Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Jane Eyre

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Cary Joji Fukunaga (2011)

    It begins with the heroine running down a narrow passage and lane and from there into a huge, harsh, empty landscape.  The weather is spectacular, rapidly changing from ardent sunset to lashing rain.  The young woman stumbles and falls unconscious.  It all seems overscaled and hollowly existential – nearly a parody of our ideas about Victorian romantic drama – but it turns out to be a flash forward to Jane Eyre’s anguished departure from her life with Mr Rochester, after the interruption of their marriage service and the revelation that he already has a wife, locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall.  The sequence is still not among the best in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre but, at its proper point in the story, it no longer seems anything like as inflated as at the start.  This is a mark of how good what’s happened in between is, a tribute in particular to Mia Wasikowska – the best Jane Eyre I’ve seen.

    The young Jane is played by Amelia Clarkson, who has a bit of Hayley Mills and a bit of Shelley Duvall about her face but who’s strongly individual.    Ten-year-old Jane is hiding herself on a window seat, the curtain drawn over it, reading a book; her cousin John Reed whacks her because he’s got nothing better to do (and he’s a vile bully).  We immediately get a sense of how this girl can hold her nerve then, moments later, how she’ll stand up for herself both physically (she gets her own back on John) and verbally (against his mother).  We realise that Jane Eyre’s courageous candour will cause problems for her; and it’s this quality especially that carries through from Amelia Clarkson to Mia Wasikowska, although so too does the sense of a keen intelligence at work.   Wasikowska is obviously going to be cast as pretty women in the future but this isn’t a case where the withholding of beauty, keeping it under wraps, seems to be merely a matter of skilful make-up and costuming (although they are skilful).  Wasikowska really does beautify Jane through the personality she creates.  This girl is acutely aware of her age and social position, puzzled and alarmed by the older, wealthy man who takes a shine to her. She uses her wit to hold her own in conversation with him and to keep the force of his personality and her own passion at bay – and it’s an increasing struggle.  Wasikowska plays the role with concentration and integrity:  she’s equally convincing whether venting emotion (as in her superbly sustained outburst against Rochester when she thinks he’s going to announce that he’s marrying Blanche Ingram and he ends up proposing to Jane) or watching with bewildered apprehension as he drags her along to the church for their wedding, and he’s suddenly miles away from her, his mind on something else.   Wasikowska doesn’t just handle the Northern accent convincingly – she understands the emotional penetration and variety it can yield.

    Mia Wasikowska isn’t quite twenty-two years old and she epitomises the youth of the cast (Cary Fukunaga himself is only thirty-four).  In the case of Jane, this is faithful to the book (she’s eighteen when she goes to Thornfield as governess) but it’s unusual to see actors in their twenties and early thirties playing roles in Jane Eyre and the effect is not only refreshing but touching:  it gives you a different sense of how relatively short lives were in the mid-nineteenth century – and, because the conditions of these lives are also relatively arduous, how quickly people had to learn to cope with them.   You get this even in characters who are largely antipathetic – in Jane’s aunt Mrs Reed and, especially, in St John Rivers.  Sally Hawkins is oddly cast and slightly ill at ease as Mrs Reed but, as usual, she’s worth watching.  (Craig Griffiths, whose mother Hawkins was in Submarine too, makes a brief but effectively creepy appearance as the nastily cowardly John Reed.)  Jamie Bell, now twenty-five, creates a well-judged, nuanced portrait of St John Rivers:  there’s something inadequate and self-seeking about this young minister from the start but Bell is clever enough to prevent you from being able to put your finger on it while St John is doing apparently decent things.   Even at the end, you’re conscious of how immature he is to be setting off for a missionary life on the other side of the world.

