Monthly Archives: October 2015

  • Zero Dark Thirty

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kathryn Bigelow (2012)

    For what it is, Kathryn Bigelow’s account of ‘The Greatest Manhunt in History’ – for Osama bin Laden – is very well done.  And what it is is a series of expert reconstructions – of post-9/11 terrorist attacks and, in the movie’s climax, the raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011.   A legend at the start explains that what we’re about to see is ‘based on first-hand accounts of actual events’.  This statement is carefully worded and completely ambiguous.  It could mean that the witnesses to the events in question told a pack of lies.  It certainly means that Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal can do what they like in presenting or departing from what really happened.  Zero Dark Thirty has generated controversy – about how the film-makers gained access to classified information and for the ‘pro-torture’ position which some commentators have inferred from the film.   The torture scenes – mainly the interrogation of a man with links to Saudi terrorists – dominate the first part.  For me, they came across not as a political statement but as an uneasy compromise between fact and fiction.  These sequences, grim as they are, don’t have the rawness of actual filmed footage.  They’re underdeveloped as drama because the characters involved don’t mean very much to us at this stage – although one of them, a young CIA operative called Maya who is the movie’s main character, comes to mean more.   This foreshadows an essential and pervasive limitation of Zero Dark Thirty.

    Because Bigelow’s priority is to create brilliantly realistic action set pieces, it’s difficult for the actors to blend in with the movie’s style and still register.  Some of them blend in at the expense of being interesting – Jason Clarke (as Maya’s fellow officer, Dan), Joel Edgerton (the leader of the Red Squadron that carries out the Abbottabad raid), Chris Pratt (a US Navy Seal).  Edgerton and Pratt are just about indistinguishable.  At the opposite extreme, Jennifer Ehle (another CIA officer) registers by hogging the camera:  she destroys the rhythm of Zero Dark Thirty every time she appears.  Given what Kathryn Bigelow seems to be trying to do, the casting of Ehle is bizarre.  Her playing is not only attention-getting but arrogant:  in her precise calculation of every detail and how the camera will pick this up, Ehle looks to be trying to invite comparison with Meryl Streep.  (There is no comparison – although there is an irony in seeing an imitation of the acting technique of a genius of imitation.)  There are other surprising pieces of casting.  As a senior officer in the Agency, Mark Strong gets off to a really bad start:  he storms into a room full of downplayed CIA colleagues and acts his head off.  He’s much better in quieter moments later but Strong’s effort not only to sustain an American accent but to make it sound natural (it doesn’t) sticks out of the faux-documentary texture.  Stephen Dillane as the National Security Advisor looks to be keeping the lid on what he really could do.  Only two of the actors succeed in staying in context without a loss of animation – James Gandolfini as the CIA boss and Jessica Chastain as Maya.

    As written by Mark Boal, Maya is a pretty cliched character.  At first, we see her physically flinch from the torture in which she’s participating in a way that her male colleagues don’t.  Then she turns into a woman with more balls than any of the men around her.  In a meeting to discuss the suburban compound in Abbottabad, Maya interrupts the cautious language coming from round the table by introducing herself to the Gandolfini character as ‘the motherfucker who found this place, sir’.  When, later on, Gandolfini asks the team whether they think it’s bin Laden who’s in there, Maya blasts through the tentative 60% probability ratings of the men:  she’s 100% sure – then downgrades to 95% ‘because I know certainty freaks you guys out’.   I was no less certain that, once bin Laden had been killed, the film would end with a shot of Maya wondering, after devoting the whole of her recent life to the hunt for him, what the hell she would do next.  Jessica Chastain makes everything about Maya more interesting than it deserves to be.  She may look rattled as she stands in the torture chamber but she speaks strongly and definitely to those on the receiving end of waterboarding etc.  In that final shot, she expresses genuinely mixed feelings, which include relief and distress.  Chastain’s nuanced straightforwardness is a refreshing contrast to the clenched, monotonous intensity of Claire Danes as the supposedly bipolar heroine of Homeland, even though Bigelow and Boal occasionally nudge Maya’s character in the same direction as Danes’s – for example in her angry, repeated scrawling on the glass of her superior’s office door of the number of days that have passed without progress in taking bin Laden.  (There’s also a senior CIA man seen on his prayer mat, which recalls the Muslim the Damian Lewis character has turned into in Homeland.)   The excitement of Jessica Chastain’s alert acting comes less from what she’s doing here than from thinking of the range of characters she’s already played and the prospect of what may be to come.  Maya isn’t satisfying because she’s essentially a character in a documentary – and further removed from the centre of the movie than the Jeremy Renner character was in The Hurt Locker.   In one sense, it’s pleasingly unconventional that Kathyryn Bigelow, during the climactic raid on the bin Laden compound, doesn’t keep cutting back to Maya’s reactions.  But this isn’t self-discipline or imagination on the director’s part:  she’s not that interested in Maya anyway.

