Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Crazy, Stupid, Love.

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (2011)

    That full stop is attention-seeking.  The title irritated me too because I couldn’t think, as I watched the film, of the similar one it nearly brought to mind. (This turned out to be the 2004 ITV tele-film Dirty Filthy Love.) The collision of different registers may be meant to reflect the polymorphism hinted at in the film’s name but for much of the time I suspected it was more because the central comic premise – an expert womaniser tries to help a middle-aged nerd, whose wife of twenty-five years is divorcing him, to ‘rediscover his manhood’ – was too thin to sustain a full-length feature. But the lurches in tone and style happen so repeatedly that they come to seem intentional; and when, as the closing credits came up, I was reminded who the directors were, I was inclined to think there’d been method in the apparent messiness. I don’t know when Crazy, Stupid, Love (I’m not going to repeat the full stop throughout) was made in relation to the distribution problems that beset I Love You Phillip Morris, the previous (debut) feature of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. I don’t know either how truly subversive either that film or parts of this new one really are but it’s a fact that Phillip Morris – with its aggressively gay conman protagonist and even with Jim Carrey in that role and Ewan McGregor as Phillip – didn’t get a full theatrical release in the US. Here Ficarra and Requa have Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone and Marisa Tomei in the cast but they also have some risky sexual elements. Apart from Jacob (Gosling), who tutors Cal (Carell) in the art of woman objectification, there’s Cal’s thirteen-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo), who’s is in love with his seventeen-year-old babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton). (In their first scene she goes into his bedroom and finds him wanking.) Jessica is increasingly obsessed with Cal, whose wife Emily (Moore) has recently decided to end their marriage: a more sexually precocious girl at school advises Jessica, if she wants Cal to notice her, to be ‘dirty’ so Jessica takes nude photos of herself on her mobile. It’s as if Ficarra and Requa want to avoid as much as they can the commercial problems of Phillip Morris – so they limn the potentially controversial threads of Dan Fogelman’s screenplay within the framework – and often with the emotional flavour – of a more familiarly eccentric, touching heartwarmer. They give the audience plenty to laugh at. But they left me with a sense they might be laughing at the audience too.

    I found myself responding to the less conventional elements in different ways. I liked just about everything in the Cal-Jacob department but wasn’t comfortable with Robbie’s or Jessica’s passions. These are often illustrated in farcical situations but they persist and that persistence both is strong and made me queasy (effects that are reinforced by the two young actors: neither is comfortable to watch – though both are really into their characters). These mixed feelings are strongest in their final scene: Robbie tells Jessica he’s optimistic she’ll love him eventually because, as he grows older, he’ll look more like his dad; she gives him the nude photos she took for Cal to ‘get you through high school’. By contrast, Cal’s unsentimental education by Jacob is sheer enjoyment – and that’s also because of the actors, and because Carell and Gosling, unlike the kids, are able to fuse rich characterisation with an amused awareness. There are sequences in this film that are really bad and make no sense at any level. The first woman Cal goes to bed with after Jacob has helped him on his way is Kate (Tomei), who turns out to be a teacher at Robbie’s school. It’s when Emily and Cal are briefly reunited for a parents evening (and rapprochement is in the air) that Cal and Kate also meet again. Her love rat tirade in front of a crowd of parents is so crudely ridiculous that you cringe for Marisa Tomei – something that rarely happens. The film-makers seem to have forgotten about this outburst when Kate appears in the end-of-school-year sequences later on. The scene that propels Hannah (Stone), in a fit of pique, into Jacob’s arms, after she had the nerve to resist him earlier in the story, is terrible too. Hannah has just qualified as a lawyer and we’re meant to believe she’s expecting a proposal of marriage rather than the offer of a job from a male lawyer (Josh Groban) who is so rebarbative you wonder how Hannah could bear to work with him, let alone become his wife.

    But Crazy, Stupid, Love also includes several excellent moments and one extended sequence which is brilliant. In the very first scene, Cal and Emily are in a restaurant. Steve Carell’s opening line is, ‘Oh, I’m so full – you were right, I shouldn’t have had all that bread’. He invests it with a blend of wit and dullness that makes you both laugh and see immediately why Emily is about to tell Cal she wants a divorce. The directors, the scenarist and the actors achieve something remarkable when Jacob embarks on what he assumes will be a one-night stand with Hannah, and the encounter turns into something less transient. Jacob explains to Hannah that what’s unfailingly irresistible about him is that he can do the lift like the one at the end of Dirty Dancing, after which any girl will want to go to bed with him. Because Jacob has seemed so scrupulously cool until now, the secret of his success is strikingly cheesy. It works with Hannah as with everyone before her then, when they’re in bed, she asks Jacob questions about his parents and we see him as vulnerable for the first time. There’s no breakdown or any explosion of resentment – that lack of melodrama gives the exposure of Jacob’s feelings more impact. These scenes are edited in a way that convinces you that hours have passed in the bedroom and a lot of emotional ground has been covered. Jacob’s transition from love machine to lover is comic but believable.

    Steve Carell’s combination of gifts runs the risk of his getting cast in films much worse than this one to perform comic routines and touch our hearts – to give an illusion of depth and substance. The great thing about Carell, though, is that what he does on screen always seems to be anchored in comedy: the more serious bits are an aspect of the comedy rather than a departure from it. The physical and temperamental contrasts between him and Ryan Gosling make them a fine partnership here. When Jacob takes his shirt off, Hannah exclaims that: ‘You look like you’ve been Photoshopped!’ and Gosling is almost alarmingly muscular. He looks about a foot taller and much leaner since Half Nelson, let alone Lars and the Real Girl. He gives the role a surprising delicacy which is always funny: he’s almost ridiculously elegant in Jacob’s pick-up routines and his line readings are very witty. The leading men are better than the women: it’s always good to see Marisa Tomei but she’s badly used and Julianne Moore is thoroughly uncertain as Emily, although I got to like Emma Stone. With Kevin Bacon as the work colleague Emily’s having an affair with, and Julianna Guill as Hannah’s best friend (who disappears without explanation).

    28 September 2011

  • Conviction

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Tony Goldwyn (2010)

    The title of this sibling love story refers to both meanings of Conviction: the brother gets a prison sentence, his younger sister shows courageous determination. Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell) is found guilty of first degree murder in Ayer, Massachusetts in 1983. Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) spends the best part of two decades trying to clear his name and puts herself through law school in order to become Kenny’s attorney. Conviction is, almost needless to say, based on a true story. (According to the film, Kenny and Betty Anne were among the nine children of their mother, sired by seven different men, and spent periods in care. Kenny had form – a series of minor thefts but no criminal history of violence – before the murder, in 1980, of a woman called Katharina Brow.) Because film-makers working with this kind of material tend to include standard setbacks and breakthroughs, the result is somehow always the same true story – or a false story. Perhaps Kenny Waters was arrested on suspicion of murder during his grandfather’s funeral service but Tony Goldwyn’s staging is so crude – the cops interrupting the priest’s eulogy – that the moment seems incredible. The screenplay by Pamela Gray, although it includes some good lines, is largely a matter of joining up the dots between obligatory scenes: a flashback to the two kids involved in a quasi-housebreaking incident that shows Kenny’s (a) quick temper and (b) absolute devotion to Betty Anne; a sequence in which Betty Anne melts the heart of an initially frosty bureaucrat who can yield vital, lost evidence. The continuing dribble of hopeful music by Paul Cantelon is anticipating the happy ending from the word go. The legends at the end of the film, which explain that Betty Anne Waters is still working for the New York-based ‘Innocent Project’ (which takes on alleged miscarriages of justice), omit to mention that his release from prison wasn’t in reality a happy ending for Kenny Waters. He was killed after falling from a wall, a few months after being freed in 2001.

    Although it’s utterly unsurprising, Conviction is easy and entertaining enough to watch. Tony Goldwyn keeps things moving competently even if his and Pamela Gray’s concentration on the required elements of the fighting-for-justice-against-the-odds genre makes for very sketchy background information. (How, for example, did Betty Anne, whose marriage breaks up when she decides to become a student, afford to put herself through law school? The closing legends say that the real Betty Anne also still ‘jointly runs’ the bar where we see her working during the film, although you wouldn’t get from what you see that she has a stake in the place.) In spite of the trial scenes (designed mainly to show how the false testimony of two women did for Kenny), there’s remarkably little detail of the incriminating evidence against him. (The revelation that his blood group and the killer’s are the same – group O! – surely couldn’t count for much.)

    In a film like this, the emotional dynamics are really all that count. Betty Anne doesn’t, at any stage of her legal education, assess the evidence – she just knows Kenny is innocent. Nancy Taylor is the policewoman who’s determined to pin the crime on Kenny from an early stage: it’s surprising that her word can carry such weight but no matter: it’s she who’s mainly to blame for the guilty verdict because she’s the villain of the piece. (Taylor turns out to be professionally corrupt in other ways, which proves what a thoroughly rotten bitch she is – although it’s never clear if she’s mistaken or vindictive about Kenny and, if it’s the latter, why.) Betty Anne’s husband Rick, in forbidding her to go to law school, is presented as a heartless chauvinist – even though he might reasonably feel that his wife’s obsession with clearing her brother’s name is already threatening to ruin their family life. Rick then disappears from the scene: there’s a sequence in which Betty Anne’s two young teenage sons talk with her about going to live with their father instead of her but it doesn’t appear to happen and there’s no further turbulence in her relationship with the boys.

    When some other law students are talking about DNA testing (in 1999, more than a decade after its introduction and five years after the O J Simpson trial), Betty Anne has never heard of this potential key to proving Kenny’s innocence. A few minutes later, the news that it’s state practice in Massachusetts for forensic evidence and exhibits to be disposed of ten years after a trial comes as a bombshell to her. These things could suggest that Betty Anne isn’t as clued up as she might be but they’re there just in order to engineer melodramatic highlights. Goldwyn and Gray don’t mean to disparage Betty Anne: the film has no interest in presenting her as anything but a heroine. When she gets angry (as she often does), she’s righteously angry. Goldwyn and Hilary Swank (who’s also one of the executive producers) take care not to get us feeling ambivalent about how difficult Betty Anne must have been to live with – how the way that she lived might have caused problems for her sons. With her lantern jaw and toothy grin, Hilary Swank looks more like Matt Damon’s sister than Sam Rockwell’s: in flashback scenes, to before Kenny’s conviction, she has a fluidity I’ve not noticed before but it disappears once Betty Anne has embarked on her mission in life. By the age of thirty, Swank had won two undeserved Oscars for playing roles which were ‘challenging’ in terms of their gender identity – a transsexual man in Boys Don’t Cry, a female boxer in Million Dollar Baby. There was nothing ambiguous, however, about either of these characters in terms of audience engagement with them – both were heroic victims. I think I would like Swank better as Betty Anne Waters if her CV suggested a greater willingness to be dislikeable on screen.

    Hilary Swank’s lack of nuance as an actress is thrown into relief by the casting of Minnie Driver as Betty Anne’s best friend Abra (the only other mature student in the law school group). It’s ages since I’ve seen Driver on screen but she’s deftly witty in this role, even though Abra’s relentless loyalty to the cause means that she inevitably starts to fade into the background. The supporting actresses in Conviction are much the best thing in it: as well as Driver, Melissa Leo, with the thankless task of playing the wicked cop, gives Nancy Taylor an intriguing individuality that the script denies her. And Juliette Lewis is spectacular as Roseanna, one of the two lying prosecution witnesses – a woman with whom Kenny had a violent affair after the murder was committed but who alleges he confessed to her. When Betty Anne, Abra and Barry Scheck, the head of the ‘Innocent Project’, need more than the DNA evidence to overturn the conviction, they go to Roseanna, asking her to sign an affidavit which admits she lied in court. Juliette Lewis is startlingly aggressive then briefly collapses into tears before regaining her jagged bitterness remarkably quickly: it’s no surprise when Roseanna proves canny enough to know she risks perjury charges and refuses to sign. (‘I didn’t know she knew so many syllables’, says Abra as the trio departs, empty-handed.) Mandy, the daughter to whom Kenny writes devotedly from prison, is played by Ari Graynor (who has the look of a straight-faced Bette Midler). Clea DuVall is her mother, the other false witness.

    As Kenny, Sam Rockwell works hard and this is the best performance I’ve seen from him although you’re always aware of his working hard to be the loose cannon that Kenny, even after years in jail, continues to be. Rockwell is good, nevertheless, at suggesting Kenny’s declining hope as prison wears him down. He’s responsible for the film’s strongest moment. When Kenny doesn’t want to take the DNA test, Betty Anne angrily asks him why, and he replies quietly, ‘It’ll come back positive’, and a shadow passes over Betty Anne and the whole screen. (It disappears immediately when Kenny explains that he means that the authorities will rig the test results.) On the whole, the men are eclipsed by the women in Conviction, even though Betty Anne’s sons are convincingly ordinary-looking and well played by Conor Donovan and Owen Campbell. The same goes for Loren Dean as their father. As Barry Scheck, Peter Gallagher is pleasant but weirdly dark-haired: whether it’s a wig or Grecian 2000 I don’t know but it looks odd over a decade on from when Gallagher played the grey-maned ‘King of Real Estate’ in American Beauty.

    14 January 2011

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