Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Lawrence of Arabia

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lean (1962)

    I went to see it once before, at the York Odeon, around 1973.   All I can remember is dismay that what I thought was the end turned out to be the intermission.   It was a more entertaining evening 35 years on but I still think Lawrence is a masterpiece of logistics rather than a work of art – and that a main reason for its inordinate length (222 minutes plus overture, intermission and exit music on its original release) is that Field Marshal David Lean, having assembled his materiel in the desert, has to make the most of it:  moving all the troops and equipment around takes time.  Lean was perhaps at the peak of his powers when he made the picture – which means, given his strengths and weaknesses, that he was able to exercise control and create an enduring work through purely technical means.  It’s not only the physical qualities of the desert itself that are amazing (the film was mainly shot in Jordan, Morocco and Spain):  the orchestration of the men-and-camels action sequences is remarkable too.   (The movement and cutting of these looked all the more impressive after we’d seen the relatively sloppy Doctor Zhivago a few days later.)  And even if the imperatives for Lean’s desert campaign aren’t primarily artistic, the different and unaccountable tempo exerted by the place is powerfully expressive.  The director’s command of the narrative never feels quite as sure when he moves into the city for any length of time – especially in the last main sequence in Damascus.  In spite of the huge developments in film technology that have occurred in the half century since it was made, Lawrence is undiminished as a spectacle.  The scale and authority of the desert sequences are epic:  because their vastness is so awesome and stirring – and with the considerable assistance of Maurice Jarre’s music – they convince you emotionally that the deeds that will take place in this landscape will be commensurately heroic.

    In retrospect, the juxtaposition of the first two sequences in the picture is an early clue to the limitations of the picture – and the screenplay, by Robert Bolt and his (unoriginally uncredited) co-writer Michael Wilson).  The opening passage – in which T E Lawrence rides his motorbike down an English country lane, swerves to avoid a collision and crashes in the process – is superb.   The glinting, glancing sunlight through the dark luxuriance of overhanging trees, the goggled figure on the bike, the blend of safeness and threat in the images give this wordless sequence a distinctive and memorable texture.  The fatal accident with which it ends is followed by different kinds of thud in the immediately following scene, at Lawrence’s memorial service on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral:  members of the establishment spout clumsily aphoristic opinions of the man (what a rum sort he was, and so on).  This is the start of our nearly four-hour exposure to the crudeness of Bolt’s dialogue – at its crudest in what’s put in the mouths of the military top brass.  The congealed readings of the British film and theatre luminaries who deliver it delighted much of the audience in NFT1 – as if the actors’ playing was stiletto-sharp satire of Empire; their playing seemed to me to say as much about a moribund theatrical tradition as about the rottenness of imperialism.  This is unkind but I think the best that can be said for actors like Jack Hawkins (General Allenby), Anthony Quayle (a colonel), and Donald Wolfit (another general) – as screen actors anyway – is that they were well cast here as pillars of an establishment in decay.

    Robert Bolt’s simplistic approach to historical drama is a much larger liability when it comes to the complex character of Lawrence himself.  T E Lawrence is not susceptible to the treatment Bolt gives Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons  – a dramatised hagiography, in which the hero not only shows himself the only honourable person on stage (which is what Fred Zinnemann’s screen version still seems to be taking place on) but also, as Pauline Kael said, gets all the best lines.   Bolt, Wilson and Lean don’t get across any clear idea of T E Lawrence’s personality or motivation – it seems a considerable abnegation of responsibility to depend on his being an ‘enigma’/rum sort’ (and to rely on this connecting in the audience’s mind – and below a conscious level – with the impenetrable mystery of the desert).

    What is heroic about Lawrence of Arabia is Peter O’Toole’s resourcefulness in the title role, his ability to suggest psychological complexity when the screenplay and direction give him no help whatsoever.    Of course it’s impossible in 2008 to watch Peter O’Toole and see his performance for what it was in 1962:  it’s a palimpsest now, with later O’Toole portraits complicating the view.  Some things, though, remain clear.  O’Toole’s looks make him right for the part in a variety of ways.  His height enables him to be physically outstanding; his leanness gives him an ascetic potential; in his face, the blue eyes and the bone structure combine romanticism and coldness.  Once these elements are animated through the ineffable wit of his voice and movement, the heroic is fused with the eccentric in a unique way.   (It’s fascinating to think that Albert Finney turned down the part.  Finney is a magnificent actor but he has, at least in physical terms, a down to earth quality which I think might have limited him as Lawrence on screen.)

    Lawrence of Arabia is famous for, among others, the debut in an English language picture of Omar Sharif and the long, bravura shot whereby he makes his entrance – starting as a dot in the screen and metamorphosing from a liquid shimmer into human (on camelback) form.  According to the Wikipedia entry on the film, the character of Sherif Ali whom Sharif played is a composite, based on a number of different Arab leaders (with each of whom Lawrence actually served).  It’s plain to see here (as well as easy to say with hindsight) that Sharif is an effulgent film star and a limited actor – but, as you’re also reminded in Doctor Zhivago, he’s a much better actor with his face than with his voice.  Sharif is very good at conveying a developing relationship with Lawrence, one that seems to grow into something combining loyal affection and respect with an awareness of necessary distance, and incomprehension.