    Michael Fassbender is a surprisingly young Rochester too but Cary Fukunaga’s percipient casting pays off.  Fassbender easily suggests someone with an unhappy, determinedly closed off past – the fact that his Rochester is still, to outward appearances, a young man brings an increased poignancy to his situation:  you realise his youth is being extinguished because you can still see the embers of it.   There’s a strong connection between the two principals from their first meeting in the tenebrous wood, when Rochester comes off his horse, and a sexual dimension is salient not just in that famous encounter but throughout.  This animates the drama in a very persuasive way.  The scene in which Jane finds the curtains in Rochester’s bedroom ablaze and wakes him up is excellent:  the circumstances mean that the governess sees the master in his nightshirt and turns away as he puts on his trousers – the surprising physical frankness of the moment is made credible and covered by the urgency of the situation but doesn’t go unnoticed.  Like Wasikowska, Fassbender uses wit as a weapon – but, in his case, sometimes an offensive weapon.   When he tells Jane he doesn’t care for children then says something sarcastic to his ward, Jane’s pupil Adele (Romy Settbon Moore), the mordancy of his tone is both funny and chilling:  Rochester seriously doesn’t like her.  The two actors help each other.  Fassbender’s charm and dynamism enable Wasikowska to bring to life Jane’s predicament:  she experiences Rochester as a sexual being yet the idea of a sexual relationship with such a man seems impossible.  When he asks Jane if she thinks him handsome and she says no, the exchange is more potent because he is:  Jane has to try to deny it to herself (and she’s also compelled by her moral sense to remind him that good looks aren’t enough anyway).  Wasikowska’s luminous quality and emotional agility give Fassbender something to keep trying to follow and get hold of:  she allows him to make complete sense of what Rochester says about being bewitched by Jane.

    You perceive not just what this pair see in each other but what they can’t see.  He doesn’t notice her jealousy until he feels the force of it in the proposal scene.  She’s compelled by his eyes:  their magnetising gaze and the misery in them are indivisible.  (By the time she fully understands that misery his eyes have been destroyed.)  Fassbender’s accent is less secure – but that seems right:  Rochester has lived in different parts of the world and lacks a sense of home.  After the debacle of the wedding service, he seems less convincing in Rochester’s apology to Jane but perhaps this is right too – there’s no way he can’t, in this moment, be diminished in how Jane sees him.   He looks a bit too tragically styled in the final scene but he’s great in the very last shot of the film as the reunited couple embrace.  Rochester’s tremble, as he embraces Jane and although we see only the upper part of the two bodies, seems to go from head to foot. This also is the best Rochester I’ve seen.  It’s the kind of performance which isn’t just exciting in itself but leaves you excited about what the actor’s going to do next.  (On the day I saw Jane Eyre, Fassbender won the Best Actor prize at Venice for Steve McQueen’s Shame.  David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, in which Fassbender plays Jung, screened at Venice too.)

    As well as these marvellous young actors, there’s Judi Dench as the Thornfield housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax – a role perhaps a little expanded from the novel once they knew who was going to play it but still not a large one.  To say that she creates a complete character may be saying nothing new about Judi Dench but watching it happen is as much a treat as ever.  She’s able to suggest a whole life in a few moments.   She gets over the idea of a normal, humdrum existence going on year after year at Thornfield, and a suggestion of human warmth in this large, underheated place – but there’s an edge of unease too. Mrs Fairfax seems both part of the house and intimidated by it.  (The film was shot, according to Wikipedia, on various locations, including Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall, but Thornfield develops a strongly integrated identity.)  Judi Dench delineates Mrs Fairfax’s social position and prejudices with extraordinary deftness and precision.  Her three or four punchlines are so perfectly (but unshowily) delivered that you want to applaud.  I wondered too if Dench had in effect taught Mia Wasikowska what can be done with a Yorkshire accent.

