Daily Archives: Saturday, January 23, 2016

  • Hearts of the West

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Howard Zieff (1975)

    I first came across the New Yorker as a teenager, on visits to the doctor’s surgery. There were always a few copies of it among the magazines in the waiting room. I found out more about Pauline Kael and splashed out on Deeper into Movies, her latest collection of New Yorker film reviews, in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford in the first week of October 1975. It wasn’t until later that month, though, that I bought my first copy of the magazine. It wasn’t something you found in an average newsagent’s in England. (That’s probably not changed much in the years since.) In that particular issue, of 13 October 1975, Kael reviewed Hearts of the West. Over the last four decades, I’ve read plenty more New Yorkers and every piece by Pauline Kael that I’ve been able to find but I’d never seen Howard Zieff’s film until now. To be honest, I’ve not made much effort to track it down but there was still a mission-accomplished satisfaction in watching it at BFI a few days ago. The UK release print used for the screening was in such poor shape that BFI actually sent an email in advance – apologising for the ‘magenta bias’, expressing the hope that this-won’t-spoil-your-enjoyment etc. Hearts of the West begins with a 1930s movie screen test. I wondered for a moment if BFI had looked only at this intentionally sepia sequence before sending their apology but what followed turned out to be pinkish in what I’m starting to think is the standard colour scheme of unrestored 1970s American movies. (It was too muted to merit the slightly alarming ‘magenta bias’ description.) In fact, the shabby antique look didn’t bother me. It felt appropriate to the film’s place in my personal history of not getting round to seeing movies I’ve always meant to see.

    Set in the early days of the Depression and of sound pictures, Zieff’s comedy is the story of Lewis Tater, a young Midwesterner whose dream is to be the next Zane Grey. Rather in the manner of Joel McCrea’s film director in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, Lewis feels he needs to immerse himself in the real world in order to make art from it. He decides to better his prospects of publishing Western novels by spending time in frontier country. He reads about the University of Titan in Nevada, and journeys from his father’s Iowa farm to enrol there. Lewis arrives in Titan to discover its university doesn’t exist, except in the form of a mail-order correspondence course scam run out of the hotel that Lewis has checked into. During his night there, he’s attacked by one of the two scamsters. Lewis manages to escape by stealing their car which, unknown to him, contains a cache of money. Lost and bewildered in the Nevada desert, Lewis comes upon a film unit, shooting a B-Western. He catches a lift to Los Angeles with some of the cowboy actors – employees of an outfit called Tumbleweed Productions. In LA, Lewis first gets a job washing dishes at a Western-themed eatery in Hollywood. He then finds himself working as a Tumbleweed stuntman before being offered a speaking part in one of the company’s shoestring-budget Westerns. All the time, the two crooks in whose car he escaped are on Lewis’s trail.

    Hearts of the West was well received by many American critics – Pauline Kael included – but didn’t do well at the box office. Although that’s not surprising, it’s a pleasing film. Rob Thompson’s script treats Hollywood’s lower rungs and Lewis’s aspirations with a nice balance of good-humoured mockery and affectionate wit. Howard Zieff’s direction struggles to maintain a consistent tone but Jeff Bridges is excellent as Lewis – it’s his easy charisma and emotional openness that give the film a degree of coherence. The bits involving the pursuing conmen (Richard B Shull and Anthony James) are pretty lame but Lewis’s two differently romantic relationships are another matter. The first of these is with Miss Trout, the script girl: Blythe Danner, as well as looking lovely, times her lines to perfection. She stylises the character yet inhabits her fully. Lewis’s second romance doesn’t have a sexual dimension but it’s no less strong for that. It’s an expression of his love for Westerns and embodied by Howard Pike, one of the Tumbleweed cowboy veterans.

    Howard turns out to be the alias of the Western writer Billy Pueblo, one of Lewis’s literary heroes. Andy Griffith plays the role beautifully and the moment of Lewis’s discovery that he’s been betrayed by his mentor and idol is genuinely distressing – thanks to the reactions of both Jeff Bridges and Andy Griffith. (Partly as a result, the later scene in which Howard/Billy redeems himself seems perfunctory.) As Kessler, the tight-fisted, neurotic director of the B-Westerns, Alan Arkin is ingenious but, compared with most of the rest of the cast, too knowing. This is even more the case with Donald Pleasence’s turn as a pulp-Western publisher. The bit players include, among many others, Herb Edelman, Thayer David and Alex Rocco – best known as Moe Greene in The Godfather but, thanks to that role, instantly identifiable. Perhaps because of its disappointing commercial performance in the US, the film was released in Europe in 1976 as Hollywood Cowboy. It’ll always be Hearts of the West to me.

