Daily Archives: Wednesday, January 6, 2016

  • The Fault in Our Stars

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh Boone (2014)

    John Green, the author of the young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, wanted to write a corrective to stories about teenage cancer sufferers that:

    ‘… sort of oversimplified and sometimes even dehumanized them. And I think generally we have a habit of imagining the very sick or the dying as being kind of fundamentally other. I guess I wanted to argue for their humanity, their complete humanity.’

    The film adaptation of the novel, directed by Josh Boone (his second feature) from a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber, more or less succeeds in achieving Green’s aim – in, for me, an unfortunate way.  The three main characters are:  Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), whose thyroid cancer has spread to her lungs; Isaac (Nat Wolff), whom Hazel meets at the support group she unwillingly attends and who loses both his eyes to retinal blastoma; and his friend Augustus ‘Gus’ Waters (Ansel Elgort), who comes along to the group to support Isaac.  Gus’s osteosarcoma is in remission but part of one leg has had to be amputated.  The trio’s vocal and verbal mannerisms and humour make them as tedious to listen to as any able-bodied American middle-class teenager yet I found myself making allowances for this:  I felt I shouldn’t find the kids too annoying because they were terminally ill and/or disabled by their cancer.

    In her opening voiceover, Hazel explains that what we’re about to see is not the usual movie treatment of relationships in the shadow of fatal disease – not a ‘sugar-coated love story soundtracked to a Peter Gabriel song’. To a large extent, though, this is what The Fault in Our Stars turns out to be.  Shailene Woodley is admirable as Hazel but the music, of which there’s plenty, is sweet and wet.  (This goes both for the score, by Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, and the selection of songs by, among others, Ed Sheeran, Birdy and Lykke Li.)  There’s rather little of the physical rigours of Hazel’s and Gus’s terrible illnesses.   The film confirms that, as a subject for screen drama, living with cancer doesn’t compare with dying from cancer or, especially, experiencing the loss to cancer of someone you love.  The action is fairly boring until things start happening, quickly, during the three-day trip which Hazel, her mother Frannie (Laura Dern) and Gus make to Amsterdam.

    The main purpose of the visit is for Hazel to meet Peter van Houten, the author of a novel, ‘An Imperial Affliction’, about a girl with terminal cancer which Hazel reads repeatedly.  (She admires van Houten as ‘the one person who’s been able to describe what it’s like to be dying but who’s still alive’.)  On their first evening in Amsterdam, Hazel and Gus go for a meal in one of the city’s top restaurants, compliments of van Houten, and realise they’re in love.  Next day, they meet the man himself.  The reclusive van Houten (Willem Dafoe) turns out to be a miserable, misanthropic, cruel-tongued bastard.  His mortified assistant Lidewij (Lotte Verbeek), who set up the appointment with van Houten and the restaurant for Hazel and Gus, tries to make things better by taking the young Americans to Anne Frank’s House.  Hazel’s grave respiratory problems make climbing the many stairs very difficult but she struggles to the top and is revived by Anne Frank’s spiritual example and the voice impersonating her on the audio guide.  Back at their hotel, Hazel and Gus have transcendent sex.  They’ve hardly got dressed when Gus reveals that his cancer has returned and metastasised.  This is something he’s known for a while but which he’s kept from Hazel – and, in order to give his news maximum tragic impact, from the audience.

    Shailene Woodley was one of the better things in The Descendants and, as Hazel, her acting is remarkably concentrated and consistent.  She’s very persuasive as a girl who discovers, to her amazement, that she has much more emotional room for manoeuvre than she realised.  Ansel Elgort, although irritating in the early stages when Gus is all grins and disarming jokes, can act, and his look of wholesome good health does make Gus’s eventual demise shocking.  Nat Wolff does well as Isaac.  The parents in the story get a relatively raw deal, though.  With her squinched eyes and brave smiles, Laura Dern, even allowing that she’s playing a mother trying desperately to be positive, is exhaustingly supportive.  Sam Trammell, as Hazel’s strangely boyish and uneasy father, is easier to take but a bit odd.  One of the most interesting moments in the film comes at an early stage, when Hazel says she spends a lot of her time trying to please her parents.  (It’s the reason why she grudgingly agrees to go to the support group.)  This suddenly made me realise that I’d always assumed that perhaps the only consolation of being in Hazel’s position would be that you, the dying child, would be unfailingly indulged.   At Gus’s funeral, Hazel nearly decides not to read the eulogy she’s prepared (and which, at his request, she delivered at a ‘pre-funeral’ so that Gus could hear it) but changes her mind when she sees the stricken faces of his parents.  Her change of heart and realisation that funerals ‘aren’t for the dead – they’re for the living’ are hardly original but they resonate with the earlier pleasing-the-parents insight.

