Daily Archives: Saturday, October 3, 2015

  • Little Miss Sunshine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (2006)

    The original script by Michael Arndt isn’t fully thought through and some of the characters are amusing ideas rather than credible people – but Arndt has an excellent ear for dialogue, Dayton and Faris (directing their first feature) shape the action confidently, and the actors are wonderful.   Little Miss Sunshine is a refreshing take on the road film:  the story is about getting seven-year-old Olive from the family home in New Mexico to the ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ beauty pageant in California;  the conveyance is the family’s (according to Wikipedia) ‘Volkswagen T2 Microbus’, which has seen better days.  Greg Kinnear is Olive’s father, Richard, a motivational speaker with a nine-step programme designed to create winners rather than losers.  It’s made too obvious from the start that Richard is a loser but Kinnear’s skill and sympathy make the character more likeable than ridiculous and you root for him.  Toni Collette is marvellously true as Richard’s wife Sheryl – the family’s (and the rest of the cast’s) anchor.  This marriage is always believable:  you realise that Richard has become more desperately pompous as his career becomes less successful.   Steve Carell is Frank, Sheryl’s brother, who has come to stay with his sister’s family after a failed suicide attempt:  the country’s leading Proust scholar, he’s fallen in love with one of his graduate students, only to see the (male) student start an affair with the number two Proust scholar.   This thread of the story makes no sense:  Proust is too big a name (a more obscure writer would have been funnier) and the idea that a career in Proustian studies could be wrecked in the way the film suggests is daft.  But Carell is a wonderfully versatile physical comedian; he runs the gamut from tiny movements of his facial muscles, as he suffers in silent contempt to Richard blaring on, to an extravagantly funny upright sprint (that echoes Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate) into the climactic beauty pageant sequence.

    As Olive, Abigail Breslin is genuinely eccentric and really likeable.  Alan Arkin is her grandfather – a kind of senescent delinquent.  As well as getting (and earning) a laugh with nearly every line, Arkin gets over a weariness in Grandpa’s bellicosity that turns the role into something much stronger than it might otherwise have been.  Paul Dano is Olive’s unspeaking brother (he’s taken a vow of silence until he achieves his ambition of becoming a test pilot) – and does well in what’s perhaps the most difficult part.   The Daytons (who are husband and wife) and Arndt develop situations that are funny and engaging but which you know, as you’re enjoying them, it’s going to be difficult to resolve in a satisfying way – either the film will just come to a stop or there’ll be an artificially engineered ‘conclusion’.   The writer and directors opt for the latter:  Olive’s eventual stage routine at the pageant, and the chaos that ensues, feel forced – at odds with and raising questions in your mind about what’s gone before.   But the ensemble playing is just about perfect and the film builds up so much goodwill that it hardly matters that the end is disappointing:  the journey has been more than enough.

    20 September 2006

  • Gomorrah

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gomorra

    Matteo Garrone (2008)

    The title is a pun, unavoidably lost in translation:  the Camorra is a Mafia-like criminal organisation, centred on Naples, and the film is based on a non-fiction exposé of the Camorra by Roberto Saviano.  The film-makers seem to have calculated, not unreasonably, that a documentary screen version would be impracticable, whereas a dramatised adaptation would have real and international commercial prospects – as an Italian film, treating in an unglamorous way, one of the country’s most enduringly successful exports, especially to Hollywood.  The documentary elements are remarkable, at least initially.   For a British cinema audience anyway, our awareness of overseas organised crime culture is overwhelmingly through an American perspective, mostly in period settings.  Watching a film set in bleak tower blocks and areas of waste land in poor Southern Italy is a novel experience – and the larger context is very much present day.  The events take place in an economically and ethnically diversified Europe;  the main features of the plot include dumping of toxic waste and interactions between indigenous manufacturing industry and a local Chinese work force.

    But Gomorrah fails as drama:  although the five stories which it comprises are derived from Saviano’s book, they’ve not – for all the many names on the screenplay credit – been developed convincingly so that they feel like artificial constructions, each one representing a different aspect of the malign magnetism of the Camorra.  An innocent-looking early adolescent has to betray his neighbour out of allegiance to the gangsters.  Two older boys – late teens or early twenties – are wannabe Mafiosi.  A better-educated contemporary eventually walks out on his criminal employer and walks away from camera, having saved his soul but ruined his career prospects (‘Have fun making pizzas’, his boss mutters derisively after him).  A middle-aged man, who’s been collecting money for his bosses for years, is shocked out of his craven routines by the violence exploding around him.  The two aspirant gangsters are at the heart of the film and they, in particular, seem a contrivance.  In their early scenes, they act out being Tony Montana in Scarface but this fantasy seems a flashy distraction from the shocking point that Gomorrah seems to be making – that, in such an economically deprived area, the Camorra is not just the main local employer but the best bet in terms of a steady job:  young males don’t need to be dreaming of being Al Pacino to get mixed up in it.   (It’s not clear whether the fact that one of these two boys speaks in a hoarse voice that reminds you of Robert De Niro’s as the young Vito Corleone is ironic or accidental.)  After the boys steal a cache of guns from the Camorra, they go to a lake for manic target practice with their new toys, shooting into and across the water.  It’s a striking sequence – but no more than striking because the characters don’t mean enough to you as individuals.  Their roles are sketchily written – perhaps as a result, the actors sometimes seem to be working themselves into spasms of intensity that lack the underpinning of clear characterisation.   (The frequent hand-held camera work, in a similar way, can tend to seem arbitrarily urgent.) Although the boys’ eventual fate succeeds in coming over as inevitable rather than predictable, it’s done in a way that makes it seem no more than a pale imitation of the end of Los Olvidados.

    The best part of the film concerns Pasquale, the tailor who is selling his trade secrets to the Chinese rag trade.  His life and motivation have a texture and an ambivalence that Gomorrah elsewhere lacks; and Salvatore Cantalupo, who plays Pasquale, gives the most nuanced and felt performance in the film. Gomorrah ends with a lot of text – presenting the grim statistics associated with the Camorra (numbers of deaths, volume of drugs trade etc) – to be read from the screen.  This wordy epilogue – and the fact that the figures make a stronger impression than much of what’s preceded them on screen – makes you wonder if this isn’t an admission of failure to dramatise the material.   The film has its kinetic highlights:  the opening blue-lit shoot-up in a solarium; the attack on the car carrying the Chinese and Pasquale, which crashes to a halt into a yard filled with classical European statuary, parts of which are smashed in the impact.  Yet it can’t deliver these moments without following the conventions of the popular film genre to which it belongs but which it seems to be trying elsewhere to transcend.

    12 October 2008

Posts navigation