Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Broken

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rufus Norris (2012)

    An hour or so into Broken, Rufus Norris’s first feature, the young teenage heroine cries:  ‘It’ll go wrong … everything always go wrong … why do all the bad things happen – never anything good?’ (Or words to that effect.)  These are good questions to ask of the film, adapted by Mark O’Rowe from a novel by Daniel Clay.   Like Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, Broken won the BIFA for best film; like Tyrannosaur, its bleakness may disarm criticism in some quarters.  If you say the bleakness is excessive you can stand accused of being unable to take the truth.  Tyrannosaur and Broken aren’t exactly kindred spirits, though. The power of Considine’s film derives from the possibility that things could be other than grim, and the performances by Peter Mullan and, especially, Olivia Colman, which embrace that possibility.  And though their characters’ fate is predetermined, some of the dialogue that Considine wrote for his fine actors is humorous and textured.  What the two films do have in common is an appetite for showing how violently unhappy lives in England today can be.  The world they present is wholly dystopian – there’s not a sense that anyone on the margins of the story might be enjoying themselves a bit.  The Wikipedia plot synopsis for Broken describes the protagonist Skunk, her elder brother Jed and their solicitor father Archie as living ‘in a typical British suburb’.  (The household also includes an au pair, which naturally raises the question of quite how typical it is.)  Their neighbours on one side are Mr and Mrs Buckley, whose twentysomething son Rick has learning difficulties.  On the other, there’s the widowed Bob Oswald:  he has anger management problems and feral teenage daughters.  The exterior of these houses may be typical; it’s incredible that the mayhem going on inside them is too.  Jimmy McGovern’s BBC drama The Street was pushing it in this respect but the concentration of trauma in Broken is on a different level: there seem to be only three houses on the street and each one is an epicentre of agony.

    The plot, not worth going into, is engineered for maximum gruelling (and garish) effect.  Some of the questions that occurred to me during the ninety minutes give a flavour of the story.   When Bob Oswald beats up, first, Rick Buckley and, second, a teacher at Skunk’s school (and the au pair’s ex-boyfriend), why do the police start by arresting the person who’s been attacked, without bothering to find out Oswald’s reasons for carrying out the assault?   How is it that the pathologically overprotective Oswald allows a drugs party to take place in his house – the threshold of which, until this point in the story, no non-family member has crossed?   After Rick fatally stabs his mother and wounds his father one evening (before taking his own life), what does Mr Buckley do throughout the night – so that he doesn’t know that the diabetic Skunk, who’s also in the house, has been having a hyperglycaemic attack for many hours in the same room where Rick’s corpse is lying – and it’s left for Bob Oswald, whose own daughter has had a fatal miscarriage the previous evening (she was made pregnant by Jed) to rescue her?   (I’m not making this up.)

    There never seems to be enough light in the images, as if Rufus Norris had asked his DoP Rob Hardy to keep reminding the viewer what dark matter the film is composed of – as if daylight would detract from an uncompromising approach.  On the plus side, the music by Electric Wave Bureau, aka Damon Albarn (who collaborated with Rufus Norris on the 2011 stage work Doctor Dee), is lively, and its moods various – very refreshing in this context.  And some of the performances make what’s happening on screen, as well as on the soundtrack, worthwhile too.  Larry Lamb’s thirteen-year-old daughter Eloise Laurence has wit as well as truthfulness as Skunk.  Rory Kinnear plays Bob Oswald with skilful empathy – he makes you (nearly) believe in what impels Oswald’s behaviour so that the man’s my-girls-can-do-no-wrong mindset is genuinely alarming.  Robert Emms gives the troubled Rick a touching self-awareness – particularly in his reluctance to return home from the mental hospital he’s been in.   There’s nothing that Denis Lawson and Clare Burt (Eloise Laurence’s mother) can do, though, with the clichéd roles of Rick’s anxious, infantilising parents.  The cast also includes Tim Roth (as Archie), Cillian Murphy (the teacher), and Zana Marjanovic (the au pair).

