Daily Archives: Thursday, January 7, 2016

  • Written on the Wind

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Douglas Sirk (1956)

    This was the third Douglas Sirk movie in as many years starring Rock Hudson and his presence is – as it often is, in retrospect – puzzling and affecting.  But this is the first Sirk film I’ve seen which helps me to understand, a little, the fuss about his work, especially its visual schemes.  I’d seen Written on the Wind once many years ago – perhaps on a black-and-white television.  At any rate, I was unprepared, in spite of Sirk’s reputation, for the extraordinary colouring of the settings, not just outside – the bursts of flame-coloured foliage, the day-glo red and yellow cars owned by, respectively, the messed-up sister (Dorothy Malone) and brother (Robert Stack) at the heart of the story – but also by the colour combinations indoors.  At one point, Lauren Bacall in a green dress is at risk of being eclipsed by the vibrancy of a green lampshade.  Considering how the colouring of many big Hollywood films of the 1950s has faded, the look of Written on the Wind, on television anyway, remains sharp and vivid.  The combination of the artful lighting, by Russell Metty, and the stylish artificiality of the decor and backdrops has a strongly claustrophobic effect.  Kyle Hadley (Stack), the feckless, alcoholic scion of a Texas oil baron (Robert Keith), and Lucy Moore (Bacall), the secretary he’s swept off her feet, arrive in a Florida hotel.  The view from their window is so luxuriously fake that it suggests an elaborate mural rather than a world outside their room.

    In spite of the brief lampshade challenge, Bacall doesn’t need brilliant colours to shine.  She’s often dressed in more subtle tones (Bill Thomas did the gowns) and she wears them all superbly.  Bacall, although she gives an unusually nuanced performance here, isn’t a great actress but she is unquestionably a star.  The look of Written on the Wind is so persistently startling that it struck me more than once that only someone with her magnetism could compete with the non-human visuals.  When Dorothy Malone eventually appears as the sexually voracious Marylee Hadley, she too is more than able to hold her own.  This isn’t entirely a compliment, though:  Malone incarnates the spoilt rich bitch perfectly but Sirk has either encouraged or allowed her to overplay so relentlessly that she seems to be putting on a show rather than playing a character.  It was enough to win Malone a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.  She is often amusing but she’s usually ludicrous too.

    Rock Hudson moves hesitantly through this cornucopia wearing a brown suit.  He plays Mitch Wayne, who Jasper Hadley took a shine to when Mitch and Kyle were boyhood pals and who’s turned into the son the old man always wanted.  (Mitch is also still attentive to his own poor-white-trash-but-decent father (Harry Shannon).)  Mitch, a geologist, is an exasperated but long-sufferingly loyal friend to Kyle but their relationship comes under extreme strain when Kyle more or less pinches Lucy, with whom Mitch fell in love at first sight, from under his nose.  It’s Marylee who’s crazy about Mitch but he tells her he can be only a brother to her.   The script, then, supplies Rock Hudson with reasons to look solemn as the gentlemanly Mitch but these are not enough to account for the pall of unhappiness the actor generates.  It’s virtually impossible now to resist reading onto his performances the discrepancy between his Hollywood image and his private personality and sexual orientation; the more I see of Hudson, the more I think it’s not only legitimate to do this but clear that he was a better actor than he was given credit for at the height of his fame in the fifties.  (And 1956 was perhaps his best year:  Hudson’s performance in Giant – a very different drama about Texas and oil – gained him the one Oscar nomination of his career.)

    Watching Hudson now, you see not the wooden, inexpressive performer he was reckoned by many to be but an actor unable to perform in the way expected of the film type that he was.  It’s as if he couldn’t sustain the fiction of his public and screen persona, even when he was pretending to be someone else in a film.  While it might be argued that if he’d been a first-rate actor he would have been able to do this, I get a sense that in dramatic roles like this one Hudson drew on his own miseries and created a truth.  That truth didn’t come through because it wasn’t what people expected a he-man film star to transmit.  (I suppose I’m suggesting he was drawing on himself because I assume Hudson’s life to have been unhappy and because there’s a recurring melancholy in his presence on screen, whenever the movie isn’t explicitly a comedy.)  A comparison here with Montgomery Clift is interesting.  Hudson, although I think him underrated, obviously wasn’t the great actor that Clift was; and it was probably no easier for Clift than for Hudson to combine Hollywood stardom with being homosexual.  But it was easier for audiences to recognise and accept thoughtfulness and sensitivity in Clift’s performances because those qualities soon became, and were accepted as, an integral part of his screen personality.

