Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Detective Story

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1951)

    Detective Story is an adaptation of a successful Broadway play of 1949 by Sidney Kingsley.  William Wyler has the confidence to live with the constraints on movement dictated by the stage origins of the piece – there’s remarkably little opening out of the action – and the skill to make a dramatic virtue of the largely unchanging set, a New York police station.  The spirit of place he creates gets across the boredom and the continuously dangerous edge of working there.  The routine is oppressive but fragile, because of what could happen, and the few eruptions of violence – whether yelling voices or physical assaults – have real impact.  Wyler’s previous film, The Heiress, was one of his very best.  Detective Story doesn’t, unlike that film, have great acting in it but Wyler’s orchestration of the cast is superb.  The characterisations are consistently rich and the variety of rhythms in the exchanges between characters is very pleasing.  All the cops are good – Horace McMahon, Frank Faylen, Bert Freed and, especially, William Bendix, whose naturalness and depth transcend the obvious and limited conception of the character of Lou Brody.  His son died in action in World War II; Brody feels sympathetic towards a young man, well played by Craig Hill, who’s charged with theft and who’s the same age as Brody’s son would now have been.

    It takes a little time to get your bearings with Detective Story.  What’s so clever about Wyler’s direction is that seeming shortcomings in the initial stages turn into major strengths of the film.  As a spinster shoplifter, Lee Grant seems a shade too theatrical when she first arrives in the station and there’s not much else happening there yet.  But she’s completely in tune with the (unnamed) woman’s slightly forlorn eccentricity and she stays thoroughly in character.  By the time she leaves the premises after things there have got much more complicated and troubling, you’re very sorry to see Grant go:  it’s a beautiful piece of acting.  Although the story holds your interest from the outset, it lacks a focus – until you realise the connections between the several threads of the plot, and that the number of things going on is essential to the atmosphere and changes in tempo.  The converse effect is what stops Detective Story from being even better than it is.  A focus does gradually develop.  It’s on a morally uncompromising detective, Jim McLeod, who believes that all wrongdoers should be punished and that a criminal suspect is almost certainly a wrongdoer.  McLeod shows a more yielding side in his love for his wife Mary.  The only sadness in their otherwise perfect marriage is her continuing inability to conceive.  It’s necessary, of course, for Jim to be punished for his brutal moralism; and for Mary and a personal history he didn’t know about to generate that punishment, and reveal Jim’s own unhappy past.

    As the couple’s relationship increasingly takes centre stage (and that it is the phrase for it), the script gets wordier and clichéd.  (It’s adapted from the Kingsley play by Philip Yordan and Robert Wyler, the director’s older brother.)  The problem is made worse by Eleanor Parker in the role of the wife.  She’s unusually tolerable in her early scenes (so much so I had to look twice to check it was her) but, once Mary starts suffering, Parker, even under Wyler’s direction, is back to her stiffly histrionic self.  It’s hard to believe that proper Mary ever had sex outside marriage with anyone – and Parker doesn’t remotely suggest that her properness is a front.  I also got confused about Mary’s shameful connection with a New Jersey doctor (George Macready), a man her husband takes a particular dislike to:  it seems that she must have had an abortion yet there are references to her illegitimate child being stillborn[1].  Kirk Douglas in the role of Jim McLeod is, however, a big compensation.  He gives a performance of force and commendable empathy.  An impossible load of bitter (self-)recrimination is required of him by the end but it’s quite something that so much of it seems genuinely felt.  The casting of Douglas is acute in any case.  His natural rapport with the audience makes McLeod’s harsh moral intransigence challenging – you can’t stand back from it the way you could if someone less engaging were in the role (or if Kirk Douglas had himself stood back from the character).  As Charley Gennini, a recidivist thief, Joseph Wiseman (who, like Lee Grant, had played his role on stage) is acting in a very different style but his vocal and gestural exaggeration pushes Charley far enough over the top to take him somewhere beyond, and make him alarming.

    3 May 2012

    [1] All was explained on Wikipedia – as follows:  ‘During production, the film had some trouble with the Production Code Authority. The Production Code did not allow the killing of police officers or references to abortion. Joseph Breen suggested that explicit references to abortion would be altered to “baby farming”. However, when the film was released, film critics still interpreted Dr Schneider as an illicit abortionist. Breen and William Wyler suggested to the MPAA Production Code Committee that the code be amended to allow the killing of police officers if it was absolutely necessary for the plot. They agreed and the code was amended, lifting the previous ban on cop killing’.

  • Detachment

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Kaye (2011)

    Henry Barthes – a supply teacher (the American term seems to be ‘substitute teacher’) – takes a three-week assignment in a Long Island high school.  It’s an eventful three weeks.  During that time, Henry (Adrien Brody) takes Erica (Sami Gayle), a teenage prostitute, into his home then has her put into care; the grandfather (Louis Zorich) who’s his only living relative dies; on the last day of the assignment, one of his pupils (Betty Kaye) commits suicide in front of the whole school.  Henry is an English teacher but there’s little evidence that he teaches English – apart from his reading in the film’s closing scene from The Fall of the House of Usher and, earlier on, asking his class what ‘assimilate’ and ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘doublethink’ mean.  He uses this vocabulary test to depart from the syllabus, to launch into invective about the mind-numbing commercial culture of America today.  Henry shares a surname with one famous French writer