    Cary Fukunaga’s approach is socially incisive but never heavy-handed.  The children at Lowood School, in their pinafore uniforms and drained of colour, are de-individualised to reinforce our view of them as prisoners.  The servants at Thornfield, preparing for their master’s return, evince a slight excitement that’s counterbalanced by awareness that this means more work for them.   When I read that the film had been shot in mostly natural light, I wondered if this might be ‘realism’ that didn’t amount to much but I was wrong.  The reliance on candles inside Thornfield makes you appreciate how gloomy things must have been indoors before electric light; it also dramatises the house’s secrets in a way that’s both Gothic and strongly believable – you really don’t know what lies around the corner because you can’t see that far.  The movement of Adriano Goldman’s camera round the place emphasises its big, empty spaces and its inscrutability.  Some of the exteriors are highly expressive too – a narrow strip of grass running between the stone of the house and a high hedge on the other side, a befogged grey-green lane beyond.  Fukunaga is himself a cinematographer, as well as a director and writer, and the visual scheme is strongly coherent.  Some of this is obvious enough – a shot of blue sky and blossom when the love between Jane and Rochester is coming into the open.  Some of it is more complex:  Jane eventually returns to the charred hulk of Thornfield in bright sunshine, everything about the place now exposed; then she’s reunited with the blinded Rochester, now in complete darkness.

    I’ve read Jane Eyre twice but I don’t know it well enough to be sure how much of the film’s dialogue was written by Charlotte Brontë and how much by Moira Buffini, who did the screenplay.  Whatever, the lines ring true and the actors are able to deliver them in a way that allows us to connect with them, without their seeming ‘too modern’ (Jane Campion and her cast managed the same in Bright Star).   There’s the odd detail that does seem anachronistic, though:  as Richard Mason (Harry Lloyd), Bertha’s brother, is carted off to have his wounds treated, Jane comes out of the house in her nightdress.  A few other things don’t work.  There’s a good moment between Rochester and Blanche Ingram fooling about in a summer house but it’s otherwise hard to see how Jane could believe that Rochester feels anything for Blanche.  He’s too obviously dismissive of her at the party at Thornfield and Imogen Poots, an excellent Jean Ross (aka Sally Bowles) in Christopher and His Kind on television last year, is perhaps too eccentrically pretty to be right for the part.  Rochester’s wife Bertha (Valentina Cervi), when we finally see her, is rather posy – Fukunaga presents her more as an image than as the woman who set fire to her husband’s bedroom and stabbed her brother.

    The film runs just two hours and there are some unavoidable elisions in Buffini’s trim script:  Bertha’s keeper Grace Poole (Rosie Cavaliero) counts for little here, and the character of Jane’s beloved friend at Lowood, Helen Burns, is reduced to a very few minutes on screen – although this means that the progress of her terminal TB is relievingly rapid (a couple of coughs and she’s gone) – and the scene of the two young girls in bed together on the night Helen dies is very well done.  It’s hard to tell whether the moisture on the face of Helen (Freya Burns) is sweat or tears, perhaps it’s both.  Simon McBurney is not a subtle actor but, as Mr Brocklehurst, the principal of Lowood and embodiment of institutional religious tyranny, he’s not as crude as he might have been – and his profile gives him a really hateful reptilian quality.   Dario Marianelli’s score always supports, never overpowers what you see on screen.

    At the box office/refreshments counter of the Richmond Curzon (I’ll have to start calling it that), there were a young middle-aged couple and their daughter just ahead of me.   I guess the child, wearing a silly woolly hat (on a humid afternoon), was about nine or ten.   She asked her mother, ‘Which one is it?’ – this meant which screen.  The mother explained there was only one screen, that this was an ‘alternative’ cinema.  ‘What does alternative mean?’  ‘It means it shows films that are different … it’s good to be different’.   This struck me as a fine example of ludicrous local pretentiousness:  Jane Eyre is on at the biggest screen of the Odeon too.  But the woman turned out to be right.  This is a different film – unusually conceived and unusually intelligent – and one of the best of the year so far.

