Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • The Turning Point

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Herbert Ross (1977)

    Plenty of Hollywood (melo)dramas pivot on the idea of a single, crucial event in the past that determined the future direction of a character’s life.  This film, from a screenplay by Arthur Laurents, is unusually explicit by announcing the mechanism in its title – surprisingly explicit when the mechanism is such a cliché.   Also unusual is that, as far as I could tell from the credits and can see from the Wikipedia and IMDb entries for The Turning Point, there’s no acknowledgement of the film’s debt to the John van Druten stage play and subsequent movie Old Acquaintance (1943).  In the latter, Kit Marlowe (Bette Davis) is a writer whose professional success stirs up the resentment of Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins), Kit’s best friend since girlhood;  some years later, the closeness between the childless Kit and Millie’s daughter becomes another bone of contention.  The daughter’s name is Deirdre; Kit’s pet name for her is ‘DeDe’.  There are loud echoes of both these things in The Turning Point and calling the grudge-bearing character Deedee is a heavy hint that she’s a scion of the Old Acquaintance clan.  Pauline Kael found the resemblance so strong that her review of  Herbert Ross’s film was called ‘Shouldn’t Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?’

    The literary context of the van Druten material is replaced here by the world of classical ballet.  Twenty years ago, Deedee (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) were competing for the lead in a new ballet of Anna Karenina; then came the turning point.  As DeeDee ruefully puts it to Emma, ‘I got pregnant and you got nineteen curtain calls’.  Deedee gave up a career in dance to marry Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and raise a family in Oklahoma City.  They now have three teenage children and run a local dance school.  Emma has been a première danseuse ever since she played Anna Karenina, although her long run at the top is approaching its end.   The film starts with the American Ballet Company (based on American Ballet Theatre), of which Emma’s a leading light, giving a performance in Oklahoma City.   Deedee’s elder daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne) is an aspiring dancer.  Emma, who’s her godmother, suggests that she join the company at their base in New York.  Deedee, Emilia and her younger brother Ethan, who’s also into ballet, travel there.  Emilia enjoys a meteoric rise to classical dance stardom, increasing the tensions between her mother and godmother to the point of a physical fight one night in a deserted Lincoln Center.   The two women’s slapping and hair-pulling, needless to say, are not only climactic but cathartic.  (The script’s construction is sometimes cavalier in its crudeness:  the tensions between Emma and Deedee, after being pointed up early on, are left in store until they’re needed for the big finish.)

    I saw The Turning Point around the time of its original release and remembered it as being more trashily enjoyable than I found it now.  Herbert Ross, whose career as a choreographer began with ABT before he moved to Broadway and Hollywood, directed; his wife, Nora Kaye, a famous ballerina, co-produced with Ross (and Laurents).  The film-makers’ love of ballet is reflected principally in two ways, somewhat conflicting but both tiresome.  First, the artistic milieu of the movie isn’t just treated reverently; the Rosses and Laurents seem to assume that it confers depth.  Second, the film attempts to present ballet as wholesomely American – more specifically, as a suitable occupation for male heterosexuals.  When Emilia goes to New York, she soon has an affair with Yuri, the company’s brilliant leading man.   Yuri is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, in his screen acting debut; nearly everything Baryshnikov does is strong yet his presence illustrates the fundamental weaknesses of the movie.  For one thing, his masculinity – on stage and off – is enough in itself to dispose instantly of any idea that men who do ballet must be cissies – but, in order to ram the point home, the script makes Yuri an amiable, incorrigible tomcat.  All this renders the character of Deedee’s son Ethan (Phillip Sanders), who does baseball as well as ballet and talks and behaves like a jock, as otiose as it’s embarrassing.  In the second half of The Turning Point, Herbert Ross puts together excerpts featuring actual ABT artists, most notably Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, and the dancer-characters in the movie.   Ross rightly recognises Baryshnikov’s solo from Le Corsaire as a highlight:  the problem is that it’s so good it not only eclipses the preceding dances but just about obliterates the brittle story that Ross is telling.

