Daily Archives: Thursday, September 10, 2015

  • Postcards from the Edge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Nichols (1990)

    Carrie Fisher’s ‘semi-autobiographical’ account of a film starlet’s desperately comic fight to free herself from drug dependency, rotten men and the shadow of her famous mother was published in 1987 but, as a movie, it has elements of an old-time ‘woman’s picture’, modernised by its sexually permissive ambience, by Fisher’s one-liners (she also wrote the screenplay), and especially by the shrewd shallowness of Mike Nichols’s direction, which makes Postcards from the Edge easy to watch and easier to forget.  At its centre is the relationship of Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep), a wan, drug-addicted actress, and her mother Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine), a tough, brazenly egocentric musical comedy trouper.  It’s hard to summon the energy to root for the hapless Suzanne but you mildly hope and assume that things will improve for her.  In the event, she gets rid of her louse boyfriend, a sexually voracious film producer (Dennis Quaid), makes up with her mother and ‘finds herself’.  You don’t believe in the happy ending; you merely accept that it’s time for the film to end happily.  There are a few moments when Suzanne’s insecurity is touching, particularly her big scene with the kindly, paternal director of films-within-the-film (Gene Hackman).  But the real director’s frivolity is mostly impregnable.  Nichols bursts the emotional balloon even of Suzanne and Doris’s reconciliation – when the latter, hospitalised after a car accident, is suddenly, vulnerably old.  The scene shrinks to a small bubble of sentimental wisecracks.  Nichols’s irony is virtually self-protecting:  it’s as if nothing in the movie can be seriously criticised because nothing is seriously meant.

    Mike Nichols made Postcards from the Edge immediately after Working Girl, one of his most successful films (in every way).  Nichols seemed amused by the moral dubiety of a Cinderella story set in 1980s Wall Street, engaged with it wholeheartedly and made his audience follow suit.  There are moments in Postcards, however, when the artificiality of the piece seems on the verge of becoming its subject.  At the start of the picture, the coked-up Suzanne freaks out on set; a few hours later, she’s having her stomach pumped and Doris has her put in a detox clinic.  Gene Hackman is hard to beat as a barometer of emotional truth but, as the director of the film Suzanne is making when she collapses, even he is a little forced – perhaps ill at ease with the falsity of the set-up.  (Nichols sometimes seems to be on the same wavelength as the Dennis Quaid character, who at one point says to Suzanne, ‘You’re the realest person I ever met – in the abstract’.)  When Suzanne returns later in the film to do looping on the scene she flunked before she went into rehab, Hackman illuminates the exchange between them and his paternal benignity is entirely convincing.   But Mike Nichols doesn’t have the appetite for the heartwarming back-from-the-brink aspect of the material:  he seems more interested in the next technical challenge he’s going to set Meryl Streep.  (It’s no coincidence that the most successful collaboration between Nichols and Streep was Angels in America, in which she played four different parts.)

    There’s a moment when Suzanne tells Doris, ‘I’m middle-aged, Mom’.  This is an expression of Suzanne’s feeling that she’s wasted her life rather than a statement of fact but a basic problem for Meryl Streep here is that she looks too old for the part.  (She was was 40 when the film was made – Carrie Fisher was only 31 when the novel was published.)  It’s effective enough, given the relationship between Suzanne and Doris, that the daughter seems the mother’s spiritual senior – she’s certainly the more world-weary – but Streep’s aura of capability makes her mature in the wrong way.   Even so, she does many clever and charming things and the glazed remoteness she brings to the role is very right for what was the picture’s tagline:  ‘Having a wonderful time, wish I were here’.  Shirley MacLaine was 55 when she did this film (and is two years younger than Carrie Fisher’s mother, Debbie Reynolds).  You get the sense that MacLaine basically despises what she’s being asked to do; her presence and flair mean that she does it well – but she’s somehow uncomfortable.  She may be too naturally empathetic an actress to play a monster mother without strain and too truthful as a performer to believe in the moment when Doris, in hospital and deprived of her wig and the other accoutrements of mutton dressed as lamb, briefly stops performing.

    One element of the material that Nichols really does engage with is the musical numbers, all three of which work very well.   (As with Heartburn and Working Girl, the score is by Carly Simon but her contribution is a minor one on this occasion.)  At a welcome home party for Suzanne, Streep sings the Ray Charles song ‘You Don’t Know Me’ with a plaintive tentativeness that is very appealing – and which derives from Suzanne’s certainty that Doris is going to follow her onstage and completely obliterate her performance:  Shirley MacLaine duly delivers the Sondheim song ‘I’m Still Here’ with a crude panache that’s exhilarating and repellent at the same time.  In the finale – a piece of stomping country-and-western self-assertion called ‘I’m Checkin’ Out’ (written for the picture by Shel Silverstein) – Meryl Streep is tremendous.  She’s not only in great voice but she pitches the number perfectly, shaking off the faltering confidence of Suzanne’s earlier number but holding back from her mother’s vulgarian verve.  This is the one moment when the I-will-survivalism of the piece registers with some emotional force.  (Streep is even freer as she continues the number over the closing credits – it’s quite a curtain call.)

    The supporting cast, although most of them haven’t got much to do, is a remarkable line-up.  As well as Hackman and Quaid, there’s Annette Bening (incredibly vivid in the bit part of a bit part actress whom the Quaid character beds on the same day he beds Suzanne), Richard Dreyfuss (as the doctor who pumps Suzanne’s stomach and later asks her out on a date), Gary Morton (as Doris’s predictably unscrupulous manager), Mary Wickes (as Doris’s mother), Rob Reiner, Simon Callow and Michael Ontkean.  A dark-haired actress called Robin Bartlett, who I don’t remember seeing since[1], has a witty, straightforward incisiveness as Suzanne’s roommate in rehab.