    Broken is a reminder that a film straining to paint things black is – because of the straining – almost always more lowering than an organic dramatisation of unhappy lives.  Perhaps the very worst thing in the movie is the no less contrived hopeful ending.   It’s Bob Oswald, who seemed beyond redemption, who is Skunk’s eventual saviour.  After he’s found her unconscious, she hovers in hospital on the verge of death; indeed, she has a dream in which her family and neighbours – a fair number of whom have by now lost their lives – are gathered together in a church and appear to be inviting her to stay with them.   Skunk, however, follows the receding figure of her father back to the land of the living:  she wakes from her coma to appreciate him as never before.  I saw this film at the end of the week in which the case of Nicola Edgington had been in the news.  The schizophrenic Edgington made repeated 999 calls, insisting that she needed medical help, shortly before murdering another woman.  It’s difficult – crude and lurid as the Rick Buckley strand of the story in Broken is – to ignore the resonance with the Edgington controversy.  It’s nowhere near enough, however, to make the film ‘true’.

    The other odd but superficial resonance is with To Kill a Mockingbird:  there’s the vaguely tomboyish girl protagonist (Skunk/Scout), who has an older brother (Jed/Jem) and a wifeless father whose business is the law;   the characters of Bob Oswald and Rick Buckley seem almost a conflation of qualities in Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, who turns out to be more than a figure of fun and/or fear.  I can’t say if Mike O’Rowe’s screenplay is a faithful adaptation of Broken and I don’t know if Daniel Clay has already written other novels.  But if it is, and if he hasn’t, I hope, with no disrespect to Harper Lee, that Clay follows suit and never publishes another.

    10 March 2013

     

  • Nine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Marshall (2009)

    The sine qua non for this material is that there’s a vital connection between the movie unfolding before us and the character of its protagonist, the star film auteur Guido.  Unless Guido intrigues us as a cinema artist, unless we experience the film we’re watching as an expression of his art, the concept is seriously depleted.  Because Fellini is such a famous director and 8½ has become a classic, it’s nowadays hard for audiences coming to it for the first time (I didn’t see it until 2004) not to be conscious of who made it but I guess there will be plenty of people watching Nine who know little or nothing of its lineage[1] – I kept trying to imagine how they would see it, and what they would see in it, if they didn’t connect it with 8½.   Without the musical numbers (see below), Nine amounts to little more than an expensive-looking, florid marital melodrama with a period (mid-1960s) setting.  Its protagonist is a handsome, self-centred philanderer (he’s a world famous director but we gather that his recent pictures haven’t been a success and there’s no evidence of his film-making talent).  Anyone who knows and likes 8½ and can’t put it out of their mind is likely to find Nine an aberration.  In Fellini’s film the women in Guido Anselmi’s life – his wife, his mistress, his muse et al ­­– are central to his artistic and personal obsessions and dilemmas but they’re not the whole story:  Guido’s relationship with the Catholic church, for example, is important too.  The screenplay for Nine, by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella (to whose memory the film is dedicated), retains Guido’s meeting with a cardinal but the sequence is perfunctory.  Nine is about a filmmaker and about making, and not making, a film; yet Guido (his surname here is Contini) imagines each one of his women performing on a stage.  If there’s a good reason for this, beyond the fact that the immediate source is a stage musical and a convenient option, it’s not obvious.

    The terrible songs by Maury Yeston (most of them in the stage show apparently) sound like either Whose Line Is It Anyway? improvisations or plagiarism.  They exude the synthetic Italianism of the piece:  one is called ‘Be Italian’ (the tune is a pinch from ‘Reviewing the Situation’ from Oliver!), another ‘Cinema Italiano’.  Nearly every one of these songs is designed as a ‘showstopper’ – some from the word go, others working up to a knock-‘em-dead finale.  It’s no surprise that, except for ‘My Husband Makes Movies’, sung by Guido’s wife Luisa when she joins her husband’s party at a restaurant, they all end up sounding the same.  ‘My Husband Makes Movies’ is one of the few effective bits in the picture just because its tone and staging are so different from the rest.  Nino Rota’s score for 8½ is so memorable and the film contains sequences of such superb theatricality that the music in Nine sometimes seems not only bad but tautologous – for example, when the beach dance by Saraghina (Fergie) segues into a stage number.   One of the few smart decisions which Rob Marshall makes is to end the film with a graceful, quiet image – the little boy who has played the child Guido sits on the adult Guido’s knee as they’re hoisted into position to oversee the action on set.  At least Marshall doesn’t try to emulate the great, absurd curtain call dance in 8½.

