Daily Archives: Wednesday, December 16, 2015

  • Her

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Jonze (2013)

    Her is a fine idea but proof that you can have too much of a good thing.  At 125 minutes, it’s way too long – and, if you know the running time beforehand, punitive because it’s obvious so soon what’s in store.  Even so, I like the film, for various reasons.  It’s good to see something that’s visually extraordinary and crucially verbal, something that belongs unarguably on a cinema screen but isn’t a blockbuster.  The story is set in Los Angeles in the near future – much of it was shot in Shanghai in 2012, which brings the future nearer (and also perhaps explains the striking number of Asians in evidence in this version of LA).  The interiors of office buildings and apartments – elegant, eerily spacious, impersonal – are a remarkable piece of design.  (The DoP is Hoyte van Hoytema; the production design is by K K Barrett and Gene Serdena.)  I like Her also because it’s science fiction with imagination although those with a better understanding of computer games and the potential of IT may be less impressed by this aspect than I was.  The main character is the tweely-named Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix).  He falls in love with the her of the title – his computer operating system, aka Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).  Spike Jonze creates the world of this relationship carefully and cleverly. Theodore, who earns a living writing letters for other people, is going through a divorce.  If he feels lonely, he can go through prospective night-time conversation partners as easily as switching channels on a TV remote.  It’s suggested at one point that relationships of the kind that Theodore and Samantha develop are unusual but not exceptional.  Yet it’s a decisive – from Theodore’s point of view, a shocking – moment when he realises with just how many operating system users Samantha has a personal relationship:  she is talking with 8,316 others, of whom, she says, she’s fallen in love with 641.  The effect of this revelation on Theodore doesn’t make much sense.  In the world of the film, why wouldn’t it have occurred to him before, especially in view of his job in the personal communications industry?

    Her isn’t a jeremiad about technology taking over human lives.  While this is part of the culture being described, it isn’t the moral of the story:  it’s a relief that Spike Jonze isn’t interested in making such an obvious and potentially censorious point.   The film’s subject seems rather to be a familiar one, placed in a distinctive context:  the difficulty of sustaining a relationship.  But there’s another difficulty in this film, one of Jonze’s own making.  Perhaps it’s intentional that the main characters speak in the same way – that halting yet eventually metronomic, struggling-to-find-the-words-I-need-to-say-how-I-really-feel tempo.  Whether intentional or not, the effect is dulling.  The confidential tone in conversations is virtually a monotone and, because I struggled to hear much of what was being said, the rhythm and register of the voices really dominated.  It’s energising when Theodore and his ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) have lunch together.  She gets annoyed and, just for a moment, there’s tension in the air.  Joaquin Phoenix is one of the actors I now most look forward to watching on screen and casting him as the benign, passive Theodore Twombly is certainly interesting.  I was fearful before seeing Her that Phoenix in this role might merely be subduing the emotional conflict and volatility which delivered a fine performance in Walk the Line and an even better one in The Master.  This doesn’t happen:  Phoenix gets right inside Theodore and the many tight close-ups reveal nothing false.  The problem is rather that he gets too far inside the character – he’s likeable and witty but he seems submerged.

    As Theodore’s friend Amy, Amy Adams is terrific – as free and as varied as I’ve seen her – in the first half of the story.  (As she showed in Junebug, she has a real flair for comedy.)  Later on, as things go wrong for Amy – her own marriage disintegrates – and she turns melancholy, Adams’s playing is less engaging.  Witty as Scarlett Johansson is, there’s a similar disappointment with Samantha’s voice once the mood darkens.  After going nowhere fast for a long time, the climax to Her seems hurried but I wasn’t sorry.  Shortly before Theodore’s discovery that Samantha is common property, she briefly goes offline and he panics that he’s lost her.  In this sequence, the speed at which both the film and Joaquin Phoenix suddenly move is a shot in the arm.   The ending is disappointingly conventional:  Theodore writes his own farewell letter to Catherine and there’s a suggestion that he may be about to embark on a relationship with a real girl in Amy.   With Olivia Wilde as a blind date for Theodore, and Portia Doubleday as a sex surrogate who simulates Samantha.  (Neither evening ends well.)

