Daily Archives: Friday, January 8, 2016

  • Sunset Song

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Davies (2015)

    The critical reception of Terence Davies’s latest has been cooler than it was for some of his earlier films:  it’s less easy to be contrarian about this new movie than about Of Time and the City or The Deep Blue Sea.  Sunset Song describes the coming of age of a Scottish girl, Chris Guthrie.  According to Robert Hanks’s review of the film in Sight & Sound (December 2015), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel is ‘rooted in the landscape and rural culture of the Mearns, south of Aberdeen, where Gibbon was brought up, and written partly in Doric, the local dialect …’   Davies has wanted, for many years, to bring Gibbon’s story to the cinema screen.  It was a financial struggle to the end but you’d never guess it from the look of Sunset Song.  Davies and the cinematographer Michael McDonough have produced a handsome piece of work.  As usual with this writer-director, it’s also a determinedly gloomy one.

    In 1911, crofter’s daughter Chris (Agyness Deyn) is coming to the end of her schooldays.  She’s the brightest pupil in her class and wants to go on to higher education.  Her family moves to another tenancy in the Mearns area.  (The new farm is called Blawearie – a perfect name for the main setting of a Davies picture.)  Chris’s father John (Peter Mullan) is a puritanical Christian, a chauvinist and a sadist.  He continues to exercise his conjugal rights although his wife (Daniela Nardini) is far from robust.  When the Guthries’ eldest son, Will (Jack Greenlees), displeases John, he gets horse-whipped by his father.  Mrs Guthrie gives birth to twins after a very difficult labour; shortly afterwards, she discovers she is pregnant again.  She takes her own life, and the lives of her babies.  Chris and Will’s two surviving younger brothers are taken in by relatives.  Will emigrates to Canada.  Only Chris is left to keep home for John and help him on the farm.  She must abandon all thoughts of training to be a teacher but, when her father suffers a stroke and dies, she is an independent woman.   She is courted by Will’s friend, Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie).  They marry and have a child.  It is now 1914.

    Terence Davies gives auteurism a bad name:  his work is clearly identifiable often because it’s merely predictable.  At one point in Sunset Song, John Guthrie takes on an itinerant labourer and tells Chris the man must sleep in a barn rather than in the farmhouse because he’ll be riddled with lice.  Chris takes the man’s food to the barn and stands with the tray.  The labourer, sitting in the hay, touches her lower legs and rolls down her stockings.  The effect is almost disgusting:  this man, whom we’ve already been warned is unclean, now seems dirty in a different way and somehow to threaten the chaste Chris with infection.  Davies then cuts to Chris alone in her room:  she undoes her nightdress and inspects her nakedness in the bedroom mirror.  It seems the pawing labourer has caused a sexual awakening in the girl.  As you knew he would.  Chris and Ewan’s happy courtship, followed by the survival of mother and baby in childbirth, is more surprising.  I liked the way Davies used the flight of stairs in the farmhouse as the wordless recorder of a family history.  We usually see the stairs from the same angle – head on – but people go up and down them in a succession of very different situations.  Ewan’s descent, on learning news of Chris’s pregnancy, and his ascent, when their baby has been delivered, register particularly strongly.

    Davies’s presentation of the early stages of Chris’s relationship with Ewan lulls you into a false sense of hopefulness but the Great War arrives on cue.  Ewan is scared both by the prospect of warfare and by the implications of not enlisting.  He goes to fight.  To say that he is, when he comes home on temporary leave, a changed man is putting it very mildly:  Ewan is just about unrecognisable – he’s violently abusive in word and sexual deed.   He yells not only at Chris but at their infant son, whom Ewan accuses of being a miserable little bleeder or words to that effect.  (The child does look very gloomy, as if preparing for a lifetime in the world of Terence Davies movies.)  Chris’s reaction when Ewan returns to the front is not unconvincing – she feels that she’s lost the man she loved even while he’s still alive.  This interesting angle is wasted when she learns of his actual death.  Chris reverts to standard disbelieving war widow (‘it’s not true – it’s not true!’)  Davies doesn’t even let her show that she realises she was mistaken in thinking her love for her husband had vanished because of what war had done to him.  The director gets his miserable money’s worth in the closing stages.  Chris receives the news of Ewan’s death from a friend called Chae (Ian Pirie), who encouraged him to enlist and who explains to Chris that Ewan wasn’t killed in the trenches but was shot as a deserter.  Although he hasn’t used flashback previously, Davies does so now to show the lead-up to and the moment of Ewan’s death by firing squad.  Shortly before he’s shot, Ewan begs Chae not to let Chris know how he died.  The flashback and Chae’s conscience-driven revelation to Chris are a kind of posthumous double whammy.

