Daily Archives: Saturday, October 3, 2015

  • Cinderella

    Kenneth Branagh (2015)

    In 1976, The Slipper and the Rose, Bryan Forbes’s version of Cinderella, was advertised – amorphously and almost desperately – as an antidote to ‘dismal disaster and senseless violence’.  (These were the words of the film’s trailer.)  One of the interesting things about Walt Disney Studios’ Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is that it’s being promoted – and successfully promoted – as a straight, traditional version of the Cinderella story.  The hype is certainly more specific than it was for The Slipper and the Rose.  It’s founded on the relative straightness of Branagh’s Cinderella – compared with other, very recent fairytale-based pictures:  the two Snow White movies released in 2012; Maleficent, the 2014 take on Sleeping Beauty; and, in the realm of animation rather than live action, the phenomenally successful Frozen (2013).  Disney Studios naturally want to keep audiences warm for the sequel to their reworking of The Snow Queen:  a short, Frozen Fever, is so much a part of the new Cinderella that it follows rather than precedes the certificate for the feature.  But the title character in Branagh’s film, although not a wimp, is a less complex creature than Elsa in Frozen and isn’t part of the kickass heroine sisterhood of which Rapunzel in Tangled (2010) and Princess Merida in Brave (2013) are founder members.  (Brave is an original screenplay rather than based on a canonical fairy story but it’s still relevant to the ‘traditionalism’ of this Cinderella.)

    Chris Weitz’s script is based on ‘Disney’s “Cinderella” properties and the fairy tale by Charles Perrault’.  In that order:  for example, most of the characters share their names with those in the animated Disney film of 1950.  The Branagh version is, however, longer and slower going than that precursor.  One reason for this is the amount of screen time devoted to parental deaths – Cinderella’s mother and father (he dies off-screen but we hear the news relayed to Cinderella and see her reaction) and the prince’s father.  Before she pegs out, the heroine’s mother urges her daughter to ‘have courage and be kind’ and Cinderella remembers this advice.  The mantra is repeated more than once and the concluding voiceover (the film is narrated by the Fairy Godmother) extends it:  the recipe for a good life includes courage, kindness and ‘occasionally, just a bit of magic’.  ‘Just a bit’ are the operative words:  there’s more mortality than magic in this Cinderella.  It’s as if the audience needs to be reminded that, in the real world, people get old and/or ill and die – the fantastic elements of fairy stories must be tempered with the hard facts of the real world.  This emphasis makes ‘Cinderella 2015’ far from traditional.  (In the Perrault tale, the only death is that of Cinderella’s mother, described in a very few, scene-setting words.  The heroine’s father dies in the animated Disney film but the king doesn’t.)   It’s striking that the film-makers feel compelled to give death its due in this way.  Compared with readers of the story in earlier periods or viewers of the animated film (a few years after the end of World War II), there will be many fewer children in today’s audience who have actually experienced the death of a parent (or even a grandparent).  More crucially, though, it seems pointless to minimise the magical element when the plot hasn’t been thoroughly re-imagined and still depends on supernatural achievements.

    Although Cinderella is part of the classical opera and ballet repertoire, the story is stretched very thin as a feature film with no singing (the Disney animation and The Slipper and the Rose both had a full song score) and less dancing than you might expect or hope for.  The backstory is so protracted here that I was relieved when the evening of the royal ball arrived but, like nearly everything else in this Cinderella, the magic, when it happens, takes its time.  In Perrault, ‘instantly the pumpkin changed into a beautiful golden coach’.   In Branagh’s film, the special effects that transform the pumpkin, the mice into horses, the lizards into footmen etc are strenuously extended.  It says a lot that the reversion of the magical transport to its original components – at breakneck pace, through the chimes of midnight – is more entertaining than the first transformation.  (The coach is driven by a goose and the swiping into thin air of his coachman’s hat, the last vestige of the Fairy Godmother’s magic, is a nice, quick touch.)  I doubt that cinema is the best medium for these metamorphoses anyway.  A pantomime of Cinderella, at the Theatre Royal in York, is the first theatre visit that I remember as a child.  I’ve never forgotten, in particular, twelve o’clock striking and Cinderella, back in her working clothes, dashing across the stage – ‘a ragged young girl who looked more like a kitchen-maid than a fine lady’, in the words of Angela Carter’s translation of Perrault.  Film can create illusion so easily – too easily for this kind of transformation to be extraordinary or exciting.

