Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Submarine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Ayoade (2010)

    Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 novel Submarine must be very popular.  I saw Richard Ayoade’s film adaptation at the start of its second week at the Richmond Odeon (late Friday afternoon) – one of the small screens but it was still unusual to see the place full and, although most of the audience were youngish, a few looked older than me.   It’s hard to believe that any of the cast, or Ayoade himself, is this kind of box-office draw:  there must have been people there who were already fans of the book.  That may also be why plenty of them seemed primed to laugh from the word go, whereas I took some time to get onto the film’s wavelength.  Set in Swansea, Submarine is a coming-of-age story and the early teenage protagonist Oliver Tate at first comes over as an intellectually advanced Adrian Mole, with Oliver’s desire for Jordana Bevan, a girl in his class at school, an echo of Adrian’s passion for Pandora.  I never felt the themes and structure of Submarine were greatly original but the eccentric detail is funny and fresh, the look of the film is always lively and sometimes surprising, and the tone is secure and likeable.  The behaviour of Oliver and his family, and the situations they find themselves in, are often laughable but the characters themselves are never merely ridiculous.  The Swansea coastline is strongly individual – so much so that, even when Oliver’s doing an Antoine Doinel, it’s the sea you notice as much as the reference to Les quatre cents coups.  The reference works well in any case:  it’s the kind of fantasy that the culturally ambitious Oliver would have – and it makes you see both the slight kinship and the gulf between him and Truffaut’s young alter ego.

    Richard Ayoade, who did the screenplay, handles the fantasist side of Oliver very well.  The first time I laughed was at his imagining his death and the whole of Wales in Diana-like mourning.  Ayoade keeps slipping in bits of fantasy so that the lines between what is and isn’t really happening to Oliver get blurred – and we get a sense of the proximity of the two worlds in Oliver’s mind.  Submarine is also good at getting across the vicious pecking order among adolescent school-kids, especially in the taunting of a fat girl.  There’s a sequence when Jordana and another boy have nicked the girl’s satchel; Oliver is joining in because he wants to ingratiate himself with Jordana.  They’re in a wood and there’s an expanse of standing water behind them.  The fat girl moves to try and catch her satchel that the others have thrown into the air and there’s a freeze frame, which tells us and Oliver that she’s going to land flat on her back in the muddy pool.  When she does, it’s upsetting – but also the moment at which the character of Oliver, because he can’t laugh this off like Jordana and the other boy, starts to mean more.   Ayoade pushes to a more broadly comic extreme something like going through drawers in your parents’ bedroom.  The teen feeling that you’ve a right to personal privacy and to be nosey comes over well.  Oliver’s determined to lose his virginity, with Jordana, before his fifteenth birthday; at the same time, he keeps his mother Jill under increasingly close surveillance, once an old flame of hers has arrived on the scene.  Submarine may be essentially generic; still, the fact that Oliver makes it with Jordana but this doesn’t put his life simply in order makes the film relatively distinctive within its genre.

    Oliver’s low-flying academic father Lloyd is a marine biologist.  He also tends to depression:  as he explains to his son at one point, Lloyd often feels himself ‘under water’.   The film’s title also picks up things that Oliver says in his voiceover narrative about ultrasound being used by submarines, and human beings not being among the animal species that can pick it up – and, as a result, staying self-enclosed.  As he explains in the film’s prologue, everyone thinks they’re the most important person in the world.  Like Lloyd, Oliver is self-aware in understanding the workings of his own mind, less perceptive of the effect he’s having on other people until it’s too late.  Richard Ayoade has a sharp but sympathetic feel for both the entertaining and the cowardly, hurtful aspects of egocentrism.  Oliver, who likes reading dictionaries, is very much his nerdy father’s son – even if Lloyd’s lack of emotional intelligence can still take him by surprise:  when he finds out Oliver’s got a serious girlfriend, Lloyd gives him a cassette (the antiqueness of that seems right) with ‘celebration’ tracks on one side and ‘despondency’ ones, for when the relationship dies the death, on the other.

