Daily Archives: Thursday, October 8, 2015

  • The Chalk Garden

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ronald Neame (1964)

    An elegant, elderly woman on a walking stick looked as if she might be someone important as she hovered uncertainly around the front rows of NFT3.  Sure enough, she was introduced by the BFI curator Jo Botting as Julie Harris – the British costume designer rather than the American actress.  This Julie Harris, who won an Oscar for dressing Darling (1965), is now in her ninetieth year.  (The other Julie Harris is coming up for her eighty-fifth birthday.)  Botting explained that Harris was one of the prime movers behind the Deborah Kerr retrospective at BFI – and this conversation with Harris was one of the best things about going to see The Chalk Garden, an adaptation of the stage play by Enid Bagnold.  The guest of honour rambled a bit but she was very conscious of that.  I also liked the fact that she was rather irritated to be introducing a film that gave her more of a budget than an opportunity for creative costume design:  as she said, the clothes she put Deborah Kerr in (although Harris had obviously loved dressing her in other pictures) looked a bit too expensively tailored for a governess earning £12 a week.

    Miss Madrigal (Kerr) comes to a big house in Sussex, close to the chalk cliffs, to be interviewed for the job of governess to Laurel (Hayley Mills), the teenage granddaughter of the lady of the house, Mrs St Maugham (Edith Evans) – a widow, who is estranged from her daughter Olivia (Elizabeth Sellars), Laurel’s mother.  As the butler-cum-handyman Maitland (John Mills) explains, Laurel goes through governesses like loaves of bread and we soon see why:  she’s a self-dramatising dissembler with a caustic tongue that she uses to wound herself and others.  Mrs St Maugham treats this maladjusted girl largely indulgently – or self-indulgently:  the old lady’s one aim in life appears to be to ensure that Olivia doesn’t take Laurel away.   Mrs St Maugham is a keen but unsuccessful gardener:  none of the plants in her care – including the granddaughter named for an evergreen – will grow.   (Julie Harris dressed Edith Evans in some enjoyably colourful outfits – I wasn’t sure if the choices of fuchsia, lilac etc were ironic, given Mrs St Maugham’s horticultural failures.  Otherwise, The Chalk Garden, as photographed by Arthur Ibbetson, is visually toneless.)  The symbolism, and the fact that Mrs St Maugham must, in the nature of morally conventional theatre, get her comeuppance, are so obvious so soon that your attention quickly switches to the governess who arrives in the household without references or, it seems, a past.  (But she has green fingers!)  It emerges – after a series of heavy hints (Laurel has a ghoulish appetite for true crime, the governess isn’t keen on locked doors etc) – that Miss Madrigal has just been released from prison, having served many years for the murder of her stepsister:  she was sentenced to be hanged but the sentence was commuted because of her tender years.  One of Mrs St Maugham’s old flames is a judge and she invites him to lunch in the hope that he can ‘do something’ to ensure that Laurel’s mother can’t get her hands on her daughter.   It turns out that the judge is the same one who donned the black cap at Miss Madrigal’s trial.   (I’m not making this up.)

    Perhaps Enid Bagnold’s crude symbolism and melodramatic plotting might get by in the theatre, where the stage is the world and you’re willing to accept the scope for human interaction as being limited to the people who appear before us.  In other words, it’s a small world; watching The Chalk Garden as a play, you can maybe suspend disbelief in the improbability of the judge’s going back a long way with both Mrs St Maugham and Miss Madrigal.  The virtually inevitable visual aids of cinema, and the external reality in which the film’s action is set, make these mechanics ridiculous.  As if we hadn’t already got the point, Ronald Neame displays the garden’s rows of moribund shrubs as the characters walk among them.  At the lunch with the judge, it might be possible on stage for the actors to generate the tensions of the situation; on screen, the intensive close-ups of Miss Madrigal and Laurel, as she cottons on, merely expose its falsity (and Malcolm Arnold’s madly energetic music, here and elsewhere, hardly helps).  Besides, given the way the main parts are played, the moral scheme of The Chalk Garden doesn’t make sense.  The destructively possessive Mrs St Maugham is meant to be a monster but Edith Evans’s acting is so much richer than anyone else’s that’s not how she comes over – you see the neediness in the old woman’s selfishness.  Because of this and because Mrs St Maugham is less prone to moralise than most of her household and visitors, she had my sympathy.  Elizabeth Sellars, one-dimensional and delivering her lines in an elocuted coo, is ghastly as Olivia:  gruesome as Laurel is, you wouldn’t wish this mother even on her.  Miss Madrigal can ‘see myself’ in Laurel but there’s not a hint of emotional kinship between Deborah Kerr and Hayley Mills.   (If we could be persuaded that Miss Madrigal’s perception was deluded that might solve the problem but we’re not.)  Kerr, in spite of her tidy, by-the-book style of acting, is interesting in her early scenes; less so once the governess’s secrets begin to be revealed.    Felix Aylmer looks very right as the judge and gives you the sense that, although the old man’s manner is faintly gaga, he’s taking everything in.  As a result, you’re left feeling flat by the scene in which Miss Madrigal admits to him who she is and it turns out he hadn’t already realised this.