    The individual impact of each of the series of terrorist attacks depends largely on your familiarity with it.   Any British viewer is going to know what will happen to the London bus on 7 July 2005 and, in my case, exactly where it will happen.  I didn’t know, or had forgotten details of, the Camp Chapman attack in 2009, so this was more startling.  A legend announcing the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad immediately rang a bell but I have to thank Jennifer Ehle for taking me by surprise in this episode:  I was so mesmerised by her selfish acting that I’d forgotten a bomb was going to go off in the hotel restaurant.  During the final assault in Abbottabad, I admit the main suspense for me consisted in whether we would get sight of bin Laden (the sight we didn’t get on real-life television news).  The editing by Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg, excellent throughout the movie, is never better than it is inside the compound and in the aftermath to the raid – in what you do and don’t see.  The Abbottabad raid is impressive in other ways too – like the weird, alarming combination of masked sci-fi-ish faces, weeping kids and screaming women that recur on the screen as the Seals penetrate deeper into the compound.

    Sally, who really liked the film, felt this whole extended sequence reminded you of how variously hazardous the operation was:  I think this confirms that Bigelow’s ideal viewer is someone who, like the director, is primarily interested in the meticulous recreation of real events.  I guess I approached Zero Dark Thirty more as a moviegoer – and what’s amazing in reality is par for the course in a live action dramatic film.  By the same token, Bigelow keeps the atmosphere of the raid scrupulously bleak but, if you’re watching as someone primed to distinguish heroes and villains, you’ll want the Seals to get their man.  The movie is fully realised – on its own terms – in this final section.   Elsewhere, Bigelow seems less decisive.  She starts with what’s presumably an actual recording of a conversation with someone trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Removing the usual images of the day is obviously meant to make this introduction more powerful; because this effect is so calculated, it’s actually rather offensive.  The text on screen during the film – alternating indications of where and when events are taking place with chapter headings (‘The Meeting’, ‘Tradecraft’, ‘The Canaries’ etc) – suggests a lack of confidence in the narrative’s ability to cope by itself, without these signposts.  Like many of this year’s front runners for awards, Zero Dark Thirty is too long (157 minutes) but at least time passes more quickly as the film goes on.

    2 February 2013

  • Late Spring

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Banshun

    Yasujiro Ozu (1949)

    Noriko Smiling, Adam Mars-Jones’s 2011 essay on Late Spring, made me want to see the film and I liked it – not as much as Mars-Jones’s erudite and entertaining book but more than An Autumn Afternoon.  The themes and storyline of the two films are similar but Late Spring has a tighter focus on the relationship between a father and daughter, and what the young woman’s marriage will mean for them both.  Noriko (Setsuko Hara), an only child, keeps house for her widowed father, Professor Somiya (Chishu Ryu), on the outskirts of Tokyo.  Somiya’s sister, Masa (Haruko Sugimura), persuades her brother that it’s high time the twenty-seven year old Noriko was married.  Neither father nor daughter is keen for their domestic life together to change.  The drama of Late Spring is centred on how both come to accept that it must change.  As always, it takes a little time to adjust to the disjunction between the words in the subtitles and the Japanese actors’ faces and tones of voice.  It was Chishu Ryu, now more familiar and so easier to read, who drew me into the story.  Ryu’s Somiya fights quietly but compellingly against feelings of self-interest:  he’s affecting in his anxiety about the prospect of losing Noriko to another man; in his sadness when he recognises that she will marry; and, especially, in his resigned melancholy when he returns home after her wedding.  I found Setsuko Hara a more gradually acquired taste.  In the early stages, Noriko’s giggling modesty seems too much (when Aunt Masa suggests that Noriko alter a pair of her uncle’s trousers and takes these from a bag, I thought the giggles were even mistimed).  But Setsuko Hara is an increasingly strong presence, especially when Noriko’s feelings are not so obviously expressed.  I must admit that, as usual, I found it easier to interpret the pantomime of the actors with more Western features – like Jun Usami, who plays Somiya’s assistant Hattori.  Haruko Sugimura’s match-making Masa is readable for a different reason; the character is an obvious one.

