Daily Archives: Tuesday, August 25, 2015

  • Tyrannosaur

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paddy Considine (2011)

    In their interview in this month’s Sight and Sound, Paddy Considine and Peter Mullan, who plays the lead in Tyrannosaur, disparage social realism in film-making, Mullan more aggressively than Considine.  Mullan illustrates the potential falsity of realism not with any example of dramatic screen fiction but with TV ‘reality’ shows that he rightly sees as skewed and manipulative.  Mullan goes on to remind the interviewer Nick Bradshaw, that any choice he (Bradshaw) makes in conducting the interview is a ‘political act’.  Using something like Big Brother as a stick with which to beat cinematic realism doesn’t do a lot for Mullan’s argument but this is something he clearly feels strongly about.  As Bradshaw notes, this latest interview picks up where the S&S piece with Mullan on Neds at the start of the year left off.  In Neds, Mullan uses social realism as a take-off point for imaginative unrealistic elements.  That’s not what happens in Tyrannosaur, the first feature directed by Paddy Considine and which Considine also wrote.

    This unhappy story – set in present day Leeds, about the lives and relationships of Joseph (Mullan), a middle-aged widower who struggles to control his drinking and his rage, Hannah (Olivia Colman), a practising Christian who works in a charity shop, and James (Eddie Marsan), her physically and psychologically abusive husband – stays rooted in reality, in the sense that the film depends crucially on the audience’s believing that everything we see happening on screen might really be happening.    In the first half of the film, Considine sustains this belief very well.   But as the dramatic climax of Tyrannosaur approaches, you become increasingly aware that he’s pushing things too far in order to intensify the misery of the characters’ situation and the emotional power deriving from that.  In the S&S piece, Considine and Mullan emphasise the primacy of ‘emotional truth’.  (In Neds the fantastic sequences enriched the emotional truth that developed in the realistic ground of the film.)  But what kind of truth is it that’s conveyed through situations which you know to be contrived for emotional effect?  There’s no doubting the fine, often moving performances in this film or that Paddy Considine directs the actors with a sure and sensitive touch, or his skill in writing incisive naturalistic dialogue, but Tyrannosaur is too determinedly grim.

    Considine’s previous film as a director was the prize-winning short Dog Altogether (2007), which introduced the character of Joseph (Mullan played him there too and Olivia Colman played a different role).  According to Wikipedia, the phrase ‘dog altogether’ comes ‘from an Irish expression that Paddy’s father used to use when situations got really bad’.   It’s the culmination of the canine part of the story in Tyrannosaur that shows in its most blatant form Considine’s tendency to force the material in order to pile on the grief.  At the start of the film, in his first outburst of fury, Joseph takes his anger out on his dog, kicking it so hard in the ribs that the animal dies.  Joseph’s neighbours have a pit bull; this dog, like Joseph (and like the man who owns it), is always straining on its leash, looking keen to take a bite out of someone.  After the death of Joseph’s own dog (and with his only human pal terminally ill), the young son of the neighbouring family is the only person with whom he has friendly conversation.  In the epilogue to the film, which takes place a year after the main action, Joseph writes a letter to Hannah, who’s now in prison for killing the husband whose abuse she could no longer stand.  Joseph explains that he too has been inside in the meantime – for unlawfully (and savagely) killing the neighbour’s pit bull.  He was driven to do this by the fact that the animal had attacked the little boy Joseph had befriended – the boy’s face was left badly scarred as a result.  But surely the boy had to go to hospital for treatment, surely the cause of his wounds became clear, and surely the dog would have been humanely destroyed as a result?  That both these things should happen is implausible and the only emotional truth here is that Paddy Considine wants to have his cake and eat it:  he wants the child’s damaged face and Joseph’s lethal attack on the dog.

    It’s her upmarket address which allows Joseph to inform Hannah, in one of their early exchanges in the charity shop, that she knows nothing about how hard life can be; but he’s wrong, and one of the strongest elements in Tyrannosaur is how Considine dramatises the democracy of unhappiness and isolation.  Perhaps that’s the justification for none of the neighbours noticing the lack of activity at the house in the period between Hannah’s escape from it and Joseph’s eventual discovery of James’s dead body, a fly buzzing round it, in an upstairs room.  But we’re led to believe James has a good job – does no one at his place of work notice or question his absence?   Is Hannah a Christian on her own?  It’s possible but it also clearly suits Considine’s purposes that no one from church wonders where she’s got to.   Nor do any of the people who work at the charity shop (she surely can’t run it that on her own).  But then we never see them or indeed any customers, apart from Joseph – and James, who comes in one day to check up on Hannah and leaves with his paranoid suspicions confirmed that the ‘slut’ is being unfaithful to him with Joseph.  We do, though, hear the voice of a woman who comes in with some clothes to donate.  Olivia Colman is wonderful in that scene as she switches with great but unseen effort from weeping in the back of the shop to brightly affable performance as she talks with the unseen woman.