    10 September 2011

  • The Road

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Hillcoat (2009)

    This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world is often astonishing to look at.  The location filming – in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Oregon (and without reliance on CGI, according to John Hillcoat) – is alarmingly credible.  The occasional image looks a little over-composed – there’s a glum shot of lines of telegraph poles stretching into the distance in which the poles in the foreground are leaning and the ones in the background are straight – but the black, leafless trees have a sinister beauty, and are powerfully expressive because they’re both forbidding and vulnerable.  (All plant life on Earth is dying and there’s a sequence in which trees crash to the ground.  It’s tragic because of the fall of something great, as well as terrifying from the point of view of the father and son in the forest.)  Whatever cataclysmic event has occurred to make the planet sick unto death (it’s unexplained) has blotted out the sun.  The only brightness in the waste land comes from firelight and from the labels on a cache of tinned food the travellers discover but the cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe defines remarkably graded shades of grey in the drained, muddied landscape and there are haunting long shots of the man and the boy trekking across the horizon against a narrow band of light with dark clouds above them and dark land below.    (What Aguirresarobe does with a colourless palette seems all the more brilliant when the last film shot by him that I saw was the languorously sunlit Vicky Cristina Barcelona.)  But The Road isn’t so easy to admire beyond these visual accomplishments; it’s hard going not because it’s rigorous or emotionally wrenching but because it’s monotonously solemn. One indication of the blatant self-importance of the story is that the characters don’t have names:  the man is in the credits as ‘Man’, the boy as ‘Boy’ and so on.

    In some ways, Viggo Mortensen is very well cast as Man.  He’s well equipped to play archetypal heroes battling adversity:  his handsomeness is both chiselled and rugged; he suggests bodily strength and mental resourcefulness.  There are moments too when Mortensen’s facial bone structure enables him – particularly when he’s breathing heavily or asleep with his mouth slightly open to show prominent teeth – to look strikingly like a skeleton-in-waiting.  His character’s love for his son is convincing, especially in its physical expression, and Mortensen has a naturally honourable quality which means that he can avoid sanctimony in the role of a man striving, in dehumanizing circumstances, to keep his child and himself alive without sacrificing essential humanity.  (To be more specific:  this father needs to keep foraging to keep them both alive while sticking to the belief that eating people is wrong.  He’s anti-social because he suspects everyone else of being a potential cannibal.)  Yet Viggo Mortensen never suggests a man with a life in the pre-apocalyptic world.  The very first time we see him – on the day before the world changed irreparably – Man is holding a horse and Mortensen puts his head wistfully against the animal’s head as if he already knew the good life was nearly over.  John Hillcoat doesn’t help in the choice of flashbacks to Man’s past life, which seem too consciously memorable:  sliding his hand up the long legs of his wife (Woman) as they sit listening to a classical concert, a composed, idealised image of her sunbathing, etc.   Mortensen reads the voiceover narrative in a way that suggests exhaustion but with a studied gravity – he uses the same tone even when the man reads a story to the boy.

    According to his Wikipedia filmography, Hillcoat has directed a video for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and he overuses the mournful music which Cave and Warren Ellis have written for The Road – sometimes it makes the quietly spoken leading pair all the harder to hear.  As the son, Kodi Smit-McPhee does well enough but he’s touching only when he’s inarticulate, whimpering or crying.  (Smit-McPhee is an experienced child actor in Australia and his knowingness as a performer isn’t always an advantage here.)  In any case, I had a fundamental difficulty with the character of the boy.  His mother is heavily pregnant with him when the cataclysm occurs; in another flashback, we see Man delivering the baby (although Woman is horrified at the idea of bringing a child into a moribund world).  Boy has never known a world without civilisation and, in recent experience (it’s not made clear how long ago his mother departed the scene), a life other than the gruelling quest for survival that we see him living.  In one of the series of deserted houses the pair enter, the father finds a decomposed body in a bed and tells his curious son it’s ‘nothing you’ve not seen before’.  Yet the child proves to be far from inured to the harshness of their existence.  When his father – always advising the boy to keep an eye out for ‘the bad guys’ – does something harshly pragmatic or, one occasion, vengeful, his son is distressed and disputes these actions.  He seems to have developed  strong reserves of compassion and altruism thanks not to experience, or even the example of his father, but to a sentimental idea about the innate goodness and innocence of children in the mind of Cormac McCarthy – or at least the mind of Joe Penhall, who did the adaptation.