    Ayoade might have encouraged Craig Roberts to play Oliver a bit straighter, in the early stages anyway.  Roberts (who was nearly nineteen when the film was shot, in late 2009) has a sufficiently unusual face to mean there’s no need for him to try to look weird.  When Oliver stares into space at his desk in class, Roberts’ expression is rather brilliant – he seems miles away but the gaze is rapt and penetrating too.  Compared with this, his wide-eyed scrutiny of what his mother’s up to is forced.  I grew to like Roberts, though – he develops real emotional shadings, while staying droll.  This is equally true of Yasmin Paige as Jordana.  It’s sometimes hard to make out what she’s saying but, when you can, Paige’s timing is good and she too becomes much more complex than the unreachable, inscrutable tease that Jordana is at the start of the film.  As Oliver’s mother, Sally Hawkins is excellent again:  her combination of underlying neurosis and willed calm, expressed in a sonorously posh voice, is very funny.   It’s hard to believe that Jill ever had a thing with the New Age charlatan who comes back into her life and threatens her marriage but it doesn’t matter as he’s played by Paddy Considine.  (I didn’t understand either why, when they go to the cinema, it’s to see, in this day and age, a Crocodile Dundee film.  Unlike Lloyd’s cassette, there seems no good reason for this.)  Considine is playing a performer and he puts on a great show in every sense as he demonstrates the ‘Graham T Purvis System’ (of ‘psychic excellence and physical excellence’).  I can’t think of another actor working in films today who can grandstand while revealing deep inadequacy as originally as Paddy Considine.

    For once, though, he doesn’t give the outstanding performance.  That prize goes to Noah Taylor, as Lloyd.  I don’t recall seeing Taylor since he played (memorably) the student-age David Helfgott in Shine (1996).  Now in his early forties, he’s worrying to look at – his face deathly pale and deeply furrowed – but he’s a perfect illustration of Lloyd’s profound nerdiness, which verges on Asperger’s.   Taylor’s line readings are phenomenally precise and wittily expressive. The film’s supple score is by Andrew Hewitt and when Oliver puts on Lloyd’s mood swing music – whichever side he plays – it brings up songs by Alex Turner, the Arctic Monkeys frontman, which are enjoyable too.  The presence of Paddy Considine and the Arctic Monkeys connection naturally bring to mind Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee and, like that film, Submarine was produced by Mark Herbert.  Ben Stiller was one of the executive producers and, according to IMDB, appears momentarily as a soap opera face on television (although I missed him).  With Gemma Chan as Graham T Purvis’s short-lived girlfriend Kim-Lin and a couple of actors familiar from Gavin and Stacey – Melanie Walters, as Jordana’s mother, and Steffan Rhodri, as Oliver’s form teacher.

    25 March 2011

  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Män som hatar kvinnor

    Niels Arden Oplev (2009)

    I’ve read somewhere that crime fiction has been enduringly popular because people can’t make sense of the real world but a good detective can solve mysteries and restore order.  I don’t know nearly enough about the genre to be able to say whether the recent television films based on Henning Mankell’s Wallander stories are typical of contemporary crime fiction – if they are, they seem to show a world that’s increasingly violent and unpredictable and murderers being tracked down not by a dispassionately brilliant sleuthing brain but by a combination of instinct, hard slog and accident.  What’s more, the process of finding out the truth always seems to involve Kurt Wallander and his colleagues in such personally gruelling experiences that their traumatic effect eclipses the solving of the crime.  Wallander not only operates in a godless universe but is himself lacking the godlike qualities of some of his literary and screen predecessors.   I expect this fall from grace applies to fictional detectives the world over although, as suggested in a BBC documentary on Henning Mankell, the frighteningly out of joint world that Wallander takes on may have a particular resonance in Sweden – a country which was a stranger to political assassinations until traumatised by the killings of Olof Palme and Anna Lindh.

    The death of the writer Stieg Larsson might be the starting point of a Wallander investigation.  Larson was a left-wing political activist and journalist, the editor of a Trotskyist journal who also worked to expose the activities of far right and racist organisations in Sweden.   He died suddenly in 2004 at the age of fifty and, because he’d received death threats from his political enemies, there were suspicions of foul play, although in fact Larsson died of natural causes.  He left behind the manuscripts of three completed but unpublished novels which became the phenomenally successfully ‘Millennium Trilogy’, of which The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first part.    The three novels have been adapted for cinema and filmed and are now being released serially.   (It’s striking they’ve been released in English-speaking countries months after their release not just in Scandinavia but in most of continental Europe).  The stories’ protagonists are Mikael Blomkvist, a big-name investigative journalist in his forties, and the twentysomething Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous ‘Girl’, a computer hacker who’s as resourceful as she’s sociopathic.   Niels Arden Oplev’s film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is impeccably, grimly modern.  Sally, who’s read the book, says that a number of its relatively warm and humane elements have been excised – and the Swedish title ‘Men Who Hate Women’ seems precisely appropriate compared with the more vaguely disquieting English one.  But a curious thing about this film is that has elements that make it seem a more old-fashioned and somewhat more comforting experience than Wallander on TV (Swedish or British versions).  The picture demonstrates, in an emotionally satisfying way, that the more evil runs rampant, the greater the relief you feel when justice is finally done.

