Daily Archives: Sunday, October 18, 2015

  • Like Crazy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Drake Doremus (2011)

    This is a small-scale film but it’s beautifully acted and detailed, and the precise emotional dynamic – of individual scenes and of the movie as a whole – is not a minor achievement.  Anna (Felicity Jones) is a middle-class, English home-counties girl, studying journalism on an exchange year at college in Los Angeles.  It’s there she meets Jacob (Anton Yelchin), who is going to design and make furniture.  They fall in love; when the time comes for Anna to return to England, she decides impulsively to stay on for a few more weeks, beyond the date on which her visa expires.   This harmless infringement of the rules defines the couple’s relationship in the months – shading into years – that follow.  Anna is turned back by American immigration control when she first tries to get back to LA.  So Jacob has to keep coming to London, where Anna has a flat and is developing a promising career as a magazine writer.  But Jacob is also doing well at work – his furniture commissions keep taking him back across the Atlantic; and he shares his bed with Sam (Jennifer Lawrence), who helps out in his office, both before and after he marries Anna, on one of his visits to England.  Anna too decides, once she’s married to Jacob and the increasing strains on their relationship threaten to destroy it, to start one with someone else – Simon (Charlie Bewley), a posh, dull young man, who’s a neighbour in her apartment building in London.  Anna’s decision to ignore the end date of her visa so she could stay longer with Jacob is what prevents their living together in the longer term.  Because of the black mark on her immigration record, even a marriage certificate isn’t enough:  their attempts to get the paperwork they need through the American Embassy in London are repeatedly thwarted.  But when, after much legal wrangling, they succeed, Anna leaves Simon and flies straight out to rejoin Jacob.  Like Crazy (words Jacob carved on a chair he made for Anna in the early days of their relationship) ends on the evening of the reunion in LA, when both are coming to realise how hard – probably impossible – it’s going to be to settle down as husband and wife.  They apprehend how much of what held them together, or at least kept driving them back to each other, was a bloody-minded refusal to give in to being separated.  The consequences of not giving up have been emotionally exhausting.  All that battling against the odds has drained their love.

    It’s clear from the very start of the relationship that Anna means business and that she’s the more determined character: she’s the one who urges the marriage and who insists it can work, through an act of will.  It’s also evident at an early stage that Jacob is relatively relaxed.  He accepts it’s time for Anna to go back to Britain and expresses (mild) doubts about her decision to stay on in LA.   I was expecting Like Crazy to be an unequal love story, a demonstration of how the sunny, before-life-starts-in-earnest affair between Anna and Jacob means much more to her than to him – a piano variation on the theme of The Way We Were.  We can see Jacob is more easily enamoured than Anna; we assume he’ll fail to live up to her demands.  But the screenplay, by Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones, is more complex than that.  Anna and Jacob both keep trying to do the simple thing, to live and grow apart, but it keeps not working.  Anna’s intransigence sometimes oppresses Jacob yet it infects him too.  And when they are together, they have a lovely time until the complications in their arrangements spark tension and rows.  In the final scene of the film, the couple take a shower together.  She wants to clean up after travelling from London; he says he’ll join her as if in the hope that this physical intimacy will force a closeness that neither of them is feeling.  Standing in the shower, Anna has two momentary flashbacks to their early times together – flashbacks that make you aware how long ago these seem to you as well as to her.  The couple and we have come a long way.  Our sympathy with them is completed by the realisation that, like Anna and Jacob, we so much wanted things to work out for them that we lost sight of the fact that this was becoming an end in itself.   The victory is a dismaying anti-climax for the audience too.

    Felicity Jones registered in her small role in Chéri in 2009 but the delicate incisiveness of her acting here is a revelation; she’s physically slight but she uses that slightness to convey a surprising combination of aspects.  In the early scenes, Anna is almost embarrassingly conscious of her charms; she turns from posy elf to terrier in the course of the film – a young woman who’s more admirable than she’s likeable.  Anna’s a spoilt only child and, when she’s wailing to Jacob on her mobile that the LA immigration people won’t let her through, I thought it served her right for her impatient selfishness over the visa – yet it’s hard not root for her in her sustained efforts to overcome this fatal error.   Anton Yelchin is a fine partner for Jones, with his open, pleasant looks and his rather odd physique (a stocky upper body and skinny legs).   As his on-off girlfriend in America, Jennifer Lawrence is more easily expressive than I found her in Winter’s Bone.  This third feature by Drake Doremus isn’t perfect.   The progression of time by jump cut montage gets to be mannered and Dustin O’Halloran’s score is too wistful too soon – it limits the emotional frame of the film.  But the dialogue is excellent – and it never feels improvised in an aimless, saying-things-just-to-keep-a-dynamic-going way.   (According to Wikipedia, Felicity Jones has said in interview the piece was ‘fully improvised’.)   It’s no mean feat for a young Californian (Doremus is only twenty-eight) to get the nuances of middle-class England as right as this.   (It’s something Woody Allen hasn’t come close to achieving.)  Jones, and Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead as her parents, convey precisely but with a light touch the family’s social status.  And Doremus, with the help of his two leads, is very good at creating slightly tense atmospheres in which you can feel a full-scale row brewing.  Like Crazy is a bittersweet pleasure.