    16 February 2014

  • To Sir, With Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Clavell (1967)

    A big box-office hit, especially in America, where the title song (by Don Black and Mark London) reached number one and, amazingly, ‘was Billboard magazine’s #1 pop single for the year’.  To Sir, With Love is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by E R Braithwaite, about his experiences as a teacher in the East End of London, but the film – although it’s fairly entertaining – has no connection with reality.  Mark Thackeray, born in British Guiana and newly arrived in England via the US, has a degree and wants a career in engineering.  He gets work as a secondary school teacher in the meantime.   The story has the potential for moral uplift x 2 because Mark is black and the schoolkids are from poor families and/or broken homes.   In fact, the racial element is pretty muted.  It climaxes with the funeral of the mother of the (one!) mixed race boy at the school but perhaps climax is the wrong word since there’s no build-up.  Although Sidney Poitier as Mark appears to be the only negro in London, there’s a not a hint of tension or prejudice or people staring at him, when he travels to work on the top of a double-decker or goes shopping in the local market.  Just about the only racially abrasive remarks we hear come from one choleric and cynical member of the teaching staff (Geoffrey Bayldon), who likens Mark to a ‘Lamb to the slaughter … or should I say black sheep?’ and mentions black magic, voodoo, etc.  Some of the kids ask Mark about the black women they’ve seen in a television ‘travelogue’ (their word – although it seems an unlikely one for them to use).  That’s about it

    Mark keeps exhorting the kids to behave like adults but who’d want to be an adult if it turned you into someone as humourlessly dignified as he is?   It’s pointless to take issue with the casting of Sidney Poitier, even though he gives off an air of visiting royalty throughout.  The makers of this British film must have been thrilled to get him for the role and the commercial success of To Sir, With Love was no doubt thanks largely to Poitier’s celebrity, at its peak in 1967 (when Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and In the Heat of the Night were also released).   Poitier is a lot more likeable on the rare occasions that he loosens up, as when Mark talks excitedly about the food and drink he enjoys – the news that he has an appetite for something other than moral improvement is a real relief.   Apart from Bayldon, who gives his primitive role some depth, and Patricia Routledge, vividly eccentric in one of her few big-screen appearances, the school’s small staff are a dreary lot.  Edward Burnham is inoffensive as the head but Faith Brook is abominably stagy as his deputy and Suzy Kendall vapid as a pretty young teacher who seems too tentative even to decide whether she fancies Mark, let alone do anything about it if she does.   Outside the school itself, Rita Webb is, unsurprisingly, the standout.

    The most amazing piece of information I’ve dug up about this picture is that, according to IMDB, To Sir, With Love earned James Clavell a Directors’ Guild of America nomination.   I can’t remember when I last saw a film made with such flagrant ineptitude.  (That’s not true:  July 2008:  Mamma Mia!)   When Mark takes the kids to a museum, the montage of stills of the outing, accompanied by the title song (which I’ve always liked, and which Lulu sings well, but which doesn’t merit as many reprises as it gets), hardly seems to be direction at all.  When the school kids cross the racial divide and turn out for their classmate’s mother’s funeral, the camera pans across their smiling faces; Clavell keeps is there until the grins have frozen. (Why are they smiling anyway on such an occasion?)   This is only the worst instance of a cut taking forever to happen.   A sequence in the school gym when Mark, who’s taking a boxing class for reasons I’ve forgotten, is provoked into throwing a punch is ineffably crude.  Clavell also did the screenplay and you get the distinct impression of clumsy abbreviation of the source material.   The school seems meant to be distinctively liberal in its educational approach but there’s no real explanation of what that approach is.  Mark’s class are about to leave school but there’s no mention of what they’re going to do next until Clavell sticks in a bit about careers near the end.  When Mark gets a job as an engineer, he doesn’t appear to have a crisis of conscience about leaving teaching.  That might sound a welcome omission; as a result, though, he then decides to stay where he is and to turn down the engineering job for no other reason, apparently, than that the kids give him a tankard as a thank-you present.

    The young actors playing Mark’s class mostly overact working-class boredom and low educational accomplishments.  No matter how inarticulate the kids are supposed to be, their lines sound elocuted.  They sustain their Cocker-knee ecksintz with considerable effort, except when Clavell forgets who they are socially.  (At the end-of-year social, one girl greets another with a surprising ‘You look marvellous!’)   Lulu was only eighteen or nineteen when the film was made – perhaps it’s because she was already so experienced and groomed as a pop star that she looks about thirty-five, older than exact contemporaries like Adrienne Posta (who makes less impression than I expected) and Judy Geeson (who’s too classy but luminously pretty as the schoolgirl with none of the mousy teacher’s qualms about acting on her feelings for Sir).  The boys are less lively than the girls, although Christian Roberts and Christopher Chittell both give decent performances.   In one of the dreariest exchanges in the film, the kids tell Mark Thackeray they’re rebels because they don’t respect adults, who’ve made a mess of the world.  When you hear this, you suspect that this younger generation does, after all, have the potential for the pompous censoriousness they’ll need to become grown-ups as dreary as Mark is, and wants them to be.  They’re probably Daily Mail readers now.

    3 July 2010

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