    Baryshnikov acts easily, unlike Leslie Browne, who plays the doe-eyed Emilia.   Browne joined ABT in 1976 and became a principal ten years later.  As a dancer here, she’s pleasing but unexciting, although her graceful impersonality is an effective counterpoint to Baryshnikov’s dynamic flamboyance when she partners him in the pas de deux from Don Quixote (the John Curry music, as I think of it).  As a screen actress, though, Browne is inexpressive and awkward.  Emilia’s fortunes in love and dance occupy too much screen time anyway; with Browne in the role, these parts of the movie become merely boring.  There is plenty more bad acting in The Turning Point and not just from famous dancers like Antoinette Sibley.  Some of the proper actors – Martha Scott as the company manager, Daniel Levans as a ‘comically’ egocentric choreographer – aren’t that hot either.  As Emma, Anne Bancroft certainly looks the part – she’s spectacularly, ascetically skinny.   Her playing of the role has a prideful quality, though:  that connects with Emma’s attention-seeking quality – charisma on tap – but Bancroft’s performance lacks shadings and surprises.   The character of the anti-arty-farty middle daughter in Deedee’s family is as obviously drawn as that of the brother although the girl is rather better played, by Lisa Lucas.  As a grande dame of the ballet world, the elderly Alexandra Danilova has a vivid, rather appealing deliberateness.

    The best acting, even if that’s damning with faint praise, comes from Shirley MacLaine and Tom Skerritt.  Watching Deedee and Wayne together, you see how a marriage and a largely happy family life has continued over the years but you see too a persistent tension, born of Deedee’s guilty regret.   It’s not that her disappointment at giving up a dance career is rampant – more that she can’t prevent Wayne from knowing the ending of that career has never stopped mattering to her.  Tom Skerritt may be advantaged by the part of Wayne being underwritten but he gives a lovely, sensitive performance.  Shirley MacLaine doesn’t have that advantage, and her clothes and hairdo underline Deedee’s provincial deprivations too heavily, but she’s tenaciously truthful:  once Emma and Deedee have had their set-to, we’re supposed to believe they’ve got all the bad feelings out of their system; what’s believable are the slight suggestions in MacLaine that Deedee hasn’t.   There’s a particularly good scene between MacLaine and Skerritt when Deedee admits to Wayne what Emma’s accused her of – wanting to have Wayne’s child and to marry him to prove to herself that he wasn’t gay.   Wayne says quietly that he always knew that’s what she wanted, and that he needed to prove it to himself too.   This is one of the rare moments in The Turning Point when issues around the sexuality of male dancers are presented subtly.  I didn’t take what Wayne said here to mean that he’d been worried about having homosexual feelings – rather that the prevailing assumptions of the time inevitably caused him to wonder.   There’s one other, somewhat similar moment that registers convincingly – when Emilia comes home from a night with Yuri and tells her mother not to worry because she’s on the pill.  Shirley MacLaine’s face expresses Deedee’s hurt frustration that she didn’t have that option twenty years back.

    27 June 2012

     

  • Greenberg

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noah Baumbach (2010)

    The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach’s most successful feature as a director to date, is about an adolescent boy who idolises his father before coming to realise that the father is a pompous, egocentric jerk.  The film, although it’s absorbing and often funny, made me uncomfortable because the father was so obviously a jerk and I didn’t like being made to feel superior not only to him but to the son who took so long to see the man for what he was.  The movie would have been better if the father had been able to take in the viewer as well as his son.  The eponymous protagonist of Baumbach’s new movie Greenberg is also childishly selfish and a pain to be with but this time the audience isn’t allowed the same distance that Baumbach allowed us in The Squid and the Whale.  Roger Greenberg knows what he’s like as much as we do:  spending the best part of two hours in his company – he dominates the picture – is as gripping as it’s dispiriting.   And it’s dispiriting largely because the film can’t go anywhere hopeful while staying true to its vision of the corrosive effects of self-centredness.  Yet I liked Greenberg a lot:  I could empathise with Roger and I admired Baumbach, who co-wrote the screenplay with (his wife) Jennifer Jason Leigh, for wanting to make a mainstream film about a thoroughly dislikeable man, and for his daring but astute casting and skilful direction of a challenging collection of actors.

