Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Man on the Moon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Milos Forman (1999)

    There are two reasons why it doesn’t pay to know too much about Andy Kaufman, the American comedian whose life and work are the subject of Man on the Moon. First, Kaufman was notorious for disorienting his audiences – they were never sure of the extent to which his increasingly outré performances were a put-on. Kaufman developed this kidology to such an extent that, when he died in 1984 at the age of thirty-five, there were people – fans and non-fans – who thought this was his biggest hoax yet. A lack of familiarity with Kaufman’s comedy allows you to experience it as if you were part of the original audience. Second, you don’t judge the actor playing Kaufman according to the accuracy of his impersonation. You can therefore be absorbed by Jim Carrey’s portrait of Kaufman as you’re watching the film even though you need watch only a few minutes of the original on YouTube afterwards to be reminded how very different he was.

    Working from a screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Milos Forman puts the is-this-for-real and art-imitating-life themes at the centre of Man on the Moon. To British audiences, Kaufman is probably better known as Latka Gravas in Taxi than for his appearances on Saturday Night Live or for any of his more subversive work on American television or as a stand-up in clubs. (Kaufman hated the idea of being in a sitcom and though he stayed in Taxi from 1978 until 1983 he negotiated successfully with ABC to have Latka suffer from multiple personality disorder to allow him to create other characters from time to time.) The scenes on the television set in the movie are peopled by members of the sitcom’s original cast, twenty years older than when they actually appeared in Taxi – Judd Hirsch, Carol Kane, Christopher Lloyd. Danny DeVito, another member of the original Taxi cast, plays Kaufman’s manager George Shapiro in Man on the Moon. The real David Letterman and Merv Griffin are there in sequences that reconstruct outrageous appearances by Kaufman on their talk shows. According to Wikipedia, ‘Many of Kaufman’s real life friends and co-stars also appear in the film (although not all as themselves) …’

    The casting and presence of Jim Carrey are integral to the true-or-false conception of the movie. Carrey is a performer whose comic dynamism is unarguable but whose showmanship – the superabundance of energy, the facial and gestural exaggerations, the toothpaste grin verging on a self-satisfied smirk – many people can’t stand or, at least, take as evidence of Carrey’s hollowness. His personality on screen is very different from that of the man he’s playing here. As a Letterman guest in a YouTube clip, Andy Kaufman is anything but hyperactive – his comic radicalism is filtered through an apparently introverted persona. This is true even in the case of his principal alter ego Tony Clifton, a talentless lounge singer who relentlessly abuses his audience. Carrey’s Tony is deep in prosthetic make-up and crummy disguise – dark glasses and moustache as well as a wig much worse than the one Kaufman wears as Tony. In Pauline Kael’s last interview with Francis Davis in Afterglow, they discuss the film (they both think it’s bad) and Davis makes the point that Carrey’s Kaufman wants to be liked whereas the real Kaufman didn’t. (This echoes Kael’s own criticism of Dustin Hoffman’s Lenny Bruce twenty-five years earlier.) I don’t agree. As a performer, Carrey is so comically frenetic that he often looks to be daring the audience not to find him funny – whether we like him or not is secondary. I don’t think he suggests anything different playing Kaufman. It’s true, though, that Carrey seems highly aware not only of the camera but of people watching him, whereas Kaufman doesn’t obviously seem to care what the audience thinks or feels at all.

    Yet Jim Carrey’s drawing on his own comic personality is part of what makes his portrait of Andy Kaufman fascinating. Carrey’s approach is daring because it doesn’t result in his showing us what Kaufman was really like – and because those who see Jim Carrey as shallow through and through (there are times when I’m one of them) may well feel vindicated. There’s an extraordinary moment when Andy warns his loving girlfriend Lynne Margulies (well played by Courtney Love) that ‘You don’t know the real me’ and she replies, ‘There is no real you’. ‘Oh, yeah,’ says Andy, ‘I forgot’. Jim Carrey looks like he means what he says but there’s nothing behind his eyes. Carrey has to discipline himself in Man on the Moon. It goes against the grain with him not to strain to be funny yet he has no option, in doing some of Kaufman’s routines, but to leave his audience baffled and unsmiling. It’s difficult eventually to say how successful Carrey is in the role – he may be unfunny more often than he needs to be – but this enigma strengthens the film. It feels richer for the fact that the question of whether Carrey ‘gets’ Andy Kaufman and the question of who Kaufman was both remain unresolved.