    The boy’s tolerance and resignation are also surprising.   He and his father are heading south –‘towards the coast’.  Since the man’s voiceover explains right at the start that the whole planet is in terminal decay, I wasn’t clear why the coast represented a certainly beneficial destination but I suppose you can accept that humans would always live in hope to keep themselves going.  The boy asks the man if the sea is blue; the father says he doesn’t know.  When they make it to the coast, he apologises that the sea isn’t blue but the son registers no disappointment that seaside life is as grim as any other terrain.   Their southward journey has been interrupted when they find an underground bunker, well stocked with food and drink and running water.  (I liked the way Kodi Smit-McPhee savoured the syllables of ‘shampoo’ – a new word for the boy – when his father washed his hair.)   When, one night, they hear noises of a dog overground, the father decides that must mean ‘bad guys’ on the prowl and that they must leave their lair, taking as many provisions as possible with them.  The son, reasonably enough, seems astonished:  considering that they live all the time on the edge of death, surely they might just as well have taken a chance and stayed put.  Not once does the boy, when they’ve resumed their journey and new horrors, say ‘I told you so’.

    Charlize Theron does good work as the wife; you sense that, like Mortensen, she is personally committed to the material but she doesn’t let this infuse her acting.  Mortified by having giving birth, the wife wanders off one night without food or provisions and so, one assumes, to certain death.  Although the scene is hard to credit, it’s very well played by Mortensen and Theron.  Robert Duvall has a cameo as a nearly blind old man whom father and son meet at one point.  It’s a well-judged performance – Duvall doesn’t overdo the nobility of the man or push his own distinguished-elderly-actor status.  The character, uniquely, has a name (Ely) but, as if to compensate for compromising his symbolism, Penhall (via McCarthy?) gives him one of the most unconvincingly epigrammatic lines in the script.  When the Mortensen character asks, ‘Do you want to die?’ Duvall replies, ‘No:  it’s wrong to expect luxuries in circumstances like this’.   As a thief who takes virtually all the possessions of the father and son, Michael Kenneth Williams comes through strongly in an effective, upsetting sequence:  Man apprehends the thief, forces him to strip and leaves him to starve or freeze to death.   (The child keeps looking back in anguish at the naked man and eventually persuades his father to leave a tin of food and clothing on the track they’re following.)  I thought the best performance in the supporting roles came from Guy Pearce as the man (Veteran) who adopts the eventually orphaned boy:  in his short time on screen, Pearce not only connects emotionally with Kodi Smit-McPhee; he also economically and strongly suggests a connection with a world that we know.

    The propensity of films to seem generic no matter how extraordinary the circumstances of the story they’re telling never fails to impress me.  It may not be the case with the novel of The Road but, in the movie, as soon as the father develops a bad cough you know his number is up; when the boy wants to adopt the old man, it feels rather like the standard scene when a child wants to keep a lost animal.  The father carries with him a gun, which contains only two bullets.   He threatens enemies or suspected enemies with the weapon but the bullets are to be used by him and his son to commit suicide when life becomes intolerable.  (In an early scene we see the man show the boy how to shoot himself through the mouth.)   I may have lost count but I think that, in the event, both bullets were used in urgent self-defence; anyway, neither turns out to be needed for its originally intended purpose.   The father dies and the son finds another father – and a mother and siblings.  After an impassioned farewell to his natural father, Boy sees another man (Pearce) approaching.  He points the (empty?) gun at him but stops doing so after asking for and getting assurance that the man is one of the ‘good guys’.  Boy also asks the man if he has a son; the man says that he does, and a daughter, and he invites Boy to join his family.  When he goes to them, he sees they also have a dog.  The smiling kindly wife (Molly Parker) says, ‘We’re so glad you joined us.  We’ve been following you.  We were so worried about you’.   This ending is presented as if hopeful and uplifting but it struck me as doubly miserable.  Apart from the fact that the world is dying anyway, I took it from what Motherly Woman (sic) said that it was this well-meaning family whose dog Man and Boy had heard above their bunker.   Is this supposed to mean that if Man had not been so primed to be distrustful they could have joined forces and died as one big happy family?

    9 January 2010

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