    Although I probably don’t watch them carefully enough, I get the impression from the Wallander stories that the villain is sometimes a diabolus ex machina.  That may well be intentional – making the point that the territory in which murders take place is more uncontrollably extensive than a country house or the Orient Express – but it deprives the audience of the traditional pleasure of trying to identify the culprit from early on.  What’s more, the crimes may eventually be explained without Wallander and his team seeming to have done much to bring that about.  It’s quite refreshing in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, co-produced by Yellow Bird Films (who make the Swedish TV Wallander) with Danish and Norwegian companies, that the explanation for the series of murders that eventually comes to light is linked to the group of characters in the frame from the start (even if that’s unsurprising since they’re mostly leading lights in the Swedish National Socialist Party).  It’s nice too that Mikael and Lisbeth (who has the handy gift of a photographic memory) receive clues and work things out from them.  The physical violence in this picture is thwacking and insistent and the material lacks the psychological richness to allay the suspicion that the violence is needed to make the prevailing gruesomeness dynamic.   Even so, it’s also a welcome contrast to much crime fiction on the television screen – Morse and adaptations of P D James included – that hardly any of the main characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although they may suffer ordeal and injury, is killed off.  (I have an abiding problem with whodunits set in a superficially real world in which people are disposed of with the same breezy heartlessness as in Agatha Christie.  I prefer Christie, whose murder stories are more reassuringly a game and whose pawns in the game are less likely to be confused with real human beings.)

    When a book as widely read as this one is being made into a film, the adapters are at both an advantage (it’s a fair bet many people watching will have read the book and know what’s going on in spite of elisions) and a disadvantage (much of the audience is well placed to find fault with the adaptation).  As someone who hasn’t read the source material, I think Oplev and the screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg have done a good, workmanlike job with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.   Visually, the filmmaking isn’t particularly imaginative:  the Swedish landscape is stupendously, comfortlessly beautiful but there’s an awful lot of unsurprising (and lowering) greenish interiors.  In the early stages, Oplev gets information across simply by characters telling each other things – and accompanying these exchanges with visual aids like scribbled messages or photographs is hardly inventive.  Given the importance of Lisbeth’s IT skills, the shots of computer screens and fingers tapping on keyboards are disappointingly clichéd.  Yet the direction is tenaciously proficient – Oplev keeps the momentum going and the persistent use of old photographs and the attempts of Mikael and Lisbeth to work out the significance of the people in them become increasingly compelling.  There’s also a wonderful photograph of Harriet Vanger, whose unexplained disappearance as a sixteen-year-old four decades ago is the starting point for the investigation – and whose expression in the photo is Mona Lisa-ishly unreadable.  Mikael Blomqvist, who’s awaiting a three-month jail sentence after a corrupt industrialist has successfully sued him for libel, is hired by Harriet’s great uncle, Henrik Vanger, to try and solve the mystery of her vanishing.  (Henrik, the retired head of a family-owned group of companies, seems to be the only non-fascist among his siblings).

    Brutal misogyny and the need for this to be spectacularly revenged form a recurring pattern in the story.  It’s reflected in Lisbeth’s relationship with her legal guardian (which provides the most garish sequences in the picture); in the revelation of what took place between Harriet and her father; in the flashbacks to Lisbeth’s own childhood and her reunion with her mother late on in the story.   While these episodes seem melodramatic, the naturalistic acting – the lack of histrionics – serves to make The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo more alarming:  you’re deprived of the security of theatricality.  (The film is certainly scary compared with the consciously stylish Shutter Island.)   Michael Nyqvist gives a patient, well-judged performance as Mikael Blomkvist – his ability to seem both interesting and ordinary enables Nyqvist to hold our attention and to act as the audience’s proxy.  I particularly liked the way in which his Blomkvist, in the early stages of his investigation, can show his interlocutors an affable face while making clear to us what he’s thinking.  The sense that the journalist is on a disorienting sabbatical is very well summed up in his palpable recovery of energy towards the end of the film when, having got to the bottom of the Harriet Vanger mystery and served his time in prison, a further intervention by Lisbeth enables Blomqvist to return to proving the corruption of the industrialist Wennerstrom.  Noomi Rapace is physically compelling and very effective in the role of Lisbeth although I wasn’t sure how much depth there was to her acting.   (Her husband is Ola Rapace, so good in the Swedish TV Wallander:  this must be an unusual example of an actress taking her husband’s name as her professional one.)   There’s good support from Sven-Bertil Taube (Henrik Langer), Marika Lagercrantz, Peter Andersson, Ingvar Hirdwall, Bjorn Granath, Ewa Froling and, especially, Peter Haber.

    20 March 2010

     

     

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