    The ages of Chris Guthrie and her siblings are a puzzle in more ways than one.  Chris and her brother Will appear close in age but their two younger brothers look at least ten years younger.  It seems their mother is meant to be exhausted by repeatedly giving birth; I wasn’t sure, though, if we were supposed to assume there had been numerous intervening offspring who died at birth or during infancy.  Agyness Deyn had just turned thirty when the film was in production.  Although she seems younger than that, she’s plainly too old in the opening schoolroom scene and even in her early married life:  Ewan says, shortly after their wedding, that Chris is only nineteen.  Best known as a model, Deyn has the beauty and the height to give her screen presence but her Chris Guthrie is a stronger image than she is a personality.  I guess this is what Davies wanted:  he never gives Deyn the chance to show, for example, how Chris feels about being thwarted in her academic ambitions.  In an interview with Nick James in Sight & Sound to coincide with the film’s UK release, Davies explained how he handles his actors:

    ‘I say to the actors in every film, “I don’t want you to act, but I’ll be there for you.  If you do something that’s different than I think is best, stay with it.”  That way you give them the freedom to do what they feel.  And it’s much, much more powerful if they don’t ‘act’.  But they’ve got to have the architecture of the piece, and technique has to come in there, but it just has to be felt.’

    Although she has acting experience on screen and on stage, I’m not sure this laissez faire approach always helps Agyness Deyn in Sunset Song.  When he tells her the truth about Ewan’s death, Chae explains to Chris that he feels he must do this ‘so that you’ll never be vexed with me’.  In response to hearing the truth, Chris says, ‘I’ll never be vexed with you’.  Deyn’s stress on ‘I’ll’ is nonsensical.

    There are instances of cutting that result in baffling sequences.  Will is whipped by his father because he fooled around with the old man’s rifle while John was out of the house.   Davies suggests that John discovers what Will’s done after he returns home – but Will fired the gun so quickly after his father left the farmhouse that John wouldn’t have been out of earshot.  (In a less careless, highly characteristic moment, Davies has Chris impart the insight that ‘There are lovely things in the world that don’t last – and all the lovelier for that’ as the camera contemplates her brother’s bare, whipped back.)  In a later scene, when Will is about to travel to Aberdeen, Chris tells him he needs to hurry up.  Next thing, she’s asking if he’s going to have a nap before he goes.  He zips upstairs and zips back down a few screen seconds later.  The film has been praised for its lyrical qualities although the connection between the changing aspects of the landscape and developments in Chris’s personal experience produces lyricism of a very obvious kind.  There are more than enough shots of wind shaking ripening corn, trees in full leaf, and so on.  Lewis Grassic Gibbon wrote Sunset Song a few years before Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind.  For a cinemagoer, however, Gibbon’s heroine is oddly reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara when Chris Guthrie asserts in voiceover that ‘the land would survive’ and that ‘she was the land’.  The use of songs and fine community singing, perhaps this director’s most agreeable trademark, are a consolation in Sunset Song as they have been in other Davies movies.

