibility to the latter’s believing the story Mary has whispered to her during a car journey.   Credibility certainly is in short supply at this point.  The crucial exchange between Mary and her grandmother is bungled:  Mary mentions the word ‘unnatural’ (as used by Aunt Lily about Martha’s feelings for Karen) as if she fully understands not just what it means but exactly what effect her quoting it will have.  But although the scene goes wrong partly because of Karen Balkin’s hideous knowingness and Wyler’s failure to control it, the botch and the filmmakers’ emergency surgery on the script also reveal the crudeness of Hellman’s dramatic technique and her callous portrait of Mary:  she makes this child the mechanical but strongly ill-intentioned villain of the piece.  The story would be more powerful, as well as less unsubtle, if what Mary told her grandmother was careless chatter – if the development of rumours into cast-iron accusations were a more accidental, gradated progress.

    Because Miriam Hopkins is ridiculous as Aunt Lily, the invented scene between her and Amelia (Fay Bainter) doesn’t help in the way Wyler and Hayes intended.  If talking to Aunt Lily confirms her suspicions, this makes Amelia seem even more gullible than when she swallows what Mary tells her in the car.  Fay Bainter, in what turned out to be her last film role, gets the rawest deal of anyone in terms of Hellman’s manipulation of the characters for the sake of dramatic expedience.   Early on, Amelia seems alert, self-possessed and rather shrewd; she’s impatient with Mary when the girl complains how unkindly she’s being treated by Karen and Martha.  But as soon as Amelia hears the word ‘unnatural’ and what Mary then whispers in her ear (which we don’t hear), she’s incredibly transformed.  She’s stonily intransigent when Joe, Karen and Martha argue with her.  Once Mary’s lies are revealed, Amelia’s collapse is as abject as her campaign against Karen and Martha has been implacable.  There’s nothing in the writing to suggest, let alone explain, Amelia’s credulous, volatile absolutism.

    Fay Bainter is inevitably defeated by these contortions but she gives a sympathetic performance; there’s a thread of weariness running through Amelia’s character changes that holds your interest in her.  Audrey Hepburn as Karen comes off second worst after Bainter.  When Karen forces Joe to ask the question she knows he wants to ask, she answers that she and Martha never were lovers; he says he believes her; she says they must separate because she’ll never believe that he does.  This is a strong, well-acted exchange; and the psychological trickiness of what Karen does here sets you wondering whether she wants Joe to leave her because she’s increasingly unsure about her feelings for Martha.  But once Joe has gone and Martha admits that she’s sexually attracted to her, Karen reacts as a simple innocent, assuring Martha that the latter is imagining an impure aspect to their friendship.

    At the time this picture was made, Shirley MacLaine must have been the best young American actress around.  As Martha, she really inhabits her dowdy clothes – especially a cardigan, which seems to double up as a comforter and a hair shirt.  MacLaine is very good at suggesting a woman who keeps subduing her feelings by firmly turning her mind to practical matters, to the next thing on her list of things to do.  We see her thoughts being transformed into physical movements:  sublimation in action.  This is a simple, effective way of convincing us that, until personal crisis and public scandal have exploded into their lives, Martha really hasn’t recognised the sexual aspect of her love for Karen – it’s the fact that we see Martha suppressing other (associated) emotions that makes this credible.    Audrey Hepburn is a very different kind of star from MacLaine; she’s a good actress but within a narrower range.  Hepburn’s star personality is very definite and we can admire the wit and shadings of her characterisations without ever feeling she’s much different from what we expect her to be.   Although she’s dressed (for her) unglamorously here, Hepburn looks almost lovelier as a result and because the part is insecurely written, she’s effective only in bits.  But they’re good bits:  in Karen’s big scene with Joe and in her two extended walks in the closing stages of the film.  When, after Martha has expressed her true feelings for Karen, Hepburn comes towards the camera, down from the house towards the entrance to the school, the rhythm of her movement reflects Karen’s shifting thoughts.  At Martha’s funeral, when she walks across the screen and away from the other mourners watching her, Hepburn is very expressive:  we see that Karen has internalised the legacy of the experience in a way that will cut her off from other people long after the funeral is over.   James Garner gives a scrupulous performance as Joe but it’s not surprising that he seems uncomfortable:  Joe isn’t really an independent character – he’s a necessary plot component and a useful device for illustrating the play’s themes.

    It’s not clear – in spite of the play’s reputation – what exactly it’s saying.  Fred Zinnemann’s film Julia implies that The Children’s Hour was inspired by Lillian Hellman’s girlhood friendship with the eponymous Julia, and by other friends suspecting this relationship had a sexual element.  There’s a scene in Julia when a young man says to Lillian, ‘Everyone knows about you and Julia’.  Lillian launches a right hook which knocks him off his chair.  The Children’s Hour, on the evidence of this picture, seems more preoccupied with the general injustice of being accused of something you haven’t done than with the particular injustice of finding your private and professional lives laid waste by homophobic prejudice and intolerance.   To an extent, this may simply reflect when the play was written – and help to explain how it became what seems, from this distance in time, a surprising Broadway hit in the mid-1930s.  (Some people clearly find autres temps autres moeurs a hard concept to grasp:  one member of the BFI audience gave a sarcastic yelp of horror when mention of Karen and Martha being lovers was first made.)   In any case, it’s the ambiguity – even evasiveness – in Lillian Hellman’s writing that makes the piece still of interest today.  Does Martha commit suicide because her world has been destroyed or because she can’t live with the realisation that she’s a lesbian?  If the answer is both, that still fudges the issue of what Hellman felt about homosexuality, as distinct from victimisation.

    The stage origins of the piece are awkwardly evident in a number of exits and entrances (and there’s a little inconsistency about what characters can or can’t hear ‘offstage’).   Yet The Children’s Hour is visually interesting in a way that screen adaptations of theatre rarely are – shot in black-and-white by Franz Planer, and with well thought out costumes by Dorothy Jeakins.    Alex North’s score is less effective:  it’s a bit too richly ‘atmospheric’ for the subject and the look of the film.

    10 May 2009

     

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