    It also makes sense therefore that, when Peter van Houten suggests that Hazel is used to getting her own way, this particularly infuriates her.  Otherwise, this episode is weak in several respects.  Given that van Houten refuses to answer fanmail, it’s improbable that Lidewij (who doesn’t bother to clear the hundreds of envelopes from the floor of his house) would set up the meeting with Hazel and Gus.  Van Houten ridicules Hazel for wanting to know what happens to the other characters in ‘An Imperial Affliction’, ‘after the novel ends’.  Insensitive though his reaction is, she does seem too old and too intelligent to be asking this kind of question.  You know van Houten is bound to reappear later on, to make it worth Willem Dafoe’s while.  More important, you need to know what effect the shattering and traumatic meeting with him has on Hazel’s continued reading of his novel.  But at least the novelist’s personal circumstances – his young daughter died of leukaemia – aren’t treated as an excuse for his behaviour.  In his final letter to van Houten, Gus describes him as the antithesis of himself – a good writer but a shitty person.

    Hazel Grace Lancaster’s own terminal illness gives her a distinctive perspective on the death of Gus but, since she’ll die ‘after the story ends’, she’s also a familiar figure in a tale of this kind:  the survivor who loses the love of her life.  The Fault in the Stars as a book was a huge commercial success, widely praised by critics, and the film is following in the novel’s footsteps but it would be worth knowing how popular either has been with young men (or young straight men, at least).   More remarkable, though, and hard to argue with, is what the book has come to mean to those of John Green’s readers who are themselves afflicted with cancer, as described in Margaret Talbot’s recent profile of Green in the New Yorker[1]. Green is a big name not only in young adult fiction but also in video blogging:  his online activity and reputation have clearly been a factor in turning The Fault in Our Stars and, by extension, the disease from which some of his and the book’s admirers suffer, into a shared, social experience.

    9 July 2014

    [1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/09/140609fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all

     

  • Fruitvale Station

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ryan Coogler (2013)

    In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, a twenty-two-year-old African-American called Oscar Grant was shot by a transport police officer on a platform of Fruitvale Station in Oakland, California.  Grant, who had been unarmed, died in hospital a few hours later.  The officer, Johannes Mehserle, was charged with first degree murder.  At his trial Mehserle claimed that he’d drawn and used his handgun by mistake – that he’d intended to Taser the young man.  The trial jury was instructed to limit its deliberations to charges of second degree murder, voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.  Mehserle was acquitted of the first two and found guilty of the third.  He received a two-year jail sentence and was released after serving eleven months.  Ryan Coogler’s film (he also wrote the screenplay) begins with footage of the shooting, which was recorded on the cell phones of several witnesses as well as on CCTV.  It ends with news film of a demonstration – with placards asking for Oscar Grant to be remembered and for belated justice to be done – outside Fruitvale Station on the fourth anniversary of the incident.  A few days after this demonstration took place Fruitvale Station was screened at Sundance, where it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for a US drama.  The film went on to take the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2013 and did well in the main American awards season later in the year – with ‘breakthrough of the year’ wins or nominations for Coogler and Michael B Jordan, who plays Oscar, and recognition of Octavia Spencer, who plays his mother, in the supporting actress category.  Fruitvale Station was made, through Forest Whitaker’s production company, for a budget of around $900,000.  Its box office takings worldwide currently amount to something over £17m.