    As Ewan, Kevin Guthrie brightens things up considerably.  Perhaps he slightly overdoes the lad’s eager ingenuousness; he’s a breath of fresh air in the film, even so.  I sensed that Guthrie simply didn’t believe what he was expected to do as the Ewan traumatised by war.  The younger men in the cast generally do well – Guthrie, Jack Greenlees as Will, Douglas Rankine as another friend of Ewan’s, who also dies in the Great War.  Getting Peter Mullan for the role of John Guthrie was a remarkably unimaginative piece of casting.  Mullan is a good actor but he’s played the lowering paterfamilias and/or men with serious anger management issues too often in recent years:  in films such as Neds, Tyrannosaur, even Sunshine on Leith; on television in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake.   In a movie by a director with Davies’s miserabilist tendencies, Mullan emits a strong abandon-all-hope signal the moment he appears on screen.  As a result, this viewer was put in the uncomfortable situation of feeling relieved when John Guthrie was immobilised by illness and glad when he died.

    In his S&S conversation with Nick James, Terence Davies also spoke of his determination to resist calls for subtitling of Sunset Song with the North American audience in mind.  In principle, this sounds like an admirable refusal to bow to commercial pressures.  In fact, much of the British audience will struggle to make out what the characters in Sunset Song are saying too.  It’s not just the Scottish dialect either.  In a sequence at the beginning of the film, a stuffy schools inspector disparages the French pronunciation of the pupils in Chris’s class (although she then proves herself the exception).  Demonstrating how it should be done, the inspector says what sounded to me like ‘une putain’ – slang for bitch or prostitute.  It’s a startling moment but I think I must have misheard.  Neither the class members nor their teacher turned a hair.

    10 December 2015

  • Cinderella Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ron Howard (2005)

    The story of James J Braddock, dubbed ‘Cinderella Man’ by Damon Runyon during the boxer’s comeback in 1934-35, is rags-to-riches twice over, although Ron Howard’s biopic omits Braddock’s progress from his Hell’s Kitchen upbringing to early success in the ring.  The movie begins with Braddock already well on the way to fighting for the world light heavyweight title and living in style with his wife Mae and their three young children.  Cinderella Man then moves quickly forward to the depths of the Great Depression.   Braddock has lost nearly everything in the Wall Street Crash and a succession of injuries has sent his boxing career into reverse.  He and his family are living on the breadline:  Braddock turns up each morning at the gates of the New York dockyards, with hundreds of other men, in the hope of being one of the few chosen for shift work that day.   When his longstanding manager-trainer Joe Gould gets Braddock a fight at Madison Square Garden against an up-and-coming heavyweight, it’s expected to be a farewell appearance – one that will at least provide a modest payday.  To everyone’s surprise, Braddock wins.  This is the start of the road that will lead to the film’s climax, his shot at the world heavyweight title against the charismatic Max Baer, and an even more astonishing, against-the-odds victory at the Garden.

    This is a true sporting fairytale but Ron Howard isn’t a sufficiently imaginative director to make you feel amazed that what you’re seeing on screen really happened.  Much of Cinderella Man consists of boxing movie and Depression-era-struggles movie tropes; although these are executed competently, they root the film in cinematic convention rather than a surprising reality.   Yet Cinderella Man turns out to be very effective, for two main reasons:  Russell Crowe, as Braddock, gives one of his finest performances; and Howard is a good storyteller, who knows how to create emotional excitement.  More words from Damon Runyon appear on the screen at the start of the film:  ‘In all the history of the boxing game you find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J Braddock’.  While this may be true (or may have been true at the time) it doesn’t guarantee dramatic substance – especially as Braddock isn’t a volatile personality.   According to the screenplay by Akiva Goldsman and Cliff Hollingsworth, Braddock’s changing fortunes were not mirrored by changes in behaviour.  Casting Russell Crowe as a pugilist chimed unfortunately with his objectionable off-screen reputation at the time the film was made but Jim Braddock is a fighter only by profession.   He’s a devoted family man at the start; in adversity, he’s a heroically devoted family man.  He never looks at another woman or abuses his wife or children in any way.  He doesn’t have a drink problem or get into drugs or crime when his fortunes are at a low ebb.  Cinderella Man didn’t do great business at the box office (although, according to Wikipedia, the film eventually earned back comfortably more than its budget).  Perhaps audiences were disappointed that the character wasn’t the hell-raiser the star playing him was reputed to be but it’s a tribute to Crowe that he’s sensitively magnetic in the role.   He’s entirely convincing in the fight sequences.  Out of the ring, his characterisation has, like nothing else in the movie, a bracing realness.  There’s a wonderful moment when Jim laughs lovingly, entirely naturally, at something that one of his children says.