    I struggled to make sense of the enthusiastic audience in NFT3.  An atypically young(ish) man sitting next to me laughed decisively whenever a character said something outrageous or epigrammatic and applauded ostentatiously at the end.  But most of the people there were much older than him – quite a bit older even than me.  They must have been in their early twenties when the film was released.  It doesn’t seem to be material that age group would enjoy, unless their tastes were remarkably old-fashioned; and were many people now in their mid-sixties big fans in their twenties of Deborah Kerr or Edith Evans or John or Hayley Mills?  Is it rather that some people, once they reach a certain age, become nostalgic for the films of their youth, and the performers that go with them, because, even if they didn’t particularly like them at the time, these movies represent a lost golden age?   (I’m one of these people to an extent but I’m not yet desperate enough to think that something like The Chalk Garden is any good.)  Edith Evans is playing the villain of the piece yet, from the delighted tittering reactions, she might as well have been saying ‘A handbag?!’ every time she opened her mouth.  As Maitland, John Mills gives a familiar, complacent performance.  (I felt the character needed to be much more drily bitter in act one – to get across the difference that the advent of Miss Madrigal makes to his regretful life.)  Hayley Mills’s Laurel is grotesquely artificial – perhaps the audience lapped up her clumsy, charmless histrionics because her immutable image in their memory is that of Infant Phenomenon.

    In a sense, the film’s ludicrous ending – Laurel goes home to mother, Miss Madrigal agrees to stay on with Mrs St Maugham (and cultivate, as well as the garden, a budding romance with Maitland) – fulfils the audience’s quest for cosiness.  The minor characters are played by Toke Townley (a shopkeeper), Tonie MacMillan (cook) and Lally Bowers, who overacts as a short-lived applicant for the governess job.  I used to enjoy Bowers on television and remember her making a good Miss Prism in a BBC Play of the Month production of The Importance of Being Earnest in the 1970s.  One of Miss Prism’s best-known lines is:  ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means’.  In The Chalk Garden everyone ends happily:  Mrs St Maugham has learned her lesson and changed her spots; Laurel has gone through an experience which has solved her emotional problems.  It’s as if they deserve this outcome because they’re stalwarts of British stage and screen.  They are the good.

    12 October 2010

  • Short Term 12

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Destin Daniel Cretton (2013)

    Painfully well-meaning and sweet-natured – it’s the good intentions and benevolence of the writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton, rather than the rigours of the damaged lives he describes, which cause the pain.  Cretton, who worked up the screenplay from a short (of the same name) that he made in 2008, has an apparently tough subject – the relationships and ordeals of teenagers and the staff supervising them in a foster-care facility – but he so much wants things to work out for his characters that he resolves their difficulties too easily.  The main character Grace, one of the staff at the centre, and Jayden, one of the kids there, turn out to share the problem of a physically and sexually abusive father.   Twenty-something Grace’s father is about to be released from jail; Jayden’s has been allowed to have his daughter home for the weekend.   At the height of her own emotional crisis, Grace goes to Jayden’s home and is dissuaded from beating her sleeping father to death with a baseball bat only when Jayden appears in the bedroom doorway.  Instead, both girls use the bat to trash the man’s car and expel their anger:  it’s a decisive revenge on both their fathers.  Grace had been planning to marry her long-time boyfriend and co-worker Mason, whose baby she’s carrying.  When she tells him she’s arranged to have an abortion, however, it’s the last straw for Mason – he tells Grace he can’t take any more and it looks as if their relationship is over.  (This is what sends Grace on her way over to Jayden’s house.)  Grace’s refusal to open up to Mason is potentially the most interesting element in Short Term 12.  This is an intelligent young woman who spends her life in a place where people with problems similar to her own receive counselling yet she can’t talk about herself to anyone.   But the implication of – and certainly the emotional inference from – the baseball bat outburst, and, when reconciled with Mason, of Grace’s seeing the embryo of their baby on a screen during a hospital ultrasound, is that she has exorcised all her demons, without ever having confided in Mason.

    Short Term 12 is being described as a surprise hit but is its success really much of a surprise?  The movie doesn’t have big studio backing or huge names in the cast – although Brie Larson (Grace) is well known and John Gallagher Jr (Mason) is already a Tony winner – but it’s done well on the American festival circuit and there’s clearly an audience ready to accept that an independent film like this is bound to be more ‘honest’ than a Hollywood product.  (In fact, the working out of the plot here is facile even by Hollywood standards of solving deep-seated psychological problems.)   Although some of the cast have been encouraged by Cretton to flatten their delivery to give their characters an added ‘reality’, the film is well enough acted – Gallagher and Keith Stanfield, as a teenager called Marcus, are particularly good, and Stanfield’s delivery of a rap that Marcus has written about his unhappy family background is enough to transcend the tired idea behind the performance.  Brie Larson, who occasionally suggests a less glamorous Cybill Shepherd, is very capable and holds the picture together; Kaitlyn Dever (Jayden) and Rami Malek, as a college student working temporarily at the centre, also do well.   But Cretton’s use of a hand-held camera for each crisis and the wimpy score by Joel P West are clichés in this kind of movie and, although I didn’t want to see more blood-letting self-harm among the teenagers than there is, each of their mini-stories is too neatly completed.  Short Term 12 is clearly a tribute to the fostering community.  Mason is one of the beneficiaries of the love of an Hispanic couple who’ve cared for generations of kids – it’s at a genuinely heartwarming party celebrating their thirty years of fostering that Mason proposes to Grace and she feels secure enough to say yes.  Mason is working in the foster-care facility to give something back; Grace wants to help others avoid what she herself has had to go through.  There’s no argument about what a challenging and admirable job these people are doing but that doesn’t make Short Term 12 a challenging or admirable film.

    2 November 2013

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