    Apart from a flashback to where Oscar Grant was two years previously, on New Year’s Eve in 2006, the action of Fruitvale Station comprises – and is charged with the knowledge that you’re watching – the last twenty-four hours or so of his life.   Ryan Coogler relies on this knowledge for impact.  He also tends to contrivance in order to sharpen the ironic painfulness of what eventually transpires.  Oscar sits looking out onto San Francisco Bay, thinking about his past and his future:  the flashback to his time in jail for drug-related offences in late 2006 (although this wasn’t the only time he went to prison) causes him such remorse that he throws into the sea the narcotics he’s been planning to sell.  It’s not clear, though, what evidence there really was that he turned over this new leaf on the last day of his life.  Oscar has been fired from the supermarket where he worked.  He returns there on the morning of New Year’s Eve to buy food for his mother’s birthday celebration meal that evening and to try (unsuccessfully) to get his job back.  While he’s at the supermarket, he gets into conversation with, and helps out, a pleasant white woman who’s clueless about how to cook her boyfriend’s favourite meal.  This woman turns up again on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) underground train on which the incident occurs that brings the BART transport police to Fruitvale Station; indeed, she’s one of those who record Oscar’s killing on her phone.  Even if this really happened, which seems highly unlikely, Coogler would have done better not to include it because the woman’s reappearance is too dramatically neat:  someone who could have been a character witness for Oscar turns out to be an actual witness to, and provide real evidence of, his killing.  Outside a garage in the Bay Area, Oscar fusses a stray dog which, a few moments later, is knocked down by a car and fatally injured:  the sequence is, of course, distressing to watch but you know immediately from the deliberate close-up on the animal’s bloody muzzle that this image is going to prefigure blood on the mortally wounded Oscar’s face, and so it does.  There are occasions when Coogler overdoes the poignancy:  the farewell between Oscar and his young daughter Tatiana, as he prepares to go out on New Year’s Eve, is too fraught with significant looks that are held too long.  (On a different level:  there’s a goof in the conversation between Oscar and his mother when she visits him in prison in December 2006.  She talks about Tatiana’s watching WALL-E, which didn’t appear until mid-2008.)

    Even so, Ryan Coogler, who was only twenty-six when he shot Fruitvale Station, has made a first feature that’s not only highly involving but has many fine qualities.  Of course you can’t fail to be shocked and enraged, even with the knowledge of what’s coming, by Oscar’s killing – or by what precedes it:  the fact that the BART police, when they arrive to investigate the aggro on the train, make a beeline for young black men, even though it’s a less than young white man who starts the trouble.  There have been too many other highly publicised instances of racially prejudiced policing in America for you to doubt the truth of what’s shown here.  Fruitvale Station is a film that it was important to make in order to increase public awareness both of what happened in a particular real-life case and of the larger and persisting problem that case epitomises.  (It’s something of a sad irony that Oscar Grant’s death came a few weeks after America had elected its first black President.)  Coogler gets tragic resonance from the small things that Oscar does around the home:  when, the awful morning after, his partner Sophina takes a shower with Tatiana, the sequence begins on the shower head that we saw Oscar turn on at the start of the previous day.  The device of putting up on screen the texts Oscar sends to friends and family has a different meaning once Coogler has shown what else smart-phones can do.  Oscar’s relationships with Sophina and his mother Wanda are convincingly nuanced:  just because there are serious tensions between them doesn’t mean those tensions have to be always salient and Coogler, both in his script and his direction of the actors, is good at recognising this.   For example, Oscar drops a bombshell when he tells Sophina that he’s lost his job but she’s not going to have that spoil their trip into San Francisco to see the New Year fireworks.   You’re primed of course for the catalysing incident on the train to happen and the suspense is increased by its being delayed.  The train is stuck between stations when midnight strikes but frustration about missing the big moment isn’t the incendiary factor:  at this point, the atmosphere on the crowded train, packed with passengers of different races and ages, remains good-humoured.

    As Oscar, Michael B Jordan has strong, effortless audience rapport and I don’t think this is simply because you know what’s going to happen to Oscar and feel sorry about that.  Jordan is especially good at suggesting the thin line between Oscar’s genial exuberance and his irresponsibility.  His appearing in virtually every scene until the fatal shot is fired means that you experience Jordan’s disappearance from the action as a real loss.  A strength of all three main actors – Melonie Diaz (Sophina) and Octavia Spencer (Wanda) as well as Jordan – is in how well they sustain a sense of the difference between what their characters will reveal in public as distinct from private conversation.   This is a particularly powerful element of Octavia Spencer’s performance.  Wanda’s sociable warmth and sense of responsibility seem to be in continuing conflict with her persistent worrying about her son: the climax to this occurs when surgeons are fighting to save Oscar’s life and his mother leads prayers for him in a hospital waiting room.  Exhorting Sophina and his friends to be strong is the way that Wanda keeps herself going.   The moment when she goes in to view Oscar’s dead body is almost an anti-climax, perhaps because Coogler has Wanda voice her remorse:  it was she who advised her son to take the train rather than drive into the city.  Wanda Grant may well have done this but, since the audience is already well aware of it, the director might have done better to let Octavia Spencer’s face do the job that he gives to her lines.  Ariana Neal is beautifully expressive as the child Tatiana and Ryan Coogler directs her with real skill.

    10 June 2014

     

     

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