    The bleakness of the world of Tyrannosaur is enhanced by how unbelievably few people there are in it – the depopulation goes with the landscapes both man-made and natural, especially the dark, leafless trees.  It’s no coincidence that the only sequence in the film with any sense of joy comes when Joseph and Hannah are drinking and dancing along with others (albeit at Joseph’s friend’s wake!)  Hannah’s Christianity is a potentially strong element which gets lost in the story.  Her politely resilient defence of her faith, when Joseph derides it, is very truthful.  He’s so impressed that he asks her to pray at the bedside of his dying friend.   This prayer is exceptionally well written (‘We know that life is just a part of existence, and death is eternal’ is thought-provoking), and beautifully delivered by Olivia Colman.  It’s a strong moment too when, at the end of her tether in the charity shop, Hannah hurls something at a picture of Christ hanging on the wall, and yells, ‘What are you staring at?!’   Having introduced this distinctive theme, Considine doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.  He doesn’t even have Hannah discover that her faith is useless, or a delusion that allows her to cope with her unhappy life.   He’s careless about other details in the script and their conflict with what we’re watching on screen.   When Joseph asks Hannah why she can’t tell her friends and family about what her husband’s doing, she says that no one would believe her, that James knows how to turn on the charm and they all think he’s perfect.  With Eddie Marsan in the role of James (although he’s very good), this is impossible to believe.

    Peter Mullan is very fine at showing Joseph’s fear of getting close to Hannah, or to anyone, after the death of the wife he loved – but who, he tells Hannah, he treated badly.  It’s also amusing and touching that, dressed in the charity shop suit he got for his friend’s funeral, he looks so distinguished.   Olivia Colman is still best known for her television comedy work with Mitchell and Webb but her performance here should change that.  She and Mullan make the most of the crumbs of humour in Tyrannosaur but Colman goes way beyond what we’ve previously seen of her.  She’s marvellous at putting a brave, smiley face on things – the habit seems to run so deep in Hannah that Colman gets us (almost) to believe that this woman could kill her husband, leave the house, and think she could put what she’d done behind her.  Tyrannosaur majors on different strands of inherent masculine violence so the explanation of its title comes as a pleasant surprise.  It’s the meant-to-be-affectionate name Joseph called his heavily-built late wife:  her footfall upstairs reminded him of a something in Jurassic Park.  It’s a pity that, by the time you come out of the film, you feel a more apt title would have been As Bad as It Gets.

    11 October 2011

  • Manglehorn

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Gordon Green (2014)

    Paul Logan, who wrote the screenplay for Manglehorn, currently has only four other credits on IMDB – as the writer and director of a 2011 short, as the director of a 2015 video short and as a member of the ‘Transportation department’ for the 2013 feature Prince Avalanche, which, like Manglehorn, was directed by David Gordon Green.  Because Logan isn’t a big-name writer and because Manglehorn is so bad (and bad essentially because of the script), I wondered how the project got developed.   According to Green, in an interview last month with the digital magazine Paste, he and Logan ‘architected the film specifically for’ Al Pacino and this is how the script materialised:

    ‘I gave [Paul Logan] the seed.   I said, “I want you to write a movie called Manglehorn, about Al Pacino as a locksmith that is brokenhearted, and I want to see the smaller, gentler, subtle, funny side of Al.” And probably a week later he had a first draft, and then we talked about it for a few weeks, did various drafts, and I showed it to Al and we got him involved.’

    The set-up foretells a sentimental journey that will lead to the mending of the heart of a professional repairer, to a key-maker’s late-in-life discovery of the key to happiness.  The ‘originality’ of Logan’s and Green’s screenplay consists in demonstrating that A J Manglehorn is self-centred, insensitive, and nasty when he’s drunk;  that it’s not surprising – perhaps just as well – he lives a reclusive existence in his workshop and home behind the workshop, somewhere in Texas.  On his weekly visits to a local bank, he chats with a desperately friendly teller called Dawn (Holly Hunter):  she has a dog with health issues; he has a cat who’s off her food.  Dawn is an exceptional figure in Manglehorn’s world:  the few other adults who feature in it are even more unappealing than he is.  Years ago, he coached a kids’ baseball team.  Its members included his only offspring, Jacob (Chris Messina), and Gary (Harmony Korine), whom Manglehorn now appears to see more often than he sees his son.  Jacob is some kind of businessman and therefore an arrogant jerk; Gary, a different kind of sleazeball, has just opened a tanning salon.   As he takes care to tell his son when they meet for a disastrous lunch, Manglehorn never loved his wife (Jacob’s mother).  He is fond of his Persian cat, and even fonder of his little granddaughter, Kylie (Skylar Gasper).  These attachments may be meant to prove deep-down tenderness but rather suggest that, while Manglehorn can manage the relatively easy matter of loving a pet animal or a young child, grown-up relationships are beyond him.

