Daily Archives: Thursday, August 27, 2015

  • The Innocents (1961)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jack Clayton (1961)

    Deborah Kerr’s portrait of the governess Miss Giddens is much admired but I think it’s eventually the reason why The Innocents (adapted by William Archibald, Truman Capote and John Mortimer from the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw) isn’t a fully satisfying film, although it’s a very good one.  From the first scene – when she’s being interviewed for the job by the wealthy, uninterested uncle of two orphaned children who live on his country estate (called Bly) – Kerr suggests Miss Giddens’s suppressed neuroticism.  You can see that Kerr understands the character and it’s that understanding, rather than the character itself, that she conveys insistently as the film progresses.   There are some really good bits – especially the moments when Miss Giddens registers spinsterly embarrassment – but Deborah Kerr pre-interprets the governess’s predicament:  she always looks as if she’s read the next page of the script and the passionate quality of the performance is willed.  Miss Giddens is thrown off balance by her perceptions of supernatural activity in and around the house at Bly, and by the sexual miasma begotten by the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel that she sees.  Quint was the valet of the children’s uncle and Miss Jessel her predecessor as their governess.  Both died suddenly, and more or less mysteriously.  Miss Giddens gradually learns from the housekeeper Mrs Grose that Quint used and abused Miss Jessel, that she was in thrall to him, that the pair performed sexual acts in plain sight – of the children Miles and Flora, as well as the other servants in the household.  It’s the kinship – the nature of the kinship – between the ghosts and the children which increasingly obsesses Miss Giddens, and which drives her crazy (in both senses of that phrase).

    The estate surrounding the house is very beautiful but the teeming natural life of the place is overwhelming.  At the start of the film, the cinematographer Freddie Francis gives the gardens and the lake a paradisal quality yet the synergy of the plant life, the insects and the birds creates a sensory overload:  everything is intensely alive – nature seems both satiated and insatiable.   Flowers are in bloom, vegetation is poised between ripeness and rot.  A bee is seen emerging from the mouth of a stone cherub:  as it crawls down the statue, the fat, furry insect looks drugged and stupid.   The doves’ cooing is so rich it sounds indecent.  There’s nothing unrealistic about any single element but their accumulation produces a disorienting hyper-reality.  There are also plenty of familiar ghost story details – creaking doors and banging windows, a music box playing an eerie melody.  It’s the conjunction of these details with the sexualised atmosphere that makes The Innocents distinctive, and the fact the children are at ease with both aspects of the world that they inhabit – while these are beyond Miss Giddens – that makes it so remarkable.   It wouldn’t be fair to suggest that all the supernatural stuff is familiar (although those facets which are get slightly overused in the second, less strong half of the film).  There are some very imaginative elements too:  the appearance of Quint’s face at the window (he’s also seen as a distant figure at the top of the bell-tower in the grounds) – and especially its gradual disappearance, so that only the fiery lights of his eyes remain; the manifestation of Miss Jessel at the lake, photographed at a distance so that, like Miss Giddens, we have to peer to try to make the figure out (and can’t); an unaccountable tear that the ghost of the old governess leaves on a blackboard in the children’s schoolroom.

    In visual and aural terms, The Innocents still feels original whereas the actors’ speaking voices, with their clipped diction, seem to belong to a vanished era of cinema.   Yet hearing them half a century after the film was made gives the piece an odd authenticity:  because the voices belong to a bygone age it’s easier to be convinced that they belong to characters from an earlier bygone age (The Turn of the Screw was first published in 1898 and the story appears to be set around that time).   This gives the whole cast an authority even though you’re well aware that some aspects of this performing style are undistinguished.  For example, the opening scene between Michael Redgrave as the uncle and Deborah Kerr is rather stiff – yet it makes, in effect, a double-edged contribution:  the set rhythms of the exchange are familiar from British-made films of the time and (we think) give us our bearings – so that the texture of the world Jack Clayton then goes on to create is all the more surprising.  The same is essentially true of the conversations between Deborah Kerr and Megs Jenkins as the housekeeper:  the lines are read precisely but unsurprisingly, and Jenkins is (from other roles) a comfortable, reassuring presence.  She’s good at suggesting Mrs Grose’s quiet determination to maintain an amiable domestic front and, because this is Megs Jenkins, we somehow participate in her doomed attempt to pretend things are nice and normal.