    Although the story spans the years 1928 to 1935, the three Braddock children don’t appear to age.  In fact, Braddock didn’t marry Mae Fox until 1930.  It’s understandable that Howard and his screenwriters alter history significantly by having the kids around at the start of Cinderella Man.  It allows them to show the happy family when things are going well for Braddock.  Making the kids a few years older than they actually were also means that Howard can use children old enough to act their roles.   But having the Braddocks married ahead of time is tough on Renée Zellweger, who plays Mae.  Just as Jim is a loyal husband and father, so Mae is an utterly supportive and loving wife and mother.  The only continuing tension between her and her husband is her fear that he’ll get injured or worse in the boxing ring.  Mae married Jim after the Crash rather than when he was flying high financially:  if the real timeframe of their relationship had been followed in the movie that might have given Zellweger the opportunity to react to sudden hardship and show what Jim means to her in a more dynamic way.  As it is, she’s playing the same scene too often and, although she’s likeable, her lack of vocal colouring doesn’t help in such an unvarying role.  Paul Giamatti, witty and energetic as the fast-talking Joe Gould, complements Crowe well although you never lose the sense that Giamatti is playing a type of character in a type of movie.  This is all the more true of the minor characters in the boxing world.

    On the eve of the big fight, Max Baer, in response to the description of Braddock’s comeback as a fairytale, remarks that, ‘In fairytales, people are always getting killed’.   The main death in Cinderella Man is that of Mike Wilson, a man who does Jim a good turn when they’re on a shift together at the docks (disguising the fact that Braddock has a broken hand) but whose anger at being unemployed turns him to drink and domestic violence.   Paddy Considine is uncomfortable in this poorly conceived role (and his American accent comes and goes).  Rosemarie DeWitt (who is the real Jim Braddock’s granddaughter) has a tortured emotionality as Mike’s wife that seems too much in the context of the film.  Its presentation of Max Baer (Craig Bierko) as a preening, arrogant killer-in-the-ring was controversial but turning Braddock’s final opponent (in the movie) into a flamboyant baddie helps make the climax to Cinderella Man what it is – an emotional triumph.  Whatever else one thinks of the aestheticised fight sequences in Raging Bull they’re compelling cinema.  Ron Howard sensibly doesn’t try to emulate Scorsese; while the action in the ring in most of the film is still involving enough, what’s going on in Braddock’s corner between rounds is a bit stagy.  But everything comes together in the Baer fight, as Howard cuts from the ring to Joe Gould’s desperate ringside urgings, and to various listeners to the radio broadcast – men in a packed bar, the Catholic priest and his congregation at the Braddocks’ church, and Mae, with her sister and children yet affectingly alone.  You do get a sense here that Jim Braddock, because of what he’s gone through and gone on to achieve, has become a hero to other people who’ve suffered in the Depression.   And these are Renée Zellweger’s best, most intense moments:  Mae just wants her husband to survive unscathed – you really fear for his safety too.   You also want him to win, though.   I was pretty sure he had done but Ron Howard doesn’t make the result, or Braddock’s survival, a foregone conclusion.   The last of the fifteen rounds and the long wait for the judges’ verdict are almost unbearable.  I cried out ‘No!’ when Baer landed a big punch shortly before the bell.  I shed tears of relief when the unanimous decision went Braddock’s way.

    8 November 2013

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