    The fortyish Roger, who nearly became a successful rock singer but has been earning his living as a carpenter, is a boy who’s never grown up and can’t work out where his adult life has disappeared to.   Recovering from a nervous breakdown, he returns from New York to house sit for his younger brother Philip in Los Angeles while Philip, his wife and their two younger children are abroad on extended vacation (the fact that Vietnam is now a well-established holiday destination for middle-class Americans helps to get across the disorienting passage of time).  During his stay Roger is expected to make himself useful, putting together various wooden constructions for the family, including a dog house for their Alsatian, Moller.  Roger meets up again with people from his LA youth, notably his college friend Ivan (another member of the rock band that never quite was) and ex-girlfriend Beth.   Given that Roger is notoriously unreliable, the house-sitting set-up might not sound convincing but it’s clear enough from the start that Philip expects his assistant Florence – a secretary-cum-shopper-cum-nanny-cum-dogwalker – to be the one taking care of things if need be.   It’s the relationship between Roger and Florence that becomes one of the two emotional foci of Greenberg; the other is his relationship with Moller.

    An endangered animal (usually a dog) is a recurring minor theme in the work of Baumbach and Wes Anderson[1]; in Greenberg, it’s become a central part of the story.  Moller falls ill while he’s in Roger’s care:  after visits to more than one vet, the dog is diagnosed with, and given medication for, an auto-immune disorder.  His process of recovery is a rare instance of Baumbach being able to look on the bright side without compromising his integrity and Roger’s feelings for Moller are, relatively, heartwarming – although Baumbach doesn’t push this too far.  In fact, Roger didn’t get protective enough of Moller for my liking:  when his niece (I assume Philip’s eldest daughter) returns home for a day or two before setting off with a friend for Australia, she throws a big, noisy party; Roger doesn’t keep an eye on the dog until bawling out a guest for letting Moller drink beer.  (And I was shocked when Roger briefly thinks about joining the Australian expedition and was prepared to leave the dog’s care to neighbours who regularly use Philip’s swimming pool but whom Roger has taken care not to speak to until this point.)   Unless I missed it, the dog house never got built.  Even so, Moller gets a better deal from Roger than Florence does.

    The first scenes of Greenberg concentrate on this young woman; we see snatches of her world outside work for Philip Greenberg’s family – she’s someone whose life isn’t turning out the way she hoped but still has possibilities.  (With her friends in a bar, Florence performs folky songs, although not particularly well.)  When she finds herself attracted to Roger Greenberg, those possibilities seem to wither:  she’s drawn to him but he’s a deadening weight and a drain on her emotional energies.   At one particularly distressing moment, Florence tells Roger a story about something that happened to her as a teenager.  It’s clearly a story she’s told – and enjoyed telling – before; he listens in rising but stony irritation and Florence’s awkward laughter and hopefulness evaporate.  It isn’t hard for Greta Gerwig, who plays Florence, to have everyone’s sympathy but she gives a fine performance:  she has a transparency which increases her vulnerability and a heaviness which seems to reinforce the sense of her being trapped by her feelings for Roger.

    This is the first time I’ve liked and rated Rhys Ifans:  as Ivan, he has a palpable lack of fulfilment – it seems to be growing round him like middle-age spread.  Ivan, whose marriage is in trouble but who loves his child, is well aware that Roger – who admired Ivan for (we’re told) a British sense of style when they were students together – wants him to rage against the way things have turned out rather than accept them.   (Ivan’s determination to do just that – Ifans’ characterisation suggests it’s through a mixture of stubbornness and lethargy – makes you both respect and despise him.)   Baumbach is not only good at showing how people accept or resist disappointment in different ways.  He’s also intelligent enough not to make Roger the only disagreeable person around.  He implies at one point that the Greenberg offensiveness may be genetic:  in an angry international phone call, Philip (Chris Messina) sounds as mean-spirited as his brother – the difference (if not the saving grace) is that Philip isn’t maladjusted.