    In other respects, Man on the Moon is crude in conveying Kaufman’s comic singularity. Each time he tries something new, the faces of his impro club or TV studio audience look not only bewildered but hostile – they make you wonder how Kaufman has built up any following when no one seems to be on his wavelength. Kaufman has comic collaborators and kindred spirits – notably Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti) – but Milos Forman minimises the opportunities for us to feel that: he’s at pains to make Kaufman as personally isolated as possible. Andy’s well-meaning, middle-class parents (Gerry Becker and Leslie Lyles) are characterised as decidedly square from the opening scene (when Andy is a child, performing to himself in his bedroom, then to his kid sister) yet they dutifully support their son, whatever he does. This comes across as a lazy caricature of achievement-hungry Jewish parents. Needless to say, the parents are repeatedly distressed by their son’s appetite for offensiveness but, since that goes for pretty well everyone else we see on screen, it doesn’t make the Kaufmans distinctively antediluvian. The film’s title refers to the REM song about Andy Kaufman, which is played over the closing credits.

    5 June 2012

  • The Hateful Eight

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Quentin Tarantino (2015)

    A vast, empty snowscape on the screen. Melodically intriguing music by Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack. As the camera moves across the scene, its attention is taken by an object in the foreground. The object is hard to make out at first. It might be a gnarled tree.  It’s revealed to be a crucifix, crusted with snow, but the initial impression of the twisted tree connects with the agonised body of Christ.  A stagecoach – small in the background behind the crucifix – passes by. This is the superb opening of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (which the opening titles proudly announce to be the director’s eighth film). Unfortunately, it’s much the best thing in a movie that goes on for another 165 minutes.

    The stagecoach is approaching the town of Red Rock, supposedly in Wyoming. The time is a few years after the end of the American Civil War. Inside the coach is John Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter with a reputation for hunting down outlaws and delivering them alive for public execution. Ruth’s latest prize, handcuffed to him, is Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a member of the notorious gang that bears her family’s name. A second bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L Jackson), who is transporting three dead bounties to Red Rock, hitches a ride on the stagecoach. Another man (Walton Goggins) then follows suit: he’s Chris Mannix, on his way to take up the office of sheriff of Red Rock. While Ruth and Warren join forces to protect one another’s bounties, Warren and Mannix quickly fall out on the subject of what they did in the Civil War, in which they fought on opposite sides: Warren carries with him what he claims is a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln; Mannix is a Confederacy ‘Lost-Causer’. A powerful blizzard interrupts the journey to Red Rock. The coach’s passengers and its driver, O B (James Parks), are forced to take refuge in Minnie’s Haberdashery, a stagecoach lodge. They’re met there by a Mexican known as Bob (Demián Bichir), who explains that the owner, Minnie, is away visiting her mother and has left him in charge. There are three other men in the lodge: Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), an Englishman who’s the Red Rock hangman; a taciturn cowboy, Joe Gage (Michael Madsen); and the elderly Confederate general Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). John Ruth, anxious to hold on to his valuable bounty, takes the precaution of disarming all concerned, except Warren.

    The Hateful Eight comprises six ‘chapters’; for screenings of the 70mm version that Tarantino is keen for people to see, there’s a ten-minute interval between the third and fourth chapters. Even without this interval, a new note is struck at the start of chapter four, as the voice of Tarantino starts to deliver breezy narration. It’s almost as if he’s sat through the first three chapters and realised things need livening up. (The effect of his vocal intervention also gives proceedings more of a meta quality.) The picture’s first half is shocking largely because it is so boring. It takes around forty-five minutes to get the main characters – the unfortunate coach driver doesn’t count as one of the titular eightsome – inside Minnie’s Haberdashery for the Tarantino equivalent of a country house murder-mystery. The emphasis of the story that follows is, as you’d expect, on murder rather than mystery. You do increasingly want to know the true explanation of Minnie’s absence but this interest in a so-far unseen character is largely a reflection of lack of interest in the ones on screen. The flashback chapter five reveals what happened at the lodge immediately before the arrival of the bounty hunters, Daisy and Mannix. Earlier in the day, Bob, Mobray, Gage, and a fourth man came to Minnie’s Haberdashery and killed Minnie and everyone else on the premises, except for General Smithers. You get the feeling that the main purpose of dramatising these revelations as live action is to provide a further supply of people to be shot to pieces. This is an and-then-there-was-none piece of sorts but a starting total of nine (O B does count in the body count) isn’t enough for Tarantino. He’s repeatedly shameless, it seems for similar reasons, in having characters that appeared to be dead or, at least, debilitated by serious wounds reviving to generate more mayhem.