    31 January 2012

  • The Monuments Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Clooney (2014)

    Sally and I went to a subtitled-for-the-hard-of-hearing show.  This was primarily because it was the only show all week that we could manage but it didn’t seem a bad idea anyway:  we’ve both been finding so much inaudible recently.  The irony is that The Monuments Men can’t be faulted on this score:  the actors speak clearly but you’d be better off not hearing most of George Clooney’s and Grant Heslov’s dialogue.   It was hard not to laugh at the literal conscientiousness of the subtitles – ‘metal clanking’, ‘inaudible muttering’ – although these didn’t include ‘crap jaunty music by Alexandre Desplat’, perhaps because it’s nearly continuous, except in the occasional solemn moments.  It was obvious that something had gone badly wrong with this picture:  the Oscar buzz of early 2013 vanished in the course of the year and The Monuments Men eventually opened in the US in the dead zone of early February.  The film, loosely based on real-life events (which were also the basis of John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964)), tells the story of how a small group of American museum directors, curators and art historians formed an army unit in Europe in the closing months of World War II, with a mission to find and save numerous works of art from Nazi destruction.  The Monuments Men is so bad that it’s impossible to discern what George Clooney intended but you know it’s going to be bad from the word go, when Frank Stokes (Clooney) delivers his pitch about the proposed mission to Franklin D Roosevelt.  (Stokes debriefs Harry Truman in a matching creaky postscript.)  The movie never settles into any kind of coherent tone:  it veers between Ocean’s bro-mancing and attacks of noble sentimentality – many of the exchanges are so corny that Clooney might be spoofing antique wartime dramas.   Desplat’s annoying score is nothing if not consistent; Clooney’s overuse of it may be an admission that the same can’t be said for anything else in the film.

    This material does provide a challenge to a commercial film-maker, one that’s reflected in Frank Stokes’s reminder to his colleagues that a work of art can never be more important than a man’s life.  Few people in the audience, philistine or otherwise, are likely to react to the recovery of a priceless painting as they would react to, say, the salvation of refugee children.  This challenge is also what makes The Monuments Men potentially distinctive but realising that potential depends on rich characterisation of Stokes and his team; the viewer needs to understand their passion for the cultural artefacts they’re looking to rescue.  Instead, the movie is full of jingoistic nonsense of what you’d hoped was a bygone era.  There are some laughable examples of this:  the non-Americans in the team (Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin) are the ones who are killed off; the rapid switch, in May 1945, from German to Soviet soldiers being the baddies is unintentionally revealing.   Other instances can’t be dismissed so easily:  particularly offensive is Clooney’s cross-cutting between a grievously wounded soldier on an operating table and Bill Murray and Bob Balaban (two more of the monuments men) listening to ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, played over forces radio and bringing homesick tears to their eyes.   Stokes’s colleagues also include Matt Damon and John Goodman.   Just as Julia Roberts was allowed to join in the boys’ fun in Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve (though not Ocean’s Thirteen), so Cate Blanchett is the only woman with any kind of role in The Monuments Men.  She’s Claire Simon, a museum curator in occupied France, frumpish and spiky at first but warming up when James Granger (Damon) comes for dinner.  When he says to Claire he’s never seen her smile before and wonders what’s caused it, she answers:  ‘After all, this is Paris – and it is springtime’.  Cate Blanchett is ridiculous in this role in the way that only a major actor applying their skills to swill can be.  Her lines are by no means the worst, though.   When Stokes says (of Hitler) to Granger, ‘He wanted it all’, Granger replies, as if he’s saying something very different, ‘He wanted everything’.   At the mention of Ghent, another member of the arty half-dozen (or so) asks, ‘What was in Ghent?’  When he’s told that the Ghent altarpiece was in Ghent, he exclaims, ‘You mean they’ve stolen the Ghent altarpiece?!’

    It’s a cause for relief that George Clooney has no talent for delivering the pompous tripe about art and culture that he and Grant Heslov have written for Frank Stokes to speak.  Thanks to his core of humour, Clooney sounds as if he’s struggling to take the lines seriously.   But The Monuments Men is his fifth feature as director and there’s less and less reason to think he’s going to amount to the film-maker some of his admirers expected on the basis of his first two efforts.  This latest – in which nearly every scene is blah and arrhythmic and there’s nothing even to suggest the picture has lost shape as a result of anxious work in the cutting room – is so much worse than the others that, for the time being, it can be dismissed as an aberration.  But Clooney’s filmography as a director is looking increasingly egocentric:  he’s appeared in all five of his movies to date, has had a leading role in most of them and goes one stage further at the end of The Monuments Men.  When President Truman congratulates Frank Stokes on what he and his team have achieved, he nevertheless asks Stokes, ‘Do you think anyone will remember this in thirty years’ time?’   Clooney duly flashes forward thirty years:  we see a well-preserved elderly man and a small boy, presumably his grandson, admiring the Madonna of Bruges, one of the treasures recovered by Stokes’s men.   The old chap is played by Clooney’s non-actor father, Nick.

    25 February 2014

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