Daily Archives: Thursday, December 24, 2015

  • Bridesmaids

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Feig (2011)

    Bridesmaids was seen by some critics as an historic fusion of male grossout movies and chick flicks.  This is almost entirely because of the sequence in a high-end bridal shop.  Food poisoning grips the girls in a fanfare of farts, a tumult of throwing up and diarrhetic explosions.  The episode culminates in the bride-to-be rushing into the street, sinking to the ground in the capacious white wedding dress she was trying on, and shitting herself.  The essence-of-fragrant-femininity setting – the threat of the damage that upset stomachs might do to the pristine furnishings and costumes – makes this excremental showstopper almost perfectly symbolic of what the producer Judd Apatow, the writers Annie Mumolo and Kirsten Wiig, and the director Paul Feig, have been praised for doing in Bridesmaids but it’s just about the only grossness in the picture.  (I’m not complaining about that.)  The bride is Lillian (Maya Rudolph).  The central character in the story is her childhood friend Annie (Kirsten Wiig), the current man in whose life is a self-admiring user called Ted (Jon Hamm).  Annie’s bakery business went bust, she’s now a sales assistant in a jewellery store and her cynicism is such that she can’t help telling lovestruck customers that the good times won’t last.  Lillian asks Annie to be her maid of honour.  Another of the bridesmaids is Helen (Rose Byrne), the fatuously glamorous, control freak wife of Lillian’s fiancé’s boss.  From the moment they meet at Lillian’s engagement party, Annie and Helen are at loggerheads with the latter trying to take charge of the wedding preparations.

    The film is clever.  It alternates between comedy set pieces – Annie and Helen’s spiralling eulogy competition at the engagement party, Annie making a scene on the plane taking the girls on a bachelorette trip to Las Vegas, Annie trashing the elaborate bridal shower Helen arranges for Lillian – and more realistic conversations between pairs of characters, chiefly Annie, Lillian, the latter’s prospective sister-in-law Megan (Melissa McCarthy) and an amiable highway patrolman called Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd), who pulls Annie in for broken tail lights on her car but soon realises that he’s attracted to her.  These conversations, although they maintain a comic tone, are played in a style that encourages people to think Bridesmaids contains ‘truthful’ human elements under the exuberant comedy.  That’s an attractive combination and there’s no difficulty understanding why the film was such a hit but I had problems with it.  First, something the film-makers can’t help:  the big social events that precede the wedding itself.  Bridesmaids does satirise what a huge production number getting married has become but it does so only through exaggeration of the engagement party and bridal shower proceedings.  It doesn’t suggest that these required rituals aren’t integral to matrimony, whereas the very idea of them scares me.  Second, the character of Annie:  the structure of the story demands that things have to keep getting worse for her until the inevitable recovery starts but the setbacks go on for so long and Annie gets so pissed off that, likeable though Kirsten Wiig is, she becomes tedious.  The pep talk that Megan delivers to Annie, which is not just verbally candid but physically aggressive, is very welcome.  Third, the eventual comic payoffs – the dismissal of the jerk Ted, the capitulation of bossy Helen (who seems back to nearly normal by the time the wedding actually happens) – aren’t what they might be, especially given how long you’re kept waiting for them.  (Bridesmaids would have been better if it had lost ten or fifteen of its 125 minutes.)

    The quietness of the scenes featuring Chris O’Dowd as Rhodes is, from an early stage, a relief.  As the film goes on, Rhodes is increasingly distinctive and simpatico because things matter to him:   when Annie, after they’ve slept together, offends him, it takes Rhodes time to get over the hurt.  Elsewhere, the lack of emotional residue becomes problematic and this is because the actors are able to suggest real people.  Maya Rudolph in particular makes Lillian essentially believable and down to earth so that you don’t believe she would accept as readily as she seems to all the froth and hype around the wedding (or easily forget the trauma of crapping in the street).  I know this may seem to be taking Bridesmaids too seriously but you can’t have it both ways – that is, have the cast doing real yet treat whatever happens as weightless because it’s-only-a-comedy.  Melissa McCarthy’s performance won deserved praise – she plays the abrasively eccentric Megan staight and true and, as a result, she’s also very funny.   The two other bridesmaids – the jaded, foul-mouthed Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey) and the dimly naive Becca (Ellie Kemper) – are there to make up the numbers and character contrasts.  Although the part of Ted is thin, Jon Hamm is better in it than he has been in other big screen roles:  he seems more comfortable when there’s a sexual arrogance to the character he’s playing.  It’s both enjoyable and sad to see Jill Clayburgh, in her last screen role (she died before the film was released), evidently having a good time as Annie’s droll mother.  Tim Heidecker has an agreeable ordinariness as the groom-to-be.  He and Melissa McCarthy are amusingly right as brother and sister.  Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson are the unlovely siblings who are Annie’s flatmates.  McCarthy’s real-life husband Ben Falcone is the federal air marshal who ends up in Megan’s bed.  Mitch Silpa is excellent in the small part of a flight attendant who keeps his temper with fine sarcastic control.