    23 May 2009

    [1] Postscript:  Until Shutter Island (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), that is …

  • The Help

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tate Taylor (2011)

    There was a lot of dialogue I couldn’t make out.  I struggled to get a hang of the timeframe (though Sally assures me it isn’t complicated).  The focus on a single character as the embodiment of local racism tends to suggest there isn’t much of a social and moral evil to be eradicated in the first place.  But The Help, which Tate Taylor adapted from Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling debut novel of 2009, is full of good things – one of the best is that what you’d expect to be pushed hard isn’t.    Taylor (who’s white and, according to Wikipedia, a childhood friend of Stockett) gives the characters time to get a purchase in the audience’s mind.  For a while, The Help seems to lack a focal point:  Skeeter Phelan, the college graduate and aspiring writer (presumably based on Stockett, whose novel was partly autobiographical) is the central consciousness only in a limited way and it wouldn’t make emotional sense, given the story’s themes, for her to dominate.  This is just as well:  although Emma Stone, who plays Skeeter, is proficient and likeable, she doesn’t give out a lot, especially in the girl’s quieter, more reflective moments.   The Help’s heroines are Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, the black maids – aka ‘the help’ – who look after the children of white families in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s and whose experiences are the subject of the book Skeeter is trying to write.

    The characters of Aibileen and Minny complement each other obviously but satisfyingly   and the quality of Viola Davis’s portrait of Aibileen gives depth to the relationship, and the whole film:  it’s Aibileen who gradually emerges as the spirit of the story.   Viola Davis is superb:  you see Aibileen’s sweat and her love for the child in her care – you seem to see her whole life in her slightly laboured, weary walk.  Davis gives us a persistently strong sense of how Aibileen needs to keep things inside to keep going.  She doesn’t strain for dignity but her Aibileen is dignified, even noble. In the more openly audience-pleasing role of Minny, Octavia Spencer gives a relatively simple performance but it’s very enjoyable and highly effective.  Because Spencer’s round face and body and big eyes evoke the mammies in movies of a different era, the distance between the cartoon black maids in those old films and the opportunity given to Spencer here has a real impact.  The racist Hilly Holbrook is the crude stereotype in this script:  Bryce Dallas Howard does as well as anyone could with the role – she gives occasional hints of vulnerability, even if they don’t get in the way of loathing Hilly.  As Minny’s painfully guileless employer Celia Foote, Jessica Chastain is dazzling.  What was hidden in The Tree of Life, where Chastain was asked to animate a Pre-Raphaelite image, is in bloom here.  This is a rich characterisation – Celia is vividly pretty and tarty, ridiculous and fragile.  The scene in which she suffers her latest miscarriage is one of the most touching things I’ve seen in a new film this year.

    The cast includes an amazing collection of older actresses – Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen, Cicely Tyson.  The last named is a powerful presence not just because of the associations of her screen roles in the 1970s (Sounder, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) but also because she’s been seen so rarely over the decades since.  Mary Steenburgen, incredibly beautiful, is witty in the small role of the New York editor who tells Skeeter that, if she can collect the stories of a dozen more black maids, she may have a publishable book.  Sissy Spacek is thoroughly and engagingly eccentric as Hilly’s mother.  As Skeeter’s, Allison Janney at first looks to have been cast in a more serious-minded reprise of the hysterical matriarch she played in Hairspray but Janney creates layers to a character when a script doesn’t supply them; as a result, Mrs Phelan’s transformation here is convincing.  In the scene in which this anxiously conventional woman is put on the spot – she has to choose to be loyal either to her black help or to the hatchet-faced white sorority who’ve come for lunch and are about to honour Mrs Phelan – Janney is piercingly helpless.  The men don’t count for a lot, although Mike Vogel does well as Celia’s husband Johnny:  Tate Taylor keeps making us expect him to turn abusive and it’s effective when he’s revealed as kindly and protective, towards Minny as well as Celia.    But the relationship between Skeeter and her senator’s son boyfriend Stewart (Chris Lowell) is unconvincing:  you just don’t believe Stewart wouldn’t have had any sense of her dangerous liberal credentials before her book is published and he breaks off from her.

    The Help‘s potent themes are realised cleverly.  Although making the vile, snooty Hilly the only racist in town undermines the premise of the story, her repeated humiliations work at an emotional level:  when Hilly does things that makes the other characters’ and the audience’s blood boil, playing practical jokes on her is a good way of people getting their own back and giving us a helping of schadenfreude.  Thanks to his focus on Hilly, Taylor actually manages to remind us that the racial prejudice described here isn’t a thing of the past.  (Hilly’s eating a chocolate pie the ingredients of which include Minny’s excrement obviously doesn’t do away with the attitudes Hilly represents.)  The references to systemic racism are relatively few but well handled – especially when Aibileen has to get home alone in the dark, on a night when the Ku Klux Klan are threatening a lynching.  As they get off a bus, Aibileen calmly reassures an elderly black man (Nelsan Ellis) that she’ll be fine returning on her own but panic quickly sets in and, as she hurries towards home and safety, she slips and falls heavily.  It’s a really upsetting sequence.  The Help runs 146 minutes but time passes very quickly.  Although Tate Taylor’s storytelling leaves something to be desired, he draws out some of the sub-themes well – for example, the ways in which the white women can be shunned or endangered too, whether as a result of a personal grudge (Celia’s husband was once Hilly’s boyfriend) or local legislation.  Thomas Newman’s score – those chords are unmistakable – is nicely underused.

    30 October 2011

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