Daily Archives: Wednesday, October 21, 2015

  • American:  The Bill Hicks Story

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas (2009)

    I wonder how many of the audience in Curzon Soho were already fans or how many, like me, just wanted to find out more about the stand-up comic Bill Hicks.  All I knew of him before seeing this documentary came from John Lahr’s New Yorker profile – and I certainly didn’t remember from that how successful Hicks had been on this side of the Atlantic, in London and Edinburgh, just a couple of years before his death (from pancreatic and liver cancer at the age of 32, in 1994).   It took me some time to warm to him – even to adjust to his vocal rhythms enough to make out what he was saying – but halfway through I started to find Hicks very funny.   It’s frustrating – watching a performer who clearly depended to a large extent on momentum, on taking his political tirades relentlessly to new extremes and new depths – to have to be content with, for the most part, brief fragments of his routines.  But the longer sequences are marvelous:  his take on the Jack Palance villain in Shane (which Hicks uses as the basis for an analogy with America’s arming of smaller nations and then invading them); his rant against PR and marketing, telling those who make a living from them that the only way they can save their souls is through suicide – and repeatedly reminding the PR/marketing members of the audience that ‘You all think this is a joke but it isn’t a joke’.   (This sequence is especially brilliant because Hicks then realises that the PR-oriented will see the moral position he’s taking as admirable because it’s a potential money-spinner; by the time the directors Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas cut away, Hicks seems to be losing the upper hand.)

    After introducing the line-up of those who are going to tell Hicks’ story, Harlock and Thomas mostly ensure that these witnesses – his family and friends from childhood and/or the stand-up world – are heard but not seen, or not seen as interviewees at any rate.  The directors mix bits of footage (most of them pretty rough video recordings) of Hicks in performance, with photographs of him and those who are talking about him.  Often, the photographs are pasted into a physical context – a car, a dinner party, and so on – which is then animated, in a very basic way.    It’s distracting at first and, although you soon get used to it, I could never quite rid myself of the idea that Harlock and Thomas were making a conscientious but rather strained attempt to make a motion picture, avoiding the conventional documentary combination of archive film and talking heads.  But conscientious is better than facile and it seems very right, at the point at which Hicks’ illness is diagnosed, for us then to start seeing the witnesses as themselves – the abrupt change underlines the shock that the news was to all concerned.

    American: The Bill Hicks Story is a rather pompous title yet I ended up feeling it was true to its subject’s spirit.    Bill Hicks seems a truly constructive satirist – he has a world view (peace/love/forgiveness, using the US defence budget to feed the starving, etc) that he’s eager to recommend in preference to the ones that he excoriates.  But there are occasions, and especially one of his last performances, when he’s evidently using stand-up as soapbox:  it really isn’t a joke.   This may be the consequence of his awareness of imminent death – but you still wonder, if Hicks had lived on, quite how he would have developed as a comedian.   Harlock and Thomas appear to endorse the view of some of the witnesses, and the implied view of the man himself, that Hicks was a patriot – someone whose anger about what was wrong with his country was intensified by his love for it.   It’s suggested too that, in spite of using his Southern Baptist parents as continuing grist to his satirical mill, Hicks believed strongly in family.   This may well be true (although I’m not sure that returning home when you’re terminally ill clinches the argument).  What’s striking is that it’s through the loving testimony of Hicks’s mother, brother and sister (his father died shortly after Harlock and Thomas started making the film) that you become convinced of the strength of family ties – especially in what we hear from Hicks’s mother Mary.   Her persistent loyalty and pride in her son’s success made her immune to the subversive content of what he was saying onstage.   And he is an inspired performer.  Bill Hicks was no oil painting – his jowly, pasty face makes him look less than a picture of health from early in his career and we hear plenty about his struggles with various addictions – to alcohol, nicotine and other narcotics.   (When he gets angry, his looks can call to mind Kathy Bates in a rage in Misery.)   But I doubt if a non-smoker could have got the comic mileage out of hacking into a microphone that Hicks gets.  The way he simulates the sounds of exploding bombs is incredible too:  even when he’s not using words, he plays the mike like an instrument.