    The two children, however, are a very different matter.  Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin may superficially look and sound like the upper middle-class youngsters we’d expect to see in an English period piece made in the early 1960s but there’s nothing standard about their acting.   Clayton achieves some great things in The Innocents but best of all are the performances he gets from these children.  Stephens and Franklin do seem innocent and vulnerable in their innocence; at the same time, they’re effortlessly in tune with a world that isn’t innocent.  When Flora’s pencil screeches down the tablet she’s working on, the little girl seems weirdly, contentedly sadistic; yet when Miss Giddens tries to force Flora to admit she sees Miss Jessel, Pamela Franklin’s screams are gruellingly real and upsetting (we then hear from Mrs Grose that the screams have been accompanied by obscenities the like of which the housekeeper’s never heard).  The sense that Miss Giddens has a suppressed passion for the children’s uncle is telegraphed but Franklin brings the idea to life again when she observes how pleased the governess seems to have received a letter from him (and Deborah Kerr’s flushed reaction is good).  Martin Stephens’ clear, simple reading of the poem with the opening verse:

    ‘What shall I sing to my lord from my window?

    What shall I sing for my lord will not stay?

    What shall I sing for my lord will not listen?

    Where shall I go when my lord is away?’

    – is both affecting and disturbing in its seeming reference to Miles’ allegiance to Quint.  Miles often treats Miss Giddens with a precocious, amused condescension (he might be a middle-aged male chauvinist calming down a woman who’s getting hysterical).  It’s partly because Stephens does this easily that makes the moment when Miles gives Miss Giddens a long kiss on the lips so strong.  Martin Stephens is really uncanny at convincing you that Miles is psychically much older than the governess.  (Franklin was making her debut here and went on to other good things.  Stephens, who made films before and after, gave up acting in the mid-1960s and, according to Wikipedia, became a successful architect.)

    The Innocents has a small cast – nine, including Eric Woodburn (who played Dr Snoddie in the BBC’s Dr Finlay’s Casebook in the 1960s), who’s uncredited as a coachman.  Isla Cameron appears momentarily as the maid Anna, although she also sings – beautifully – over the opening titles.  Michael Redgrave as the uncle has just the one scene.  We never see the face of Clytie Jessop as Miss Jessel; we see nothing but the (extraordinary) face of Peter Wyngarde as Quint but hear only occasional menacing breathing and laughter from him.   (Except for Anna’s appearance, we never see any of the other servants, although the conversations between Miss Giddens and Mrs Grose make clear that they’re around the place, and that the governess has met them.  This enriches the motif of presences seen by some but not others.)  Some astonishing words and music were written for The Innocents, including the song ‘O Willow Waly’, by Georges Auric and Paul Dehn, which Isla Cameron sings at the start (over a black screen initially).  I assume that Miles’ poem was also written for the film although a quick Google search hasn’t confirmed this.   The brilliant art direction is by Wilfred Shingleton and the costumes by Motley.  Jack Clayton does a fine job of mining the ambiguity of the title.   At one point, Miss Giddens refers, with horrified sarcasm, to Miles and Flora as ‘the innocents!’ and we come to see that, in some respects, it’s the governess herself who’s an innocent compared with them.   But we come to see also that she’s not only on the receiving end of the horror, she administers it too.