    15 January 2016

  • Dark Horse (2011)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Solondz (2011)

    Todd Solondz’s latest arrives in cinemas only a few weeks after Jeff, Who Lives at Home. Solondz’s protagonist, Abe Wertheimer, is another thirty-something who still hasn’t moved out into his own place. (As usual in Solondz movies, the setting is his home state of New Jersey.) Abe only sort-of works for a living, in his realtor father’s office. His hobby is collecting toys. He’s obese. We first see him at a wedding reception, trying cluelessly to start a conversation with the woman next to him, the one other person there who isn’t dancing. By the end of Dark Horse, you wonder, considering how isolated and socially inept he is, that Abe got invited to a wedding in the first place. We’re primed, in a movie with jokes, to expect a loser like Abe who embarks on a relationship with another eccentrically sad person – the other non-dancer, who is called Miranda, is a failed writer, and is also living with her parents – to end happily. We’re equally primed to expect a Solondz movie not to do so. We suppose that a dark horse will surprise everyone and come through to win. When Todd (Happiness) Solondz uses the title, it’s a different matter. These conflicting expectations create considerable tension as you watch Dark Horse. Abe is so unfortunate and miserable that you feel his fortunes must change for the better; but how can this writer-director make that happen and remain true to his trademark misanthropic pessimism? It’s as if Solondz had set out to see if it’s possible to make an honest movie in which things turn out reasonably well. But he soon recognises the futility of the task he’s set himself, and so does the audience. From very early on, Abe’s bursts of anger in his father’s office are startlingly intense. About thirty minutes in, during a conversation with his regretful, infantilising mother, he reveals how horrible and selfish he thinks other people are, and the depth of his unhappiness. His mother wonders if Abe ought to go back into therapy. The film increasingly consists of fantasies taking place in his mind. The message of Dark Horse is that bad dreams really can come true.

    Abe’s daydreams and nightmares build up to such an extent that they virtually take over the movie. In these sequences, the people in his life – his parents, his younger and successful brother, an older woman called Marie whom Abe works with – may appear in unusual situations but they still usually tell him what to do and what they think of him, which isn’t much. Early on in Dark Horse, Abe returns a defective toy to a store and fails to get a refund because there’s a scratch on the toy and even though Abe has spotted that without opening the box it’s in. Later on, there’s an imagined encounter with the same grinningly unhelpful store assistant: Abe is making a similarly unsuccessful attempt to get his life replaced. Because Jordan Gelber is a skilful comic actor he lulls you into benign condescension towards Abe but he’s a good straight actor too. (He’s physically a cross between Paul Giamatti and Shaun Williamson – Barry in EastEnders.) Gelbert and Todd Solondz make you realise that you naturally regard someone on screen who looks like this to be essentially comical but that it isn’t funny being overweight and depressed and going nowhere. Abe doesn’t, as part of his various imaginings, wonder if he might have been a foundling, although he’s utterly dissimilar to his slim, fine-featured parents and brother. Solondz’s casting of Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken as his parents is inspired – in terms both of the way they look and the characters they create. Walken uses his wraith-like menace to fine effect: he’s extremely funny – and fairly scary – just sitting on a sofa next to Farrow watching TV. He’s completely motionless and expressionless yet he looks ready for unpredictable action – possibly homicide. Farrow engages with the caricature she’s playing strongly enough to go beyond caricature. Justin Bartha is immaculately smug as the good-looking younger brother Richard, a successful doctor (and therefore a cartoon Jewish mother’s beau idéal).

    The cast outside the family is pretty impeccable too. As Marie, the woman who works for Abe’s father (and has been his mistress too), Donna Murphy is especially good. She gives Marie a wonderfully suggestive but slightly wonky walk, and not only in the fantasy sequence in which Marie takes Abe back to her apartment and it’s the habitat of a sexual tigress. (Abe admits to Marie that he expected her to have a much more beige existence. In a later fantasy, the camera shows Marie’s apartment the way Abe wanted it to be, with posters for Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables on the walls.) There’s excellent work too from Zachary Booth as Abe’s nerdy cousin Justin and from Peter McRobbie and Mary Joy as Miranda’s parents. It’s not really the fault of Selma Blair who plays her that Miranda is the weak link in Dark Horse. She’s so crucial to the plot that Solondz hasn’t developed her enough as a character. In spite of Blair’s mannered, neurasthenic melancholy, you don’t believe this woman would be desperate enough to give Abe her real phone number, when he asks for it as they prepare to part company at the opening wedding reception. You don’t believe either that the infuriatingly self-regarding Richard would pair off with someone as displeased with herself as Miranda is. However, Selma Blair’s voice on the telephone delivers perhaps the very best line in the film. When Abe has broken the jaw of her egregious ex-boyfriend (Aasif Mandvi), Miranda assures Abe that ‘He’s litigious but empathetic’. Solondz uses as the film’s theme a number called ‘Who You Wanna Be’. Its bright, metallic insistence is so cruelly apt that I thought it must have been written for Dark Horse but it turns out to be a pre-existing song, penned and performed by Michael Kisur.

    2 July 2012

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