    I wasn’t too troubled by the bloodshed in The Hateful Eight: it’s so relentless that it’s virtual self-parody – with the lack of weight that that implies. When one of the company poisons the coffee and two of the others die from drinking it, they vomit blood before they expire. For all I know, this is physiologically accurate behaviour but that seems beside the point – of lesser importance anyway than that these people die a death with something of a Tarantino signature. What is troubling is why he must continue to fall back on blood-letting as a means of dramatic climax and resolution. And what’s objectionable here are the implications that Tarantino thinks – or pretends – he’s making serious comments about the violence of the time and place in which his story is set. He would have more credibility doing so if his track record as a film-maker didn’t suggest that violent times and places are meat and drink to him. The closing credits are accompanied by Roy Orbison’s ‘There Won’t Be Many Coming Home’ and this doesn’t seem meant to be facetious. There’s even a streak of shallow political correctness in The Hateful Eight, which sits oddly with the jocose revisionism of the piece. There’s only one sizeable female part and Daisy Domergue is physically abused from the start but at least she’s one of the last to perish; in the meantime, Jennifer Jason Leigh gets to sing a song and does it well. The African-American Major Warren is given nearly all the witty lines and he’s still breathing when the film ends, although it won’t be for much longer. Tarantino’s relatively preferential treatment of Daisy and Warren doesn’t extend, however, to Minnie (Dana Gourrier), the one African-American woman in the story.

    Although Samuel L Jackson delivers his lines with panache, the dialogue is disappointing compared with what Tarantino wrote for Django Unchained (and even Inglourious Basterds). The script is riddled with fancy, empty exchanges – like one character saying, ‘You’ve got me at a disadvantage’ and another replying, ‘Keeping you at a disadvantage is an advantage I mean to keep’. The fourth man who carries out the killings at Minnie’s before the stagecoach arrives is Daisy’s brother, Jody (Channing Tatum). After dispatching the victims, he hides in the cellar; from there, he joins in the action in the climax to chapter four, shooting bullets up through the floorboards. (This momentarily evokes the frightening sequence in the French farmhouse that opens Inglourious Basterds.) It works well enough as a theatrical surprise although it’s a short-term calculation on Tarantino’s part: the disclosure of Jody’s hiding place rather dilutes the subsequent explanation of Minnie’s fate. One of the few really startling sections of the narrative comes with Warren’s account to General Smithers of how he humiliated and murdered the son (Craig Stark) for whom the General is still searching. This episode, visualised in flashback, also seems meant to have a political charge: Warren claims as his motive revenge for Smithers’s ordering the shooting of black soldiers at the Battle of Baton Rouge. In fact, its impact on the viewer derives entirely from the particular physical nature of Warren’s torture of the General’s son. The piano-playing by another character, as Warren describes to Smithers what happened, gives an arch formality to the grim narrative – but Bruce Dern does a fine job of appalled listening to Warren’s story.

    Robert Richardson’s cinematography – the lighting of the prevailing, dark interior of the stagecoach lodge, as well as the framing of the wide white world outside it – is very impressive. Ennio Morricone was allegedly angered by how little of the music he wrote for Django Unchained featured in the eventual movie. Tarantino still wants to put together his own soundtrack so there’s not that much of Morricone in The Hateful Eight either. Even so, I’m one of many who’ll be hoping there’s enough to win Morricone the competitive Oscar that he should have won decades ago. The Academy have already awarded him an honorary Oscar by way of apology for the oversight. They now have the chance to give him the real thing.

    10 January 2016

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