    No one else in front of the camera is a drag in the same way as the British actors in the senior military ranks and in the small roles in the British officers’ club scenes.  The lower British orders, army or civilian, like Harry Fowler (although he’s the same as usual), Jack Hedley and Norman Rossington do relatively well in their small roles.  Other members of the international cast who perform with credit in more sizeable parts include Zia Mohyeddin (as Lawrence’s guide to Prince Faisal), I S Johar (a man Lawrence rescues from the desert), Claude Rains (a stereotype mandarin in something called the Arab Bureau) and Arthur Kennedy (an American war correspondent – although the part is crassly conceived and written).  Anthony Quinn is entertaining but his hard-to-disguise temperament seems so alien to that of the Arab tribal leader he’s playing that he verges on the ridiculous.  For all the thought and care that have evidently gone into his playing, the same goes for Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal (although it may be that you see and fault Guinness’s Faisal through the perspective of his later, ill-conceived interpretation of Dr Godbole in Lean’s A Passage to India).  But, while some of these supporting performances are good as far as they go, you realise that’s not very far, as soon as Jose Ferrer arrives on the scene (for only a few minutes).  He plays the Turkish Bey who has Lawrence stripped and beaten.  There’s a moment of eye contact between Ferrer and O’Toole which, given the impersonality of much of the acting in Lawrence, has an astonishing charge.  Whether the actual incident with the Bey also involved Lawrence being raped, as is apparently implied in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, seems to be a matter of historical controversy. Ferrer’s acting has the force and subtlety to leave you in no doubt as to what is in the Bey’s mind but unsure as to what he decides to make happen.

    Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Score, Cinematography (Freddie Young), Editing (Anne V Coates), Art Direction (John Box, John Stoll and Dario Simoni), Sound (John Cox).

    23 July 2008

  • The Wrestler

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darren Aronofsky (2008)

    The Wrestler is ostensibly about a sporting has-been’s against-the-odds comeback; the screenplay (by Robert Siegel) is formulaic.  It’s really about Mickey Rourke, who plays the wrestler, Randy ‘the Ram’ Robinson – and the convergence between Randy’s and Rourke’s biographies is a main factor in the film’s success.  Rourke was a very promising boxer before he turned to acting in the mid-1970s; disenchanted with movies, he temporarily resumed boxing 20 years later.  He (now) looks like a pugilist – and one who has been on the receiving end of his profession for a long time.  Rourke put on weight for this role and watching him is both similar to and different from watching De Niro in Raging Bull.   The similarity is feeling that it’s the actor, at least as much as the character, who’s the hero – because of what he’s prepared to put himself through.   The difference is that, although the extra pounds made De Niro ‘disappear’ into his role almost literally, you never felt that he and Jake La Motta were an indivisible entity.  Randy the Ram and Mickey Rourke – who wrecked his film career first time around, whose good looks have been damaged by his fighting history and/or substance abuse and/or plastic surgery – are of one substance.  (From my point of view, this difference is reinforced by the fact that – as I realised shortly before going to The Wrestler – I’d seen Rourke in only two other films:  Diner, from 1982, and (a small part in) The Pledge.  By the time of Raging Bull, De Niro had made an indelible impression in half a dozen, very different roles.)  With the attention, praise and awards that are coming his way, it might seem a remote possibility that Rourke’s work in The Wrestler will be underrated yet I think there is a risk of our not noticing the skill of his acting – because the film is about Rourke’s comeback as much as Randy’s, because Rourke is thought to ‘be’ the man he’s playing, and because the performance seems to be so genuinely felt and is so purely executed.   The script’s conception of the wrestler as a decent man trying to retain self-respect is unoriginal, to say the least; but there’s a dignity and a benignity about Randy (in the way he talks with other men at the gym and the local kids, as well as with the two women in his life) that seems to come from deep inside the actor – and which transforms the uninspired idea of the character.

    The story, set in New Jersey, is very basic and has no subplots.  Randy is twenty years past his peak, still scratching around for a living in the lower depths of the wrestling circuit, and not quite managing it.  He has to work part-time, loading boxes at a supermarket to supplement his increasingly meagre appearance fees.   He lives in a trailer.   (I liked the way that the local kids regarded him with a mixture of awe and contempt – in recognition of his prowess as a fighting man and the reduced circumstances he’s living in.)  There’s talk of a rematch to mark the twentieth anniversary of the highlight of Randy’s career, a sellout bout with ‘the Ayatollah’ (Ernest Miller) at Madison Square Garden but, after an especially brutal match (in which he and his opponent use – inter alia – staple guns, glass and barbed wire on each other), Randy has a heart attack in the locker room.  His wrestling days seem to be over.  He tries to develop his relationship with a lap dancer – stage name Cassidy, real name Pam – and with Stephanie, the teenage daughter from whom he’s estranged (I wasn’t clear what had happened to the girl’s mother).  He gets some extra hours working on the deli counter at the supermarket but he can’t stand it, or make headway with Cassidy.  After getting closer to Stephanie, he fails to turn up for a dinner they’ve arranged and is rejected by her again.   Randy goes back into training and his rematch with the Ayatollah is the climax of the film.   Randy’s heart gives out and the screen cuts to black.  The picture ends the moment Randy ends.

