Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Intolerance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    D W Griffith (1916)

    This must be one of the earliest films I’ve seen.  The experience of watching it jumbles up history, biblical history, cinema history and personal history in an extraordinary way.   D W Griffith is regarded as a quasi-religious figure, an Old Testament patriarch, in the annals of cinema; and the making of Intolerance, because of both the size of the undertaking and when the picture was made, seems comparable to a feat of construction in the ancient world:  the pyramids or – perhaps more apt, given one of the principal settings of the film – the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  Watching the New Testament-inspired part of Intolerance was, for me, a reminder that, in my some part of my mind, I think of Bible stories as somehow taking place in my own childhood.  (It was almost a shock to be reminded that they predate me.)   Griffith tells four tales, taking place over a timespan of more than two thousand years, to illustrate the persistence of human intolerance.   The four stories are known as the ‘Babylonian’, the ‘Judean’, the ‘French’ and the ‘Modern’.   The recurring image of a rocking cradle signals that, as new generations are born, intolerance is reborn in different forms.  Intolerance is ‘a drama of comparisons’ between the malign forces of intolerance who claim for themselves exclusive moral authority:  the treacherous priests who abet Cyrus the Great’s invasion of Babylon; the pharisees in Jesus’ time; Catherine de Medici and the Catholic establishment who victimise the Huguenots; social reformers in present day America.  There are many other human vices in evidence – it’s stretching a point to see ‘intolerance’ as ubiquitously dominant in the four stories.  But it is the starting point of all that happens in the contemporary American one, which is the crucial story because right wins out eventually.

    The logistics, the decorative detail and the movement of the Babylonian sequences – and especially of the battle scenes – are stunning.  Some of the incidental details here look startlingly modern (like the shots of a girl’s feet moving).  It comes as a surprise that Belshazzar is the relative hero of this story but it is Christ who is presented as intolerance’s greatest enemy – in his wanting the guests at the wedding in Cana to have a drink, in his compassion towards the woman taken in adultery.  (You watch this sequence and think of stoning under Sharia law and, with dismay, that there are men now who think themselves without sin and areready to cast the first stone.)   Griffith’s use of labels rather than names to denote the characters’ symbolic function in the American drama – the virtuous heroine is ‘The Dear One’, her husband is ‘The Boy’, a Mafioso is ‘the Musketeer of the Slums’ – makes the ‘Modern’ story peculiarly antique.  Griffith cross-cuts between the different stories and eras:  because he pioneered the technique and it became an essential form of film narrative, this reinforces Intolerance’s historic quality.  The cross-cutting results in some oddly juxtaposed climaxes but the rhythms of the editing in the build-up to The Boy’s last-minute rescue from the gallows make this episode very exciting (and the ‘hangman’s test’ sequence is the best description of the frightening techniques of capital punishment that I’ve seen on film).

    The huge cast includes Lillian Gish as ‘Eternal Motherhood’ (she rocks the cradle), Mae Marsh as The Dear One, and Robert Harron as The Boy.  The uncredited extras included Douglas Fairbanks.  Anita Loos and Tod Browning were among those who worked with Griffith on the screenplay and intertitles.  The discrepancy between Griffith’s film-making genius and his personal philosophy is no doubt a greater problem in The Birth of a Nation than here but it’s troubling nevertheless that Intolerance seems designed to demonstrate the pernicious influence of contemporary social reformers.  Some of the religious notions in the film are also primitive compared with the techniques used to express them.  At the very end, a cross of light spreads over the screen – conventional sentimental piety but, when I was jotting down notes afterwards, the predictive text on my iPad thought piety was going to be poetry and that’s apt.   Carl Davis’s score, composed for the release of a restored version of Intolerance in 1989, is highly resourceful. This BFI screening was introduced by Kevin Brownlow and very good he was too – highly informative, pleasantly informal.  This was a rare occasion when it was worth having the BFI microphone (as usual) not working:  Brownlow reminded us that he was a silent film historian – ‘You ain’t heard nothing yet …’

    23 April 2012

  • Locke

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Knight (2013)

    Ivan Locke leaves work – a building site on which he’s the construction manager – one evening.  Instead of driving home to his wife and two sons in Birmingham, he sets off down the motorway towards London.   The reason is to be present at the birth of his third child, although he hasn’t met the mother-to-be since they worked together in Croydon the previous year.  Bethan was lonely; Ivan felt sorry for her; they both had too much wine and went to bed together; it was a one-night stand, to say the most.  Once Ivan is in his car, that’s where the writer-director Steven Knight keeps his camera, except for occasional shots of the roads outside.  Ivan has almost continuous phone conversations during the journey but Locke is visually a one-man show and comes pretty close to telling its story in real time:  the film’s ninety minutes equate to two or so hours of the evening in question – in the course of which Ivan loses his job, his marriage seems to end, and Bethan’s baby is born.   Its unusual form makes Knight’s second feature (after last year’s Hummingbird) daring in two main ways.   First, the scenario suggests a radio play:  can the story be made visually interesting?  Second, Ivan Locke is played by Tom Hardy, an actor whose filmography to date is long on action roles involving physical violence:  how will he cope in a part that’s all about face, voice and sitting still?

