Daily Archives: Sunday, October 11, 2015

  • Mirror Mirror

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tarsem Singh Dhandwar (2012)

    In Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer recalls how, as a child, he was aroused by the Wicked Queen in Disney’s Snow White.  Alvy’s precocious deviancy is taking on a new meaning in 2012, which will see the release of adaptations of the Grimms’ fairytale featuring Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron.   The Roberts film is first out of the gate and the star’s beauty is one of the most interesting things about it.  When Julia Roberts’ Queen Clementianna (sic) intones ‘Mirror, mirror …’ and prepares to ask the famous question, you may feel mildly irritated:  she must know the answer.   The looking-glass sequences are sometimes rather unsatisfying.  Once the Queen looks into the mirror on the wall, it becomes a portal to a house on a bleak, isolated island.  The reflection she sees is a different self – a mildly censorious conscience who appears pallid and (to me) rather older than the middle-aged woman looking into the glass.   (I couldn’t believe this was intended and indeed Wikipedia describes the mirror image as ‘a younger, wiser version of her, dressed in simple country clothes, suggesting the Queen had truly humble beginnings’.)    Otherwise, though, Julia Roberts is as fascinating to look at as ever.   Her shocked, incredulous shout of laughter when the Queen learns that Snow White is still alive recalls the famous moment with the jewellery case in Pretty Woman.  When good triumphs over her evil, the Queen is looking in the mirror:  in a reverse Dorian Gray effect, her face instantly ages and withers as the one in the glass remains unchanged.  At the wedding of Snow White and her prince, Roberts turns up – a shawl-shrouded crone – bearing the poison apple.  The old lady make-up is excellent but what you chiefly notice is that Julia Roberts’s bone structure is as good as ever.

    Offered the apple, Snow White thinks twice, slices it neatly and offers a piece back to the donor with a crushing ‘Age before beauty …’  That putdown gives a flavour of Marc Klein’s and Jason Keller’s dialogue.  There isn’t a character in Mirror Mirror who isn’t, at some point, knowing and ironic; many of the lines are good and all the actors handle them wittily.  But however much the director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the writers (Melisa Wallack also gets a credit) and the cast send up the original or the sugared manicheism of the Disney classic, they’re still stuck with the problem that Snow White is a dreary goody two shoes.   The film-makers understandably aren’t prepared to go the whole way and have the Wicked Queen win out; their solution to the problem is therefore to make Snow White somewhat cool to a younger audience because she can stand up for herself physically.  The same goes for the seven dwarves:  in the forest where much of the film’s action takes place they dart around on snazzy black stilt-legs that turn them into the tallest guys in the kingdom and accomplished bandits.  Of course the Grimms’ stories contain a variety of violent elements but I wasn’t expecting from this modernising take on Snow White so many protracted CGI fights, which also feature a fantastical beast unleashed by the Wicked Queen at strategic moments.  These sequences may well be the key to box-office success for Mirror Mirror but they detract from its distinctiveness.  The fights got on my nerves so much that I became impatient for the whole film to end and was relieved this Snow White was smart enough to decline the apple and deliver a short cut to the happy ever after.

    This is frustrating because, in other respects, the technical accomplishments of Mirror Mirror remind you how completely live-action cinema can now deliver the magic that was once largely the preserve of animated film:  the visual effects are, as far as I can tell, flawless – figures materialise and dematerialise, creatures are metamorphosed with vivid precision.  The set design is stylish and the costumes by Eiko Ishioka, who died shortly after completing work on the film, are beautiful and imaginative – a ball at which the guests wear various animal motifs and the Queen’s sinister swansdown wedding gown are perhaps the highlights.  (It’s a pity that Snow White’s wedding outfit is the weakest thing in the wardrobe – the royal blue dress and enormous orange sash suggest an expensive Easter egg.)  Alan Menken has written a serviceable score and the wedding party sing along to ‘I Believe in Love’ over the closing credits in Bollywood-cum-Slumdog Millionaire style.

    Lily Collins as the heroine has remarkably hairy black eyebrows:  when Queen Clementianna is asked to describe her stepdaughter and she’s trying to be as bitchy as possible, you can’t believe she doesn’t choose these very salient details of her appearance.   Collins acts well enough, though.  Armie Hammer impresses again, as the prince who keeps losing his dignity and his shirt – he’s both a gent and a twit, as his name, Prince Andrew Alcott, might suggest.  Hammer has Prince Charming looks which are also peculiarly modern.  He uses his sonorous voice to amusing effect.  Nathan Lane, a superb comic actor, has spot on timing as the Queen’s factotum.  The cast also includes Mare Winningham, Michael Lerner, Robert Emms and Sean Bean, as the King (Snow White’s father) who turns out not to be dead at all.   The dwarves are played by actors of genuinely restricted growth – Ronald Lee Clark, Joe Gnoffo, Martin Klebba, Mark Povinelli, Jordan Prentice, Sebastian Saraceno and Danny Woodburn.  Each has a reasonable supply of good lines and their seven enjoyable characterisations are strongly complementary.