    31 December 2010

  • Flight

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Zemeckis (2012)

    In Flight Denzel Washington is (a) Captain ‘Whip’ Whitaker, an airline pilot with a serious drink problem which he intermittently tries to beat, and (b) a star actor fighting against his dramatic destiny:  having to admit ‘I am an alcoholic’ in the most eyecatching circumstances possible.  Whip keeps failing to stay on the wagon and Washington has to bow to the inevitable but his fearless performance is his best yet.  Washington dares not to be likeable – when a smart attorney calls Whip an arrogant scumbag it’s hard to disagree. (The attorney himself is no slouch when it comes to arrogance – in a different register:  Don Cheadle complements Washington very effectively.)   The film’s title can be interpreted literally and metaphorically:  the actual flight in question is from Orlando, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia and Whip is the pilot in charge.  After a heavy night of drink, drugs and sex, he wakes himself up with cocaine then steers the plane through severe turbulence shortly after take-off;  problem solved, he helps himself to orange juice and vodka while his co-pilot Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty) takes over the controls and Whip takes a much-needed nap.  He comes to as the plane, making its descent to Atlanta, goes into a steep dive.  Whip rolls the plane upside down to arrest the dive, realises the engines are failing and will cut out before the plane reaches the airport runway, and manages to roll it back upwards before making a forced landing in a field.  Thanks to his heroics, all but six of the 102 people on board survive; one of the fatalities, however, is the flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) with whom Whip spent the previous night.   Whip himself is hospitalised and a toxicology screening shows up the alcohol and narcotics in his system – enough for him to face criminal charges.  The major part of the movie concerns Whip’s reactions to the aftermath of the flight and his relationship with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a young woman whom he meets in hospital where she’s recovering from a heroin overdose.

    During the climactic public hearing into the plane accident – it’s presided over by a chief investigator perfectly played by Melissa Leo – I thought for an amazing few moments that Whip was going to lie himself into personal and professional safety and that Flight might land in Crimes and Misdemeanors territory.  But at the last moment he tells the truth and goes to jail.  I experienced his doing the right thing as a disappointment; and the final prison sequence, and Whip’s meeting there with the teenage son from whom he’s estranged, is a serious anti-climax – the film goes soft and redemptive.  John Gatins’s screenplay is structurally mechanical – for example, in the cross-cutting between what’s happening to Whip and what’s happening to Nicole immediately before they find themselves in the same hospital.  It’s implausible that the press take so long to track Whip down (to his late father’s farm, where he chucks out a large stash of booze) and are then content to respect his privacy.   Whip’s succumbing to alcohol temptation just before the hearing, although scarily staged, is thoroughly predictable and the reappearance at this point  of his drug dealer Harling (John Goodman), who got him out of hospital earlier on, scarcely less so.  (Harling brings Whip back to his senses with cocaine – in other words, he’s sharpened up for the hearing just the way he was before he took off from Orlando.)  Nicole’s recovery from drug addiction is achieved with remarkable rapidity.  But Gatins writes good, tangy dialogue – and for believably different voices.

    Flight is highly entertaining – the first half hour especially will resonate for anyone who, entering the workplace, has to transform himself instantly into a public face, as well as for anyone who’s a nervous air passenger.  Robert Zemeckis makes the in-the-air sequences highly involving and alarming and he has a strong cast:  as well as Don Cheadle and Melissa Leo, Bruce Greenwood is excellent as an old buddy of Whip’s and representative of the airline pilots’ union, even if the character becomes obvious in the closing stages.  Kelly Reilly is charming as Nicole.  There’s a striking scene in a hospital stairwell where Whip and Nicole and a terminally ill cancer patient smoke and talk together although James Badge Dale is a bit too eager to make the most of his brief appearance as the dying man.  But Flight is really all about Denzel Washington, whose characterisation is completely convincing.   Whip is grieving and feels guilty about various things but whenever he’s challenged his instinct is to be aggressive – it sharpens his focus.   His behaviour when he pays a call on his former wife and his son – embracing and, at the same time, almost fighting with the boy – is disturbing.   Whip seems determined to make things worse and, in doing so, feel justified in going back to the bottle.  And he knows best – you see it in his self-confidence as a pilot and in his defiantly folded arms at an AA meeting.  Washington’s acting is majestically expressive, whether Whip is lying in his hospital bed or being grilled at the hearing. He’s equally good in extremis and in relatively quiet moments, like disposing of the contents of his numerous bottles and cans.

    11 February 2013

Posts navigation