    11 June 2014

  • Cape Fear

    Old YorkerFilm review

    J Lee Thompson (1962)

    All I remember from the Scorsese remake in 1991 is (a) Sally walking out in protest at the violence (this turned out to be only two minutes before the end but it’s the thought that counts) and (b) Nick Nolte slipping in a pool of blood in the kitchen of the Bowden family home, where the vengeful bogeyman Max Cady (Robert De Niro) has murdered the private detective working for Sam Bowden.  I saw the original Cape Fear years before the remake appeared and I did recall being scared by the climactic fight between Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum in the dark waters of Cape Fear.  J Lee Thompson’s version, from a screenplay by James R Webb (based on a 1957 novel, The Executioners by John D MacDonald), was made at a time of greater moral certainty in America, and with a star whose upstanding screen (and off-screen) persona made the invasion of the lawyer Sam Bowden’s life by the ex-con Cady a rupture of the fabric of the Hollywood universe.  Preparing to see the Thompson film again, however, I thought there was a risk, with Robert Mitchum in the role of Cady, that I wouldn’t take him quite seriously enough – something of a problem for me even in a nearly great picture like The Night of the Hunter.

    In fact, Mitchum’s indolence works increasingly well in Cape Fear.  For much of the movie he suggests a born troublemaker rather than a sexual psychopath – but that makes Max Cady’s eventual assault on Sam Bowden’s wife Peggy (Polly Bergen) and daughter Nancy (Lori Martin) all the more startling.  (These roles were played by Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis respectively in the Scorsese film.)  Robert Mitchum also gets you to believe that Cady is past caring.  When, in their final confrontation, he encourages Sam to shoot him, Cady says as much and you know that he means it.  In contrast, Gregory Peck’s stiff rectitude is annoying even as Sam is being menaced and his loved ones are stalked by Cady.  After trying and failing to bargain with him, Sam is told by Cady what he did to his (Cady’s) ex-wife. Sam’s dismissal of him as a ‘degenerate’ in response is so pompous you feel the hero deserves what’s coming to him.  Peck’s moral irreproachability is inviolable.  This blurs what Sam Bowden has to resort to in order to save his family’s lives:  Peck isn’t a nimble enough actor to express the ethical conflicts of a situation unless the script dramatises them explicitly, and that doesn’t happen here.  Sam Bowden believes too much in justice to kill Max Cady as requested and thus finally confirms that he’s A Good Man – Gregory Peck is more comfortable with this bit.  The self-righteousness of Peggy Bowden is even worse; you want to hit her when she reassures her husband that their daughter will see the ordeal through because she’s ‘pioneer stock’.  There’s a striking contrast between the daughters in the two versions of Cape Fear.  Juliette Lewis is sexually precocious as the renamed Danielle in the later movie.  In the original, Lori Martin as Nancy looks fourteen going on thirty-five and suggests a spinster rather than a virgin.

    There’s some weak plotting – the upright and supposedly vigilant Bowden parents keep doing things that put Nancy in harm’s way – and Bernard Herrmann hadn’t got Psycho out of his system when he wrote the score:  J Lee Thompson’s overuse of the music serves to emphasise the gulf in quality between Hitchcock’s masterpiece and Cape Fear.   Even so, I think this version is better than Scorsese’s.  It’s well and frighteningly lit by Sam Leavitt and Thompson skilfully gets across the rhythms of life in the Georgia town where the story takes place, and the destruction of those rhythms.  Martin Balsam and Telly Savalas both provide strong support.  In the Scorsese film, Sam Bowden, as a public defender, had represented Max Cady in a rape trial but used tactics to ensure Cady’s conviction.   In Thompson’s version, Sam had given evidence to the trial as a prosecution witness, having seen Cady at the scene of the crime.  That’s a better idea.  It makes sense that it’s what Sam did as a private citizen, rather than as a lawyer, that comes back to haunt his perfect family life.

    26 November 2012

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