    The film’s characters are so wretched and/or disagreeable that the story is increasingly blood-chilling rather than heart-warming.  Then – just a few minutes before the end and as if they know  time’s nearly up – Green and Logan decide that Manglehorn is the darling you assumed at the start he would prove to be.  The early shots of Al Pacino moving round the locksmith’s premises are promising.  Manglehorn changes a bulb in a light fitting on the workshop ceiling:  as the new bulb comes on, its neighbour goes dark and Pacino gives a slight, funny droop of resignation – a grace note that is literally the best moment in the whole picture.  Unfortunately, this image also represents the viewer’s experience of Manglehorn.  As soon as Pacino’s voice on the soundtrack starts reading out letters that A J is continuing to write to Clara, a woman he loved and lost years ago, your hopes for what lies ahead are extinguished.  (The loss of Clara has poisoned the whole of Manglehorn’s life since – even though it turns out they parted company because he made her miserable.  In other words, he was a pain in the neck before Clara turned him into an embittered and regretful pain in the neck.)

    Although his Paste interview suggests that he conceived Manglehorn as a showcase for Al Pacino, I suspect David Gordon Green thinks subverting before eventually reverting to a formula gives the material a depth it wouldn’t otherwise have.   The same probably goes for the film’s more eccentric technical and narrative features.  X-rays taken of Manglehorn’s cat reveal the obstruction to her digestion to be a key she’s somehow swallowed; the vet anaesthetises Fanny to remove the object.  (The key, by the way, turns out to be the one that opens the safe containing Manglehorn’s decades of returned-to-sender letters to Clara.)   Green shows close-ups of the surgery, accompanied by the vet’s voiceover explaining what he’s finding and doing inside the cat.  Why?  Manglehorn isn’t present to witness the operation and this isn’t how he would be imagining what we see and hear.   Given his supposed level of concern for Fanny’s wellbeing, however, it’s surprising we’re not shown her owner checking that she’s recovering from the surgery OK.  Green, I think, just wants to be different – to pretend the story is something other than what it is.

    There’s a baffling sequence, which is observed by Manglehorn, in which the camera moves from the back of a line of crashed cars to the front, where an elderly woman is receiving treatment from a paramedic.  It doesn’t seem to be a dream that Manglehorn’s having but, since there’s no follow-up to the sequence, I wasn’t sure.  The tricksy editing and the hipster-loose delivery of lines by Harmony Korine give Manglehorn a modernist veneer but such a thin one that it succeeds only in drawing attention to how ineffectively the director is trying to obscure the staleness of the script. And Green isn’t, in any case, above the crassly obvious.   At the end of a grim evening (for the audience anyway), Manglehorn goes to Gary’s tanning salon and, when one of the girls there explains to him the services she provides, goes ballistic.   There are crummy reactions to the resulting mayhem:  another customer emerges, comically startled and undressed, from the tanning room; the hostess rejected by Manglehorn weeps.  (Why would she care?)

    By now, Manglehorn’s behaviour has become consistently unpleasant.  Since this happens while the cat is in the veterinary hospital, I wondered (and worried) for a while if Fanny had died on the operating table, Manglehorn knew this, and it explained why he was being so vile – but there’s no such connection.   (Fanny recovers and regains her appetite – although there are points at which the cat playing her evidently isn’t happy.)  Immediately before the tanning salon episode, Manglehorn has been out with Dawn.  A scene between them in a restaurant undoubtedly has impact but only because it’s so falsely harsh.   Dawn listens to Manglehorn telling her repeatedly how great and incomparable Clara was.  This goes on so long that I began to feel angry that not only Dawn but also Holly Hunter was powerless to do anything but sit and suffer.  It’s certainly a relief when Dawn eventually decides she’s had enough humiliation and leaves the restaurant.  In the suddenly upbeat closing stages, Manglehorn, after deciding to close the book on Clara, goes on his weekly trip to the bank, sort of apologises to Dawn, and asks if she’s willing to go out with him again.   She agrees, infuriatingly, to do so.  Holly Hunter has done her best to breathe life into Dawn; she’s believable as a woman whose loneliness is strongly linked to her over-eagerness to please.   It’s a bit puzzling, though, that she sets her sights on a man old enough to be her father (Hunter is eighteen years younger than Al Pacino and looks it) and incredible that she gives him another chance.

    There are plenty of other things that make no sense at all.   In view of his bad relationship with Jacob, how is that Manglehorn senior seems to see his granddaughter so regularly?   If he does see her regularly, doesn’t that make his life more worth living?  (There’s no suggestion that it does.)   When Jacob is driving in his car, recounting on his mobile phone a painful childhood memory of his father’s behaviour, who is he speaking to?   (Green and Logan seem not to care – they just need to get this information across to the audience.)  A rapprochement between A J and Jacob sees them both, at the end of the film, enjoying an outing with Kylie to a kids’ playground:  what’s happened to erase tensions past between father and son?  If all the previous movies Al Pacino has appeared in somehow disappeared and only Manglehorn survived, you would treasure it as a record of Pacino.  In any other circumstances, it’s a worthless film.   It’s annoyed me all over again as I’ve wasted time writing about it.

    13 August 2015

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