    Darren Aronofsky applies himself to the material in a way that is best described as full blooded.  He makes strenuous efforts to turn this into an existential fable:  Randy is a wrestler through and through – that’s all he can be and, deprived of his raison d’être, he can find nothing to live for.   (A Bruce Springsteen song about a ‘one trick pony’ plays over the closing credits.)   To make the point, Aronofsky uses the boxing picture convention of shooting the fighter from behind as he makes his way from the dressing room, through the crowd, towards the ring.   He does this at the start to show the grotty world in which Randy is now working (we see the wrestler’s trademark blond mane long before his face).  Aronofsky overdoes it in repeating the camerawork – and putting ironic crowd noises on the soundtrack – to follow Randy’s bathetic progress from out of the bowels of the supermarket to his deli counter station.  Randy’s deliberately cutting his hand in the meat slicer as he quits his job at the supermarket seems one gory moment too many;  yet Aronofsky’s strongarm tactics are mostly very effective.  However much you resent and recoil from the thudding violence of the wrestling matches, he gives the sequences in the ring an accumulating rhythm and manages to make the fleshly bulk on display seem both animate and inanimate, both repellent and hypnotic.  (If some of the bodies are golden it’s because they appear to be well advanced in the process of being cooked.)  And the theme of self-harm is so central to Aronofsky’s treatment that the staple guns, the glass and the barbed wire do make dismaying sense.

    Aronofsky may have felt the script was no more than a framework for the approach he wanted to take and the performance he felt he could get from Rourke.  But the screenplay is so mechanical that it weakens the film in important ways – especially in the story of Randy’s relationship with Stephanie.  You feel their relationship fails because the formula demands it (the series of scenes with Stephanie amount to something like the required elements in a gymnastics or skating programme) rather than because of the natures of the two people concerned, or even the nature of the world in which they live.  On an outing to an abandoned waterfront, Stephanie thaws and Randy starts saying how he really feels about her and himself.   The emotional changes are false and the dialogue is bad – and touchingly though Mickey Rourke plays the scene, this was one point where I didn’t believe him.  Evan Rachel Wood’s performance almost inevitably reflects the unconvincing, mechanical shifts in Stephanie’s feelings and behaviour.

    The relationship between Randy and Cassidy/Pam is much more successful.  Marisa Tomei (who is forty-four) looks in such great shape that she transcends the cliché of the aging stripper role; it’s when Cassidy comes off stage that she becomes someone older – because of her ambivalence about what she does and about Randy.   She’s drawn to him but she knows him through her work and she wants to keep her work separate from her day job as a single mother, doing the best she can for her son.   When she agrees to help Randy choose some clothes as a present for Stephanie and they meet for the first time away from the club where Cassidy works, he’s amazed by her appearance.   When he says that she looks so ‘clean’, Tomei beautifully expresses and represses Pam’s sense of shame about the work she does to pay her bills and uncertainty about a man from the club world getting into her life on the outside.   (The contrast between this woman’s two lives and Randy’s born-to-fight simplicity is perhaps the one potentially complex element in the script.)  The wrapping up of the character – she walks out on her job, travels to the rematch, but leaves when she can’t stand to watch what’s happening to Randy in the ring – is ludicrously predictable and perfunctory but it hardly matters;  by that point, Tomei, like Rourke, has created her own truth.

    In Britain anyway, wrestling has always been the nearly comedic cousin of boxing.  Since both leave me cold (wrestling especially so – because of its cachet as an unserious entertainment as much as a matter-of-life-and-death sport), I’m not sure whether the primal feelings that are often invoked to explain people’s fascination with boxing are supposed to be part of wrestling’s appeal too.  (My lack of the human equipment needed to enjoy fighting makes me a bad audience for The Wrestler:  when Randy gets work on the deli counter, I felt not his humiliation but relief that he’d got a relatively safe job in a shop, then pleasure that he seemed good at the job and had a great rapport with the customers – these encounters are really enjoyable.)   Yet this silly sport, with its cartoon participants and style of performance, and a crude script – it’s typical that Randy doesn’t have just a heart attack but bypass surgery, as if anything less might make it arguable that he should continue with fighting – deliver, thanks to Rourke, a genuinely powerful body-and-soul melodrama.   I’m struck by the fact that, for all the visceral immediacy of the piece, it seems stronger to me a week after viewing.

    11 January 2009

     

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