    Truthfulness is not, of course, a necessary or even desirable commodity in the lushly unreal world of Written on the Wind.  It has a rather jarring effect, not only in the absorbing, opaque medium of Rock Hudson but in the more easily readable form of Robert Keith’s strong characterisation of old man Hadley.   As the doomed Kyle, Robert Stack is a rather different proposition.  Kyle fears that he’s sterile and won’t be able to keep the Hadley dynasty going.  The denouement of Written on the Wind depends on his disbelief then paranoid reaction to Lucy’s news that she’s pregnant.  Stack gives this juicy part – which includes plenty of drunk scenes – everything he’s got but that’s not too much.  His playing is forceful and holds your attention but it lacks variety and surprise.   So does the piece as a whole.  In spite of the momentum and conviction of Sirk’s direction, the story – from a screenplay by George Zuckerman, based on a 1946 novel by Robert Wilder – is melodramatic trash.  But the movie is at least thoroughly melodramatic.  Douglas Sirk never lets up from the moment a gale starts blowing for the opening credits (not, at least, until the last few minutes of the film, which are largely anti-climactic).  There is a theme song – music by Victor Young, words by Sammy Cahn, both having an off day.

    6 July 2012

  • The Descendants

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Payne (2011)

    I knew before seeing it:  (a) this was the story of a family in Hawaii and centred on the father Matt, a lawyer preoccupied with his work and emotionally neglectful of his daughters; (b) the family’s lives were turned upside down when the mother Elizabeth was injured in a powerboat accident; (c) Matt discovered that Elizabeth, now lying unconscious in hospital, had been unfaithful to him.  I assumed that, even so, Matt would, while his wife was out of the picture, learn to be the father he never had been, Kramer vs Kramer-style.  I didn’t know that it would soon be revealed that Elizabeth had suffered irreversible brain damage and that it was only a matter of time before her life support was turned off.  A long time, as it turns out:  The Descendants is tediously maudlin and it comes as a relief when the wife expires.  Before that happens, she’s been on the receiving end of angry and/or tearful bedside monologues from Matt, from her elder daughter Alex, and from the wife of the man with whom Elizabeth with had been having an affair.  The hospital room has also heard various exchanges of cross words between Elizabeth’s nearest and dearest.  There were moments when, listening to all these overwritten home truths, I felt the brain-dead patient was better off than the audience.  Still, the deathbed verbiage isn’t as bad as Matt’s voiceover, which dominates the early stages, as he explains situations and characters which are already obvious.  On his way to pick up Alex from her boarding school on ‘another island’, he looks down from the plane window at the ocean and islands and muses that, ‘A family feels exactly like an archipelago … separate but part of a whole and always drifting slowly apart’.  This insight seems to be enough to shame even Alexander Payne and his co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (their screenplay is adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings).  After a while, the voiceover is heard no more.

    Payne had a deserved success with his last feature Sideways – a comedy with depth and a secure tone – but The Descendants is much more like his previous feature About Schmidt, which veered clumsily between poignancy and easy laughs.  This latest effort also recalls not only Kramer vs Kramer but another multi-Oscar winner of the period, James Brooks’ Terms of Endearment, which  Pauline Kael summed up as follows:  ‘At the end, the picture says, “You can go home now–you’ve laughed, you’ve cried.” What’s infuriating about it is its calculated humanity.’  I neither laughed nor cried during The Descendants (seeing it less than a week after War Horse underlines how unaffecting it is) but this shallow, unoriginal film is getting plenty of praise and prizes.  One reason may be that, while this kind of stuff – an unhappy middle-class family moves through crisis into a sadder-and-wiser, tentatively hopeful tomorrow – was a nearly annual feature of the Academy Awards thirty years ago (Kramer vs Kramer, Ordinary People, On Golden Pond, Terms of Endearment in the space of five years), it hasn’t had the same Oscar-winning prominence in more recent times.  (It’s noticeable that, as in Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People, the family in The Descendants finds its salvation in reuniting father and children, and getting rid of a problematic mother.)  Perhaps the most depressing aspect of The Descendants is that it can be seen as refreshingly different from most of what else is around now.  The second most depressing aspect is the lead performance.

    George Clooney is notoriously not a family man in real life and he hasn’t been a father in his best-known film roles to date (except, somewhat incidentally, in Syriana – and in Fantastic Mr Fox).  This is why his work here is getting such accolades.   It’s the casting-against-type path to glory:   Clooney isn’t playing someone with a handicap or in the physical disguise that is often the best way of an established star’s getting a different kind of attention.  But, as Matt King in The Descendants, he’s not himself.  There are moments in the early stages when he’s impressive – as when a doctor tells him Elizabeth’s condition is hopeless and Matt’s face goes dead and he disappears inside himself for a few seconds.  But, for the most part, Clooney’s acting is unusually effortful.  This is because he’s straining for human depth that certainly isn’t supplied by the script and possibly isn’t accessible to him as an actor.  He’s often compared with Cary Grant and, although the comparison is facile and in some respects inaccurate, they do share, I think, an ability to make essentially shallow characters magnetic and fully engaging.  Up in the Air isn’t eventually a satisfactory film but Clooney’s brilliant performance in it seems to sum up his complex appeal.   Watching tears appear repeatedly in his eyes and eventually trickle down his face in The Descendants feels to me almost like a betrayal of this appeal yet George Clooney trying to be a conscientious husband and father seems to be reassuring to a lot of people.  The attempt gives him a new (bogus) dignity and maturity.  It’s bad enough when Oscars are awarded to actors who aren’t very good.  It’s infuriating when they go to those who usually are but not in the roles that win the prize (the Sean Penn in Mystic River syndrome).

