Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Lincoln

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2012)

    Commendable but punitive, Lincoln (at 150 minutes) is shorter than Django Unchained but seems twice as long.  As Anthony Lane suggested, it’s worth seeing the two films in close proximity but perhaps Spielberg first and Tarantino second is better.   (I saw Django the day before Lincoln.)  A phenomenal amount of skill and talent has gone into the making of this film.  Janusz Kaminski’s precision lighting is even more remarkable than in War Horse: there are shots in which individual blades of grass are highlighted; there’s a view of Daniel Day-Lewis’s dark face from the left-hand side, in deep shadow but with the lashes of his right eye gilded by candlelight.   Apart from the odd dodgy wig (not counting Tommy Lee Jones’s, which turns out to be intentional), the whole look of Lincoln is impressive – from Day-Lewis’s brilliant make-up to what appears to be the natural light (or lack of it) in rooms where, in January 1865, Abraham Lincoln and his supporters are urgently attempting to obtain passage through the House of Representatives of a bill to abolish slavery (the Thirteenth Amendment) before the imminent end of the Civil War.  One criticism of the externals in the film:  except for Tommy Lee Jones’s Thaddeus Stevens, with his unkempt, sweaty look, and Daniel Day-Lewis’s less than crisp shirt collar, everyone is a bit too clean and well groomed.  Yet Lincoln, for all its technical sophistication, is hagiographic in a rather primitive way.   Tony Kushner’s screenplay is adapted from a 2005 biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln) but Lincoln kept reminding me of Pauline Kael’s review of A Man For All Seasons:

    ‘[Thomas] More is simply right and he’s smart and good and just about omniscient … More is the only man of honor in the movie, and he’s got all the good lines. … [Robert] Bolt’s More is the kind of hero we used to read about in the biographies of great men written for twelve-year-olds: the one against the many. Perhaps people think A Man for All Seasons is so great because unlike the usual movie which is aimed at 12-year-olds, it’s aimed at 12-year-old intellectuals and idealists.’

    Abraham Lincoln isn’t Spielberg’s ‘only man of honor’ but he does have most of the good lines and fumes of moral education hang heavy in the smoky rooms and debating chambers of the fiIm.  I was conscious of being more irritated by this because there’s no arguing with the greatness of what Lincoln achieved, or with the fact that it should be honoured, but the movie needn’t have taken the form of a history lesson with shades of religious instruction.  By the closing stages, after Lincoln’s assassination and in a flashback to his second inaugural address, the lecture theatre has just about metamorphosed into a pulpit.  Lincoln is shown as having a taste for ribald anecdote yet Daniel Day-Lewis’s delivery of these pearls of humour, because it underlines the President’s shrewd humanity, makes him all the more irreproachable and annoying.  You sympathise when one of the other characters is exasperated enough to say ‘Not another story!’ as Lincoln embarks on his latest parable.  In response to this exclamation, Lincoln, of course, grins understandingly.

    I think my mixed feelings about Day-Lewis informed my reaction to the film as a whole.  His achievement here is as undeniable as Abraham Lincoln’s historical importance:  a great man is being played by a great actor.  (Day-Lewis is nailed on for the Oscar, even though he’s already won twice and will be the first male ever to win three times for a leading role.)  He acts with supreme confidence:  his voice is often quiet and surprisingly light but always commands attention.  His shadowed eyes take Lincoln deep into himself – and seem to take Day-Lewis deep into Lincoln.  He’s an astonishing image.  As Michael Wood said in the LRB, Day-Lewis sometimes suggests a CGI Lincoln, especially in a sequence near the end of the film when he moves on horseback through the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia – yet his mythic appearance is substantiated by human detail.  The performance is a marvel – the saintly treatment of Lincoln could well have turned the film into a dud if Day-Lewis had continued to say no to Spielberg and he had cast Liam Neeson instead.   (One of Day-Lewis’s many gifts is his ability to convey speed of thought, essential here and something which Liam Neeson struggles to do.)