    Perhaps being fathers is what redeems Ivan and Philip but, if young children are transforming, Baumbach doesn’t seem to be enamoured of a different generation in their late teens or early twenties.   (Florence is that bit older – she seems nearer thirty.)   There’s a strong scene in a restaurant when Ivan and Florence (who are meeting for the first time) go out with Roger on his birthday.   After Roger’s incisively nasty commentary on the high spirits of diners at another table, Ivan quotes Shaw’s line about youth being wasted on the young (Roger easily tops this:  ‘I would go further – I would say life is wasted on people …’).  It can’t just be Roger’s (and my) misanthropic envy that makes the youthful guests at his niece’s going away party look hideously careless and shallow.  Roger’s self-preoccupation may not amount to depth yet he gets through to those of his contemporaries who have more depth (and to Florence).  One of the most striking instances of this comes in a for-old-times-sake meeting with Beth, in a teahouse.  The conversation, as conversation, goes nowhere yet we see that Roger is still affecting Beth – hurtfully – at a deeper emotional level.  (Jennifer Jason Leigh plays this small, key role very acutely.)   In a long message to Florence’s voicemail, Roger declares that ‘Hurt people hurt people’.  The excellence of this line, which Ben Stiller delivers perfectly, is that it both makes sense and is in character:  it’s credible but not completely sincere, self-critical but self-approving.

    The first sight of Stiller is of the back of his head; when he turns to face us, he’s very aware of the camera.  It’s not an encouraging start but, from this point onwards, Stiller hardly puts a foot wrong.  This isn’t an example of a usually lively actor playing a depressed person and, as a result, seeming merely to be suppressing his innate exuberance.  Ben Stiller retains his performer’s instincts and shaping under the blankness and holds our attention with a surprising lack of effort.  His boyishness is also right for the role.  Stiller may not be naturally well equipped to play substantial, serious roles but, even if that’s so (it remains to be seen), his superficiality is right and disturbing here:  Roger Greenberg doesn’t have depth and Stiller lets us see the moments when Greenberg knows it.   It’s because nothing that he says or registers seems deeply meant or fully felt that the character remains taut and tantalising.  Roger spends a fair amount of his time writing letters of complaint.  It’s a big moment for him when one gets published in The New York Times:  he’s mad at life of course – the letters are the tip of the Greenberg.  Because Baumbach, Jason Leigh and Stiller have created such a detailed and convincing misanthrope the moments of light relief feel almost like an evasion (although they’re certainly a relief too).    When Roger launches into self-defensive psychobabble or asks Ivan to tell him honestly what other people say about him and gets incandescent when Ivan obliges, the moments seem conceived as comic routines.    Yet they’re still believable and the clumsy bits in Greenberg are very rare.  (One occurs when Florence has had a D&C – she says Roger wasn’t the father of the aborted foetus – and he decides she’ll need food and places a burger under her nose on the folded sheet of her hospital bed.)

    Baumbach gets across Roger’s fear of life in powerfully effective ways, which may sound clichéd but don’t come across that way:  Roger trying desperately to dog-paddle (aptly enough) a length of Philip’s pool as a blaring plane passes overhead; or being startled out of his nostalgic, drug-induced haze at the niece’s party, when a small furry creature is discovered in the pool.  (The image remains more startling because the animal isn’t identified.)   The film’s ending is as well handled as it could possibly be:  Florence listens on her mobile to Roger’s message, telling her what she means to him, and he watches apprehensively.  This discreetly hopeful moment is a little reminiscent of the similarly well-judged final scene in Half Nelson, except that the hopefulness here is even more tenuous.  It would be grim if the voicemail made Florence feel all the more about Roger:  what she’s already felt is more than painful.  Noah Baumbach may have painted himself into a corner – if he tries to turn things upbeat it will seem phony, if he’s truthful he can stand accused of self-indulgence – but I’m glad that the cul-de-sac egotist Roger Greenberg has made it to the screen.

    16 June 2010

    [1]  See note on The Royal Tenenbaums.

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