    The Fellini film, for all its extravagance and phantasmagoria, makes sense because it’s the emanation of a distinct film-making sensibility; one of its chief pleasures is the partnership between Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, who plays Fellini’s alter ego Guido, and whose subtlety and humanity tone down the egocentric masochism of the material.    Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Guido here, might also have done great things in a film made by an artist; as it is, he’s in a Rob Marshall picture.    Day-Lewis has a precision of expression and gesture that make him continually absorbing to watch but Marshall’s direction is so impersonal and mechanical that there’s nothing for his star to play off.  Day-Lewis seems ready to deliver but you keep waiting for his performance to ignite and it never does.  And although he draws the camera, he doesn’t engage your sympathy – a big difference from Mastroianni, and one which can’t so easily be blamed on the director.  Marshall has, however, either allowed or encouraged Day-Lewis to speak in what Anthony Lane calls in his New Yorker review a ‘like a-theese’ Italian accent.  There’s some kind of logic to this:  with French, Italian and Spanish co-stars and an Australian playing a Scandinavian (or German?) star, it means that most of the main characters are talking in accented English.  But the logic isn’t rigorously observed – Judi Dench, playing a Frenchwoman, speaks without continental inflections.

    Dench plays Guido’s costume designer, Lilli La Fleur, and her phenomenal, bricks-out-of-straw gift for creating character is a godsend:  Lilli is both acerbically pragmatic and caring – you believe in her often exasperated loyalty to Guido, in her feelings divided between admiration and concern for him and sympathy for the raw deal his wife gets.  Kate Hudson, as an American fashion correspondent called Stephanie Necrophuros, is also vivid and convincing:  there’s a desperate edge to Stephanie’s eager ingratiation.  Hudson is poorly rewarded:  some of the shots of her thighs and backside are borderline prurient and she has to sing ‘Cinema Italiano’ (although Dench’s number ‘Folies Bergères’ is even worse).   Claudia Jenssen, Guido’s ideal woman on screen, is an artificial star construct and Nicole Kidman is much more effective in this (Moulin Rouge!) kind of role than when she’s meant to be a real human being.  Penelope Cruz is rather too obviously cast as Guido’s mistress Carla Albanese (and way less entertaining than Sandra Milo in the corresponding part in 8½) but Marion Cotillard is compelling as Luisa.  The wronged wife routine is a routine but Cotillard is controlled and expressive, and has an interiority which is refreshingly different from much of what’s going on around her (although the forced emotionality of her second number – not Cotillard’s fault – rather takes the edge off what she does elsewhere in the film).   As Guido’s mother, Sophia Loren can rarely, in the course of a cinema career of nearly sixty years, have needed her core of good humour as much as she does here.

    Dion Beebe is the director of photography as he was for Chicago; the editors are different – Claire Simpson and Wyatt Smith instead of Martin Walsh – but the editing of the musical numbers is the same.  It’s the kind of pyrotechnical cutting that’s often described as ‘brilliant’ because it so draws attention to itself but it destroys whatever rhythm the singing and dancing might otherwise have.  (There’s a good deal less to destroy here than in Chicago.)  Another pleasure of 8½ is that it’s an apparently autobiographical piece about artist’s block which demonstrates that its creator is either a stranger to the syndrome or has got the better of it.   The only sense in which the Hollywood director of Nine connects with the Cinecittà filmmaker-within-the-film is that neither of them seems able to make a decent picture.

    30 December 2009

    [1] According to Wikipedia:  ‘Nine is a 2009 musical-romantic film …based on Arthur Kopit’s book for the 1982 Tony-Award-winning musical of the same name, which was derived from an Italian play by Mario Fratti inspired by Federico Fellini’s autobiographical film 8½’.

     

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