    The title of The Descendants refers both to Matt’s daughters and to the King family more largely – wealthy landowners in Hawaii for several generations.   The film’s subplot concerns the Kings’ plans to sell 25,000 acres of unspoilt land on the island of Kaua’i for development.  Needless to say, reappraisal of his priorities causes second thoughts in Matt’s mind about this bigger inheritance picture.  In time-honoured melodramatic fashion, he decides not to go ahead with the sale at the moment when his pen is poised to sign the deal.   Alexander Payne doesn’t bother to show us what happens when Matt is put in the tricky position of having to explain his decision to a public meeting of his large extended family, which will mostly be hostile to the news of his U-turn.  This omission is in striking contrast to an earlier scene when he rounds up the neighbourhood to inform them, his voice trembling with emotion, that Elizabeth is on the way out.   Since Matt is meant to be so preoccupied with work and money that he doesn’t notice what’s going on his close family, this speech to the massed ranks of the Kings’ ‘dear friends’ makes no sense – beyond providing George Clooney with another opportunity to show his underdeveloped sensitive side.   The Descendants is very lazily plotted.  I can’t pretend to regret that the tensions between Matt and his elder daughter aren’t resolved slowly and painfully but, as it takes only a scene or two for them to be getting on fine, you wonder what the problem was in the first place.   Seventeen-year-old Alex has a boyfriend called Sid who, at first, is alarmingly boorish.  On a visit with Matt and his daughters to Elizabeth’s parents, Sid laughs at something the mother says, failing to understand that she has advanced dementia (as if no one would have explained that to him beforehand).  But, once he and Matt have gone through a couple of regulation spats, Sid turns simply affable.  (I’d briefly dropped off at the time but Sally explains that the official turning point occurs when Sid reveals to Matt that his own father died recently:  in other words, he too has known pain and loss and so must be a decent human being.)   The younger child, Scottie, is ten yet she’s entirely unconcerned by her mother’s condition and incurious about whether it’s going to change.   This is purely in order that, when the doctors break it to Scottie that Elizabeth is about to die, the child can be taken by heartrending surprise.  I expected the screenplay to be as manipulative, but not as perfunctory, as it turns out to be.

    Shailene Woodley (Alex) and Amara Miller (Scottie) are good as the daughters, although the appeal of the younger girl often depends on the familiar idea of having a little kid say outrageous things (as if these can’t be hurtful coming from one so young).  Woodley doesn’t try and ingratiate herself and there’s a mildly interesting dissonance in the suggestion that Alex’s new-found enthusiasm for her father is impelled less by love for him than by a desire to expose her mother’s adultery.  Nick Krause is Sid and Elizabeth’s lover Brian is played by Matthew Lillard:  this is a thankless role to start with and casting an actor whose face is not his fortune seems a cheap shot.  (You seem to be meant to think:  how could Elizabeth cheat on George Clooney with a man that looks like that?)  Until her ludicrous outburst in the hospital, Judy Greer gives a nicely judged performance as Brian’s wife.  Although it’s an obvious one, Robert Forster brings some grit to the role of Elizabeth’s adoring, ornery father and Beau Bridges gives flavour to his two scenes as one of Matt’s many cousins, all involved in discussions about selling the land.   The other cousins include a mysteriously wordless Michael Ontkean.  (According to Wikipedia, he now lives on Hawaii so maybe he just turned up for the occasion.)  The beautiful landscape is photographed by Phedon Papamichael but the film isn’t visually inventive.   The two images I think I’ll remember are both underwater ones.   The first is when Matt breaks the news about Elizabeth to Alex.  She’s in a swimming pool and she goes under to keep her initial reaction to herself (even so, the moment might be more expressive if we saw her disappear and reappear and were left to imagine her face in the intervening seconds below the surface of the pool).  The second is after Matt and the girls throw Elizabeth’s ashes into the sea, and leis along with them.  We see the submarine garlands and, beside them, a white shape.  The younger child has asked at an earlier point, ‘Can I swim with the sharks?’, and for a second I thought it was a shark we were seeing and what a remarkable composition this was.  But it’s only the underside of the boat.

    28 January 2012

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