    17 May 2010

  • Macbeth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Justin Kurzel (2015)

    How many children had Lady Macbeth?   The question posed in the title of L C Knights’s famous essay of 1933[1], in which Knights mocked critical approaches that sought to analyse Shakespeare’s characters as one might analyse the characters in a modern naturalistic drama or novel, is answered immediately in Justin Kurzel’s film of Macbeth.  A child’s funeral is taking place; the grieving parents are the title character and his wife.  Any viewer already familiar with Shakespeare’s play will know that Macbeth has no heirs.  To that extent, this funeral scene is superfluous backstory on the Macbeths; it also suggests the kind of treatment that L C Knights believed had no place in Shakespearean literary criticism.  Perhaps the couple’s bereavement explains what they get up to next; perhaps the overwhelming trauma of losing their only child triggered psychological disturbance that caused the murders for which the Macbeths are responsible?  It’s a relief that this silly implication is never followed up by Justin Kurzel – but that’s only because, like so much else in this Macbeth, the opening scene is there only for instant and transitory effect.

    I realise that, when you’re working on a production that cost upwards of $15m, commercial pressures oblige you to go beyond filmed Shakespeare into making a film out of Shakespeare.  The landscape created by Kurzel, his production designer Fiona Crombie and his cinematographer Adam Arkapaw is remarkable to look at – simultaneously blasted and ardent.  (The film was shot mainly in Northumberland and on the Isle of Skye.)  For all I know, Jacqueline Durran’s costumes and the military paraphernalia may be spot on for eleventh-century Scotland.  But Kurzel’s priorities are far removed from the themes of the play:  I came to feel he was merely using Shakespeare as a pretext for the creation of grandiose, often obvious images and, especially, for scenes of warfare and violence.  As a result, the film is remarkably boring.   If the words ‘Macbeth does murder sleep’ are spoken, I didn’t hear them (see below); but Justin Kurzel, in murdering Macbeth, has made it soporific.  I was glad when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, assuming the movie was into the final furlong, but I was wrong:  the final showdown between Macbeth and Macduff is gruesomely protracted.  (Although it’s also gory to an almost comical degree – there are moments here that bring to mind the bloodshed in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)  The brutal ‘realism’ of Kurzel’s staging of the killings doesn’t extend to his rendering them in immediately believable terms:  when Duncan is stabbed, the assassin’s position in relation to his victim makes Macbeth too physically vulnerable; in the climax, Macbeth capitulates to Macduff just when he’s perfectly placed to finish off his nemesis.

    The screenplay, credited to Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie and Todd Louiso, cuts many of Shakespeare’s lines, and fair enough:  this is inevitable in a film with a running time of less than two hours.  What’s unacceptable is that much of what remains of the text is inaudible – especially from the two leads.   Michael Fassbender is a disappointingly limited Macbeth although it may not be the actor’s fault when he gives a scene an empty surprise twist.  In other words, he plays a moment in a way that you (a) didn’t expect and (b) realise, after the initial impact of the surprise, doesn’t make sense.  (A bizarre example of this occurs when Lady Macbeth has died:  her husband takes her corpse in his arms, and addresses it with a detached curiosity that drifts into an almost spiteful pleasure – as if to say:  ‘You’re dead but I’m not!’)   Marion Cotillard is somewhat more interesting but she seems prematurely vulnerable – impatient for Lady Macbeth’s disintegration.  While Cotillard maintains an English accent with some effort, I think Fassbender intends a Scottish one – though he doesn’t manage it as well as some others.

    The better work is in supporting roles: David Thewlis as Duncan (Thewlis is suddenly ubiquitous – not that I’m complaining); Sean Harris as Macduff.   Harris seems to have taken to heart the complaints about his inaudibility in the BBC’s unhappy dramatisation of Jamaica Inn last year:  he speaks clearly and is the most facially expressive performer in the film.  This is in spite of the fact that, like several others in the cast, Harris appears to have been told by Justin Kurzel to convey impassionedness by grasping a fellow actor’s head, holding it an inch away from his own, placing his thumbs on the sides of the other actor’s face, and emoting for all he’s worth.   In contrast, if I hadn’t known beforehand that Paddy Considine was playing Banquo, I’m not sure I’d have recognised him – it’s hard to see his face as well as to make out what he’s saying.   The cast also includes some actual Scots, like David Hayman (Lennox), Hilton McRae (Menteith) and Maurice Roëves (Macdonwald).  The weird sisters are effectively played by Seylan Baxter, Lynn Kennedy, Kayla Fallon and Amber Rissmann.  (I didn’t miscount:  there are four of them, eventually anyway.)

    5 October 2015

    [1]  The essay’s full title is How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?  An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism. 

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