    10 April 2012

  • King and Country

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph Losey (1964)

    At the start of King and Country (which is shot in black and white by Denys Coop), the camera moves slowly across the stone figures of soldiers on a war memorial.  There are photographs of the Great War (from the Imperial War Museum collection); and the voice of Tom Courtenay, who will play a major role in the drama that follows, reads A E Housman’s lines:

    ‘Here dead we lie
    Because we did not choose
    To live and shame the land
    From which we sprung.

    Life, to be sure,
    Is nothing much to lose,
    But young men think it is,
    And we were young.’

    These images and words are very powerful:  all that detracts from their power is the awareness that King and Country is directed by Joseph Losey, who, whenever he has an important socio-political message to convey on screen, can be relied upon to convey it with arty overemphasis.   King and Country – adapted from a stage play by John Wilson (which was based on a 1955 novel, Return to the Wood, by James Lansdale Hobson) – dramatises the court-martial of Arthur Hamp, a British army private, accused of desertion.  Hamp (Courtenay), who, in civilian life, worked as a cobbler in Islington, volunteered at the outbreak of war; by the time of Passchendaele, in late 1917, Hamp is  the sole survivor of the company of which he was originally part.  As he explains to Captain Hargreaves (Dirk Bogarde), the officer who will be defending him, Hamp suddenly realised that he couldn’t stand soldiering any longer; he walked away from his colleagues with the idea of carrying on walking all the way back to London.  The defence offered by Hargreaves in the trial is, in effect, one of diminished responsibility.  Hamp is found guilty, nevertheless, and sentenced to death by firing squad.

    At eighty-eight minutes, King and Country is concise and the two lead actors make it absorbing but nothing matches the grave eloquence of the prologue.  Unless the stage play has been fundamentally reworked, much of the polemical crudeness of the writing is an inheritance rather than the invention of the screenwriter Evan Jones although this crudeness may have appealed to Losey.  Within a few seconds of the start of the first long dialogue between Hamp and Hargreaves, the director is inserting momentary images of Hamp’s London background:  these either are sentimental or supply sledgehammer irony.  (For example:  Hamp explains to Hargreaves that his wife has gone off with another man; Losey cuts to the man, supposedly Hamp’s friend, who sits smugly in bed with a verse from holy scripture embroidered on the wall hanging behind him.)  This exchange between Hargreaves and Hamp, like most of what follows, is predictably one-sided:  the young soldier’s simplicity and honesty unintentionally but persistently discomforts the more sophisticated officer, breaking down the latter’s initial snooty impatience.  Once into the court martial proceedings, it’s Hargreaves who has all the good lines against the opposition – the canny but uneasy presiding colonel (Peter Copley), a bellicose, blustering medical officer (Leo McKern) – even though the result of the trial is a foregone conclusion.  While this is going on, Hamp’s fellow soldiers try to entertain themselves in the foul trenches by conducting a trial of one of the plentiful rats and carrying out the death penalty on one of the poor creatures.  The juxtaposition is nothing if not obvious.  When Hamp is eventually executed, the firing squad is so incompetent they fail to finish him off; the remorseful but responsible Hargreaves steps in to do the job.

    King and Country is tough to watch, partly because of the intrinsically upsetting subject matter but partly too because of the way the thing is done:  the film is, in artistic terms, easy to see through and to dismiss; its subject deserves better.  It’s hard, though, to see how the two main parts could be better played.  Tom Courtenay, more theatrical than Dirk Bogarde, shows a lot of skill and invention as Hamp:  Courtenay’s especially good at suggesting someone whose emotional alertness is much greater than his intellect.  Bogarde embodies the morally divided Hargreaves perfectly – almost too perfectly:  his casting, at this distance in time, seems obvious.  The essential qualities of Bogarde’s screen persona have, in combination, a curious effect:  exuding intelligence, he carries in his face and his bearing the burden of British officer class guilt; but he also suggests that Hargreaves may be sexually attracted to Hamp.  (And, when Hamp’s mates get hold of alcohol and get themselves and the condemned man drunk on the eve of his execution, the physical and emotional intimacy is on the cusp between the homosocial and the homosexual.)  Except for Barry Justice, odd but arresting as the conscience-stricken officer who offers legal advice to the court-martial judges, the characterisations are as obvious as the script expects them to be although Peter Copley and James Villiers (as the officer prosecuting Hamp) both give decent performances.  The hopeless role of the army padre is hopelessly played by Vivian Matalon.  According to a piece that David Thomson wrote for Sight and Sound in June 2014 about the cinema of World War I, the conditions for filming King and Country were all too real for the cast and crew.  Yet Losey’s direction turns the mud and the rain into part of the overly deliberate aesthetic design.

    2 August 2014

     

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