    Somiya at first suggests that Hattori might be a good husband for Noriko, who laughs at this ridiculous idea:  the young man, she explains to her father, is already engaged.  Hattori is nevertheless keen to spend time with Noriko.  They go on a cycle ride together and he then invites her to accompany him to a violin concert in Tokyo – an invitation that Noriko declines.  I assumed that this signalled, rather than a change of heart, Noriko’s alertness to social convention; that accompanying Hattori to a concert would be unacceptably public (even though the bike ride to the seaside and Noriko and Hattori’s conversation there allows for greater intimacy between them).  Noriko’s most startling sexual attitude is expressed in her reaction to the remarriage of her father’s colleague Onodera, whom she bumps into during a shopping trip to Tokyo.  Like Somiya, Onodera (Masao Mishima) was a widower and has a daughter.  Noriko tells him – although with a characteristic smile on her face – that she thinks his second marriage is ‘dirty’.  Onodera subsequently reminds Noriko, twice, of this.  He does so humorously but the sense that Noriko was serious in what she originally said persists under the jocular tone of Onodera’s later conversations with her.  Noriko is obliged to think again when she actually meets Onodera’s second wife and perceives her to be a decent woman – but has her mind already been changed by the threat of her own father’s remarrying?  (And, by the time she meets the new Mrs Onodera, Noriko is herself preparing to be married.)  The threat of a stepmother for Noriko takes the form of Mrs Miwa (Kuniko Miyake), a widow who is introduced to Somiya by Aunt Masa.  When Somiya and Noriko go to a Noh play, the widow is also in the audience and Noriko sees her father smile at Mrs Miwa:  Noriko’s jealousy and horror at the prospect of losing her father to another woman are plain to see.  (To put it mildly:  even allowing that the rest of the audience are concentrating on the onstage performance at the theatre, Noriko’s face is too obviously miserable in reaction to the smiles exchanged between Somiya and Mrs Miwa.)

    This clearly raises questions about the nature of Noriko’s love for her father.  Adam Mars-Jones rejects the school of Late Spring thought that sees her as a Daddy’s girl with an Electra complex.  I agree that’s a reductive reading of Noriko’s complex personality yet it’s one that’s hard to ignore when, after Noriko’s wedding, Somiya mentions to his daughter’s friend Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka) that he pretended he was going to marry Mrs Miwa in order to persuade Noriko to marry.  This suggests that Noriko is, by her father’s ruse, forced to recognise that he is going to have a new partner so she may as well get a new partner too.  (Does she also think the idea of Mrs Miwa is so ‘dirty’ that she would rather separate herself from Somiya?)  The bedroom arrangements of father and daughter, when they visit Onodera and his new wife in Kyoto, are also immediately surprising to a Western viewer.  Soniya and Noriko sleep on futons in the same room, side by side:  one assumes that’s not unconventional but the mutual regret both father and daughter express that this time in Kyoto will be the last they spend together as a couple is harder to ignore.  So is the fact that Satake, the man whom Noriko marries, never appears in the film.  Late Spring, which Ozu and Kogo Noda adapted from Father and Daughter, a short novel by Kazuo Hirotsu, was particularly topical on its release in 1949.   The new Japanese constitution effective from 1947 made it easier for a woman to divorce her husband – as Aya in Late Spring has recently done.  From the start of 1948, those aged twenty or over were allowed to marry consensually without their parents’ agreement.  Noriko is so strongly individualised, though, that it’s hard to see her as representative of young women of her generation more generally.  This is partly a result of Setsuko Hara’s characterisation but it’s partly already in the script:  Aya reminds her friend that, of all the girls in their class at school, only Noriko and one other girl have not yet been married.

    I understand that the Noh performance is central to Late Spring and may well give the film its title:  according to Wikipedia, the work being performed ‘is called Kakitsubata or “The Water Iris.” (The water iris in Japan is a plant which blooms, usually in marshland or other moist soil, in mid-to-late-spring)’.  Even so, the Noh sequence is punitively long. I don’t really get Ozu’s ‘pillow shots’ either.  But he presents vivid images of Japan under American occupation.  The most obviously striking is a Coca-Cola sign on the beach where Noriko goes with Hattori but there are other American – specifically Hollywood – references.  Aunt Masa recommends Satake to Noriko as a suitable husband for reasons which include his facial resemblance, Masa claims, to Gary Cooper – ‘especially his mouth … but not the top half’.  The bridal music on the soundtrack as Noriko leaves home for her wedding incorporates here-comes-the-bride phrases familiar at the matrimonial climax to countless American films of the period.

    27 February 2015

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