Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • 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

  • The Strange World of Gurney Slade (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Alan Tarrant (1960)

    Why is it that some actors are so much better on television than in the cinema?   The obvious explanation of the reverse phenomenon is the ‘size’ of a film star’s overpowering presence.  The reasons why someone who makes their name in concentrated psychological drama on TV and fails to translate to a big action movie aren’t hard to work out either.  But what if there’s not that much difference in the physical scale of the pieces of television and cinema in which an actor makes such a different impression?  In The Hour, currently on the BBC, Ben Whishaw is not only emotionally precise and expressive – he’s charismatic too.  Could he replicate this kind of power on a bigger screen?  He was feeble in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; although he gave a fine performance in Bright Star, his John Keats was for the most part an unusually quiet protagonist and Jane Campion succeeded in creating an unusual intimacy between the principals and the audience.  Jon Hamm, a very different physical type from Whishaw, looks a master actor in Mad Men:  in his cinema roles last year in The Town and Howl, he was vague and unremarkable.  As a character antithetical to Whishaw’s in The Hour, Dominic West is no less excellent; several years on from his huge success in The Wire on HBO, his big-screen filmography hasn’t been much embellished.

    Apart from his Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist, I’ve always found Anthony Newley a rebarbative performer – self-aware, egocentric, excluding – whether I’m watching him in films or just listening to his singing voice.  It hadn’t occurred to me that, on the small screen, Newley might have been a truly engaging actor.  The Strange World of Gurney Slade is proof that he was.  It’s because of that, as much as because this television series was so unusual for its time, that I found these two episodes of it shown at BFI so revelatory and enjoyable.

    Gurney Slade (the name of Newley’s character, taken from that of a town in Somerset) aired on ATV in the autumn of 1960.  Only six episodes were made:  according to Wikipedia, the first two (the ones screened at BFI) went out at 8.35pm and the last four were shunted into a graveyard slot of 11.35pm.  Newley was a big name at the time and was given free rein by ATV to develop this comedy vehicle.  It was written by the rapidly up-and-coming Sid Green and Dick Hills (who later wrote for Morecambe and Wise) and produced and directed by Alan Tarrant (who also did some late Hancock and Arthur Haynes’ The Worker in the first half of the sixties).   The Newley character often speaks to us in stream-of-consciousness interior monologue that has a wryly melancholy, philosophical flavour.  Early in the first episode, he walks out of his living room in exasperation with his family and neighbours and off the set, exchanging grumpy words with the producer – the alienation device rather anticipates the Armchair Theatre adaptation of N F Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle the following year.  Gurney Slade laments more than once being trapped in a television programme.  At the time, this may have been a comment about Newley’s own plight as a celebrity but it now comes across as a striking foreshadowing of The Truman Show, made nearly forty years later.

    There are surrealist elements – Gurney romances with a girl in a poster on a hoarding who comes to life; they take the vacuum cleaner she’s advertising on the swings in a park; other inanimate objects are as vivified as the people Gurney encounters (a newspaper transforms itself alarmingly and passes moral judgments on Gurney, a voice issues from the bowels of a dustbin).   The suburban (North London, by the look of the street signs) settings are so impeccably familiar that they intensify the surreal effects.  It’s not hard to see why The Strange World of Gurney Slade flopped on ATV in 1960 and has developed a cult following in its afterlife.

    In the very first scene, in the overpopulated sitting room of Gurney’s house, Newley seems to be doing too much, working to draw attention to himself – just as I’d have expected.  Once he’s out of the house and heading down the street in his buttoned-up light-coloured mac, his movement is comically inventive yet you still feel his priority is to remind you he’s talented.  Because of this, it took a little while for me to warm to him:  I suspected he was comfortable because he had the camera to himself.  But the longer I watched Newley, the more charming I found him.  He reads the bizarre lines naturalistically, and with great control, and makes them consistently funny.  And he does interact – especially in conversation with a (talking) mongrel dog but with human beings too, including us.  You feel you’re really on Anthony Newley/Gurney Slade’s wavelength.

    There’s a serious risk in this kind of set-up that the rest of the cast will try to make too much of their small parts but no one overdoes things and nearly everyone’s effective – notably Una Stubbs (as the poster girl), Dilys Laye, Keith Smith and Norman Pitt in the first episode, and Hugh Paddick, Edwin Richfield and Anneke Wills, who was at BFI for the screening, in the second.  The agreeable, eccentric music by Max Harris, conducted by Jack Parnell, seemed very familiar.  It turns out it’s been used in other well-known television programmes subsequently.  (I think I recognised it from Vision On.)

    11 August 2011

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