    Locke meets both these challenges successfully.   I may be more ready than most to watch a single actor’s face for an hour and a half, on a drive in darkness on the outskirts of London.  Nevertheless, Steven Knight and his cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos make the lights on the road expressive: they offer a kind of impersonal warmth.  Inside Ivan Locke’s BMW, the panel that indicates who is calling him or who he’s trying to call presses various emotional buttons – guilt, apprehension, exasperation, antipathy (the number of Ivan’s boss Gavin comes up on the screen in the name of ‘Bastard’).  The visual texture becomes surprisingly strong – the tension on the soundtrack is increased by the repeated interruption of one call with a recorded voice reminding Ivan that he has another call waiting.  Tom Hardy, whom I’ve not rated previously, does more than hold the screen and your attention.  Once you’ve got used to his emphatic Welsh accent, you’re able to appreciate the more subtle details of his performance.  Hardy is especially good when his jittery (and, by this stage, no longer sober) deputy Donal eventually makes Ivan laugh, and when he has to struggle to keep his self-control in conversations with his sons.

    The situation is well worked out by Knight (whose best-known screenplays are Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises).  I wondered at first why Ivan had kept the secret of Bethan and her pregnancy to himself until the very night she’s giving birth; it turns out the baby is two months premature and, Ivan tells his wife Katrina, he had kept meaning and failing to tell her what had happened in Croydon.  You never doubt how good Ivan is at his job.  A major concrete pour, for the foundations of a big new building, is due for delivery the following morning.  Ivan knows he’ll get fired for not being there to supervise but he’s determined, even after Gareth confirms that he’s lost his job, to make the necessary arrangements.  (A combination of duty and pride impel Ivan to do this.)  It’s a good touch that he’s sufficiently distracted to find he has a crucial file with him on the passenger seat – he meant to leave it in the office drawer where he assures Donal it can be found.  Ivan nevertheless still manages to tell Donal everything he needs to know, as well as negotiate eleventh-hour clearance from the local council for a crucial road closure to allow the concrete to be delivered early next day.  Getting all this seen to is the most suspenseful part of Locke.

    You’re naturally anxious that the woebegone Bethan’s baby will be safely delivered (there’s a problem when the umbilical cord is wrapped round the baby’s neck) but the domestic aspect of Ivan’s dark night isn’t so absorbing.  The changing significance of the football match the family were expecting to watch together on television is too obviously shaped.  The game is absolutely important in itself in Ivan’s first conversations with his sons; by the end of the film, his younger boy Eddie is leaving a message on Ivan’s phone suggesting that, when he comes home, they watch the match again and pretend they don’t know the result (the right team won) – in other words, that they try to put the clock back to earlier in the evening when they were a happy family.

    The part of Ivan’s enraged wife, who can’t forgive her husband’s one-off unfaithfulness, is relatively weakly written too.   You can just about believe that Katrina makes an instant decision that she never wants to see Ivan again but some of the lines Knight gives her, as Katrina summarises what was wrong with their relationship, don’t ring true, so quickly after his shock revelation.   The phrasing of her tirade about his being married to his work – Ivan’s work boots walked concrete into the kitchen, it sometimes set, Katrina had to scrape it off the tiles – is too incisively assured.   Ivan’s line of work as a whole is obviously symbolic (the edifice of his conscientiously constructed life suddenly collapses) but the logistical details around the concrete pour are so good that you don’t mind.  His surname may be symbolic too and Knight’s use of it as the film’s title is surely significant.  This is the story of someone who may be a control freak, who’s kept his personal and professional life in order and who, now that it’s in free fall, still keeps his eyes on the road and, much of the time, his emotions in check.  The clear enunciation of the Welsh accent is right for a man who, in spite of his predicament, has got a to-do list for the evening and the following morning, and won’t be deflected.  (‘I have made a decision’, he tells Bastard Gareth repeatedly.)   The person who motivates Ivan’s determination to be present at the birth of Bethan’s child is neither seen nor heard – but Ivan appears to imagine him in the driving mirror and has angry, quasi-conversations with him:  the dead, feckless father who was never there for his son.  These interludes are somewhat theatrical in the context of the film but I felt Tom Hardy’s discipline was such that he deserved to be allowed to let off steam in this way.

    Hardy is given fine support by the voices of Olivia Colman (Bethan), Ben Daniels (Gareth) and, especially, Andrew Scott (Donal).  Some of the smaller vocal contributions are perfectly judged too – particularly those of Alice Lowe (from Sightseers) and Silas Carson as, respectively, a sister and an obstetrician at the maternity hospital.  Ivan’s family are the relatively weak links:  Ruth Wilson can’t do much with Katrina and, while Bill Milner is good as the older son Sean, Tom Holland’s Eddie sounds as if he’s reading lines.  (While I was watching the film, it struck me this might be a particular challenge for a child but Holland, who was good in The Impossible, is pretty experienced.)   I probably got more out of Locke than I expected because the protagonist’s plight came as a surprise:  I knew the film took place largely inside the car but didn’t realise that Tom Hardy was the only person seen at all – I’d also taken literally Robbie Collin’s commendation of the picture as ‘one of the most nail-biting thrillers of the year’.  I was pleased to discover it wasn’t a crime story but I didn’t find it as compelling as all that.  Locke’s distinctive form is also its limitation.  I was held by it but the most involving uncertainty of the film was not what would happen in the end but whether Steven Knight and Tom Hardy could keep the thing going.  They do; but Locke is a feat rather than a fully engaging drama.

    24 April 2014

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