    Daniel Day-Lewis’s vanity as an actor also comes through, however – that is to say, the quality which means that he makes relatively few movies (this is only his tenth since My Left Foot, nearly a quarter of a century ago) and each one has to be a very special event.  The Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill), at the moment of Lincoln’s death, pronounces that, ‘Now he belongs to the ages’:  Daniel Day-Lewis tends to give the impression that he thinks the same of himself as an actor.  He’s probably right too but I found this getting increasingly in the way as Lincoln marched onwards.  You’re more and more aware of that compelling quietness of speech becoming an actor’s technique – even though it’s believable as a politician’s technique too.  (The scene in which Lincoln eventually raises his voice and yells at his aides doesn’t have quite as much impact as you’d expect.)  When Day-Lewis first appears on screen and talks simply and conversationally to two black soldiers, his bringing Lincoln to life seems miraculous and brought tears to my eyes.  Eventually, I found him unmoving.

    Spielberg, for a director better known for thrilling action than for talk, shows considerable self-discipline during the many political conversations.  His restlessness is expressed in moments when he takes characters outdoors – as if to stretch his own film-making legs as well as theirs – and these scenes seem perfunctory when it’s minor characters who are taking the air.  But one of the outside sequences is strong.  The description of the tensions between Lincoln and his elder son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is pretty basic but, when a curious Robert follows a stretcher and the camera follows him, to a great pit into which the dismembered limbs of Civil War soldiers are being thrown, it’s one of the few times that the movement of the film is unexpected and throws you off balance.  This is followed by a short, sharp argument between father and son, with Lincoln slapping Robert.  Although Kushner’s screenplay concentrates on the negotiations over the Thirteenth Amendment bill, I welcomed the bits revealing Lincoln’s family life.  Sally Field, as Mary Lincoln, still seems a conventional actress, after all these years, but the ill-matched pairing of President and First Lady pays dividends.  Early on, Lincoln, although affectionate, seems condescendingly tolerant of the little woman; when Mary Lincoln begins to lose control, she causes her husband to do the same and the result is exciting.   These outbursts are a relief, not because they’re anything special as drama but because Lincoln’s shortcomings as a husband and father, his capacity to infuriate his wife and his elder son, are a break from his relentless wisdom and control as a politician.  (His relationship with his younger son (Gulliver McGrath) is simply idealised.)   Apart from the two soldiers at the beginning, however, the few black characters in the story are a phony, condescending miscalculation, especially Mrs Lincoln’s confidante, the former slave Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben).

    As Stevens, an ardent abolitionist Republican, Tommy Lee Jones’s vocal wit and flamboyance are manna from heaven.  Stevens may be a good man but he has a flair for cruel invective and Jones takes full advantage of the lines Tony Kushner supplies him with, not only in the House of Representatives but also in a conversation with a stuttering, timorous Democrat (well played by Boris McGiver) who is ready to cross the floor of the House (if that’s what happens in America).  Kushner does well, given how much of the script consists of imparting information, in writing different voices; and Spielberg orchestrates the overlapping dialogue skilfully.   The acting generally is admirable – especially given the risk that’s been taken in giving good actors, in most cases, rather little to do.  (The cast includes, among many others, David Strathairn, Hal Holbrook, Michael Stuhlbarg, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake-Nelson, Jackie Earle Haley and Jared Harris.)  John Williams’s score is an apt reflection of Spielberg’s ambivalence towards the material, respecting the need for self-discipline while seeming to want to break out into something more dynamic.  This becomes an increasing problem in Lincoln, which lacks the claustrophobic feel that a truly distinctive contribution to the political biography genre might have had:  you feel you’re watching, rather than a suppressed epic, Spielberg’s energy being diverted the only way it can be – and turning the film pious.  If he had held his nerve until the very end, the movie would have finished when Lincoln leaves for Ford’s Theatre but, though we don’t see the assassination, we get its aftermath in traditional style – followed by the inauguration speech – to put a seal on our morally improved state as we leave the Odeon.   The best audience reaction in the cinema occurred at the point at which one of the congressmen declares his vote against the bill to abolish slavery.  This is a man whom we’ve seen Lincoln trying to persuade to change his mind in a one-to-one conversation.   When the ‘nay’ was said, there was an exclamation of surprise from someone behind us – who clearly felt this shouldn’t have happened when Daniel Day-Lewis had put in some serious acting to talk the fellow round.

    28 January 2013

     

  • Bunny Lake is Missing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Otto Preminger (1965)

    Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), an American single mother recently arrived in England, takes her four-year-old daughter Bunny for her first day at a London nursery school.  When they get there, the school activities for the day have already begun.  There are no teachers in evidence but Ann can’t hang around:  a surprising piece of scheduling means that she’s also helping her journalist brother Stephen (Keir Dullea) to move flat today.  The school cook (Lucie Mannheim) agrees to keep an eye on Bunny until the mid-morning break.   When Ann returns in the afternoon to collect her, Bunny is nowhere to be seen.   That summary of the first few minutes of Bunny Lake is Missing omits to mention that we don’t see the child during Ann’s morning visit to the nursery school.  Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier), who leads the police investigation into Bunny’s disappearance, learns that Ann Lake, when she was a child, had a fantasy friend called Bunny.  Newhouse quickly begins to doubt if Ann’s vanished daughter exists or existed at all.  The mystery is solved less than twenty-fours after Ann first entered the nursery school so the Met inquiry can’t easily be accused of dragging its feet but Stephen Lake thinks otherwise.   He threatens to use his position as a journalist to create a scandal in the press over the police handling of the case:  ‘You don’t seem to be taking this seriously …!’ Stephen yells at Supt Newhouse.  This is an accusation that could also be levelled at Otto Preminger.

    The film’s screenplay, credited to John and Penelope Mortimer, is adapted from a 1957 novel (of the same name but with the action set in New York) by Merriam Modell, writing, as she usually did, as Evelyn Piper.  I don’t know how much the plotting of Bunny Lake is Missing – to describe this as ‘flawed’ would be kind – is down to the screenwriters and how much a legacy of the source material but Preminger’s approach is whimsical, verging on careless.  In an eclectic cast list, the standouts are The Zombies.  My favourite bit in the whole picture was a scene in a pub, where a television is broadcasting a news report (read by Tim Brinton, the real-life newscaster and future Tory MP) about Bunny’s disappearance.  The landlord promptly switches channels, to The Zombies performing on Ready Steady Go!  Perhaps Preminger means to suggest that London is already so swinging that pop is generally a priority there but, since he’s filled the pub with extras nearly all middle-aged or elderly, the effect is bizarre and comical.  (The Zombies had their only Top Twenty hit, in mid-1964, with ‘She’s Not There’.  As well as being an excellent single, this would seem the perfect theme song for the film so it’s a double pity it’s not what the group are performing on Ready Steady Go!)

    At this point in the pub scene, you can sympathise with Ann Lake’s paranoid feeling that all London is conspiring against her.  Ann is mostly, though, a serious weakness of the film.  This is partly because Carol Lynley isn’t a strong enough actress for the role – you rarely get a sense of the mother’s desperation about her child’s disappearance.  But Preminger could have done more to help Lynley raise doubts in the audience’s mind about Ann’s mental equilibrium.  If, for example, the staff at the nursery school had been directed to react ambiguously to Bunny’s vanishing, it would have been possible for the viewer to realise the teachers felt guilty about what they’d allowed to happen and so were touchy, but to understand too that Ann saw their reaction as something more sinister.    As it is, the teachers are so emphatically and improbably unsympathetic (even though one of them is Anna Massey) that Ann’s reaction to their insensitivity is entirely understandable and doesn’t at all suggest that she’s imagining things.

    As Supt Newhouse, Laurence Olivier is able, with little apparent effort, to achieve the ambiguity that the nursery school personnel lack.  He expertly blurs the difference between cool professionalism and cold scepticism so that you understand the effect the detective is having on Ann Lake.  His underplaying is really rather brilliant – if there are times when the whiff of bored contempt he exudes seems the actor’s rather than the character’s, you can hardly blame Olivier.  The script doesn’t seem to decide, and Preminger doesn’t appear to care, whether Newhouse, when he begins to think Bunny never existed, believes that Ann Lake is a sincerely deluded fantasist or a time-wasting nuisance.  You feel it should be the former but, if so, I missed any indication that Newhouse thought she or the police investigation therefore needed the help of a psychiatrist.  Ann buys sweets for Bunny after dropping her off at school; later, she remembers that she took one of the child’s toys for repair the previous day and has a receipt to prove it.  Both these things cause her to claim excitedly to her brother, ‘They’ll have to believe me now!’  This struck me as optimistic if the police thought Ann had crazily but conscientiously resurrected the imaginary friend of her childhood – but that’s a quibble compared with some of the other holes in the plotting and/or lead performances.

    In the event, a ship’s passenger list is crucial evidence of Bunny Lake’s reality but the police haven’t thought at an earlier stage to make a transatlantic phone call to find out more about Ann’s life in the US, which she left only a few days previously.  Although I didn’t know the denouement before seeing the film, Keir Dullea is so android-creepy from the outset that you know Stephen Lake is either a bright-red herring or seriously dodgy.   The nursery school personnel and the police initially assume that the Lakes are husband and wife; the viewer perceives, no less immediately, an incestuous glint in Dullea’s staring eyes.  It transpires that Stephen has abducted Bunny; Ann watches him bury the little girl’s possessions then remove the sedated child from the boot of his car before preparing her for burial too.  (It might have been simpler to kill Bunny first but never mind.)  When Ann confronts Stephen, he accuses her of loving Bunny more than she loves him – just as, in childhood, the fantasy Bunny made Stephen jealous until he put an end to the imaginary friendship.   Although Ann seems no more surprised than the audience is to discover that Stephen is completely bonkers, she has never expressed the slightest suspicion in their numerous private conversations that Bunny’s disappearance might have something to do with the mad possessiveness her brother has shown before.   Bunny (Suky Appleby), once she comes round and joins in the children’s games Stephen and Ann replay in the protracted climax to the story, is, in the circumstances, almost pathologically undemonstrative.  By the end of the film, you wonder if it’s the actors playing the Lakes who should have been billed as The Zombies.

    Those games – as an indicator that a key character is psychologically arrested in childhood – must have been a tired idea well over a half a century ago.  Preminger anticipates them in the sequence at the dolls’ hospital (the surgeon is Finlay Currie) in which Ann, trying to find Bunny’s toy, wanders round the dark basement among rows of naked dolls with, inevitably, a music box tune tinkling eerily on the soundtrack.   The ominous set dressing in the film is just that – set dressing.  Ann’s malignant landlord, Horacio Wilson (Noel Coward), owns a collection of African masks:  he puts one of the more alarming ones on his new tenant’s bed, as it were on Preminger’s behalf, to create an instant spooky effect.   Wilson is an aging actor and a randy abusive drunk.  The Mortimers have written some impressively nasty lines for Noel Coward, which he delivers ‘inimitably’ but with undeniable vicious bite.   There are red herrings in Bunny Lake:  Wilson is one such; Miss Ford –  the now retired teacher, ensconced in an attic of the nursery school where she’s writing a book about children’s fantasies – is another.   (I gather that in the original novel, however, the equivalent character is far from a red herring – she’s Bunny’s abductor.)   Martita Hunt is entertaining as Miss Ford and this is one of several decent supporting performances in the film.  Clive Revill, cast against eccentric type, is commendably uncharismatic as Newhouse’s sidekick, Sergeant Andrews.  In a cameo as a hospital sister, Megs Jenkins is, as usual, good.

    The BFI’s programme note included an extract from a piece by the French critic and film historian Jean-Pierre Coursodon, who describes Bunny Lake is Missing as Otto Preminger’s ‘last great film’.   Coursodon recognises that it may be subject to adverse criticism from ‘[plot]-conscious critics and sticklers for verisimilitude’ but insists that to ‘anyone the least bit sensitive to form … the triumphant flow of visual movement that keeps the action going for all of its 107 minutes is wonderful excitement’.  Bunny Lake, for all its faults, is moderately entertaining, and I’m not very – perhaps not ‘the least bit’ – sensitive to form.  But how anyone can watch a psychological mystery thriller and experience it as purely formally as Coursodon seems to have done is … well, a psychological mystery.

    30 July 2015

     

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