    Kenneth Branagh has some distinguished collaborators on his team – Dante Ferretti is the production designer and Sandy Powell the costumer – yet I found the spectacular elements of Cinderella repeatedly disappointing.  The golden coach is garish; the sumptuous ballroom is so overstated that the decor might have been chosen by Lady Tremaine, the socially pushy Wicked Stepmother.  I actually preferred Cinderella’s simple pink frock (even after Lady Tremaine had viciously ripped pieces from it) to the empyrean blue number magicked up by the Fairy Godmother.  The monstrously multi-faceted glass slipper is vulgar and looks big enough for a clodhopper.  Helena Bonham Carter, as the Fairy Godmother, is vocally witty throughout but she’s more comfortable – and a better camera subject – as the hag whom Cinderella first encounters than as her transformed version, in a complicated white meringue of an outfit.  Sandy Powell’s jealousy-green gowns for Lady Tremaine are witty but, with Cate Blanchett in the role, they only accentuate that she’s much classier than anyone else in the kingdom, royal or otherwise.  Blanchett has a fine hauteur and does amusing business (she flicks her fan so startlingly that it suggests a lethal weapon).  The (excellent) honking laugh that she’s devised is really needed, though, to cut Lady Tremaine down to size.  Without it, Blanchett is much too formidable to be ridiculous.

    Cinderella is eventually told by her stepmother why the latter is a malignant bitch:  it turns out that Lady Tremaine is not wicked but embittered – by the death of the first husband whom she truly loved, by the disappointments that her two daughters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera) have turned out to be.  This echoes the moral of Maleficent (the narrator concludes that ‘the story is not quite what you were told’) but it makes no sense here.  At least Maleficent’s backstory fully explained her as neither purely good nor utterly bad:  there’s no follow-through to Lady Tremaine’s self-analysis – as if Branagh and Chris Weitz immediately realise they’ve made a mistake and that the character is worth attention only if her nastiness is unmodified.  The psychologising of the Wicked Stepmother has the same mechanical ‘human reality’ as the demise of Cinderella’s parents and the king.  That these deaths aren’t meant to be taken seriously is signalled by the certificate warning that Cinderella contains no more than ‘scenes of mild emotional upset’.  There’s a risk, however, that the deaths will cut more deeply with thoughtful young viewers – not least because the actors concerned – Hayley Atwell (Cinderella’s mother), Ben Chaplin (her father) and Derek Jacobi (the king) – create plausible, likeable characters during their brief time on screen.

    The film’s tone veers curiously between straight and knowing:  Patrick Doyle’s conventional music sometimes seems to be used to counterbalance the more arch bits of dialogue.  The script’s attempts to accommodate political correctness in conte de fée hierarchy are awkward too.  Cinderella first meets Prince Charming, renamed Prince Kit, while he’s out hunting and her priority is to ensure that the deer being hunted escapes unscathed.  Kit pretends that he’s a humble apprentice, working at the palace; even when Cinderella discovers his true identity, he says that he’s learning how to be a king – so that his royalty is forgivable.  It’s something of an irony that Richard Madden (best known from Game of Thrones) is more believable as a common apprentice than a blue blood although he’s engaging.  Lily James (Downton Abbey), who occasionally calls to mind the young Kate Winslet, does well as Cinderella.  James’s cheerful resilience seems natural – and her appearance is immediately welcome after the overdone sunshine smiliness of Eloise Webb as the ten-year-old Ella (as she’s called before her stepsisters add the ‘Cinder-‘).   James and Madden make an appealing couple.  The large cast also includes Stellan Skarsgård (‘the Grand Duke’), Nonso Anozie (the court official who supervises the glass slipper-fitting) and Rob Brydon (unfunny as a royal portrait painter).  The CGI mice in Cinderella’s (spacious) garret are excellent – beautifully characterised and a reminder of where Disney Studios’ heart and talents really lie.

    30 March 2015

  • Ricki and the Flash

    Jonathan Demme (2015)

    Ricki and the Flash are a rock band, with a regular evening spot in a small Los Angeles bar.  They’re very popular there but lead singer Ricki (Meryl Streep) still needs, in order to make ends meet, to work by day as a supermarket cashier.  Years ago, Ricki – real name Linda – had ambitions to be a big-time rock star (she plays guitar as well as singing):  she walked out on her husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and their three children, to further her career.   Pete remarried some time back but his new wife Maureen (Audra McDonald) is away and Ricki gets a call from him:  their daughter Julie’s husband has been cheating on her and Julie (Mamie Gummer) has attempted suicide.  Ricki flies back to the family home in Indianapolis.  Jonathan Demme’s new film is rightly named because the band’s numbers – even though I don’t like their kind of music – are its strength.  Their opening routines are promising; by the time she eventually comes back to LA after her stay with Pete and Julie, I was desperate for more from Ricki and the Flash.

    The intervening return to Indianapolis – which the heroine, in spite of her long estrangement from her daughter and being broke, undertakes without a moment’s thought – is poor stuff:  Ricki’s family are so tedious that you understand why she abandoned them.   Diablo Cody’s screenplay is disappointing.  Julie, not unreasonably hostile when Ricki first reappears, capitulates too easily to her mother’s spunk and humour; Audra McDonald plays Maureen with authority but the showdown between her and Ricki is purely functional in exposing the latter’s feelings of guilt and regret.  (The best part of the scene comes when Maureen exits and Meryl Streep cries quietly in the bathroom.)  It’s hard to see how Ricki-Linda and the stuffed shirt Pete ever got together:  there’s one moment, after he’s smoked some pot, when Kevin Kline is able to hint at something they might once have had in common, under the layers of difference that the years have grown, but he isn’t given the opportunity to show more.  And Diablo Cody’s characterisation of Ricki as right wing is very shallow.  (She voted for Bush, loathes Obama, that’s about it.)

    The film looks up in its second half chiefly because Meryl Streep, once Ricki’s back on stage in Los Angeles, can sing not only with gusto but also in character:  without the song choices becoming too obviously linked to Ricki’s offstage life, Streep invests the numbers with emotions that draw on the character’s feelings about her daughter – and about Greg (Rick Springfield), the Flash’s lead guitarist, who’s in love with Ricki.  (This relationship is kept under wraps until it needs to become more central.)  Although there are others in the cast with whom she goes back much further (Mamie Gummer is her eldest daughter and Kevin Kline co-starred in Sophie’s Choice), the best connection in the film is between Streep and Rick Springfield’s Greg – onstage and off.   Springfield, who is relaxed and likeable, has acted before but not that much:  Meryl Streep plays her scenes with him sensitively, as if taking care not to overpower him.  She’s developed a good, husky voice for this role and it’s impressively absorbed:  Ricki’s vocal tones when she speaks are coherent with her singing voice and credibly suggest the wear and tear of a difficult, disappointed life.  Streep is funny too in the couple of short scenes of Ricki working at the checkout.  (This is the first film, by the way, that she’s made without Roy Helland doing her hair and make-up since before Sophie’s Choice.  He is back for Suffragette.)

    As you’d expect from the director of Stop Making Sense (etc), Jonathan Demme is good at staging the rock numbers.  Demme also did a fine job with a wedding in Rachel Getting Married but the matrimonial climax to Ricki and the Flash – the marriage of one of Ricki’s sons – is a very mixed bag.  Greg persuades Ricki to accept Maureen’s olive-branch invitation to the event and sells his guitar to finance this second journey to Indianapolis.  There are moments at the wedding that are well observed but the guests stare at the outsiders Ricki and Greg too emphatically, and the finale isn’t pretty.  Ricki’s unconventional present to her son and his bride is – to the initial consternation of the gathering – to take to the stage and perform with Greg and the rest of the Flash (who suddenly emerge).  This might have been effective if, after doing the one song, Ricki had quietly taken her leave but just the opposite happens.  I couldn’t stop thinking how awful it must be to get married and have someone, even Meryl Streep, ruin your painstaking preparations.  When all the proper, snobby guests start grooving to the music, the free-for-all brings Ricki and the Flash perilously close to the finale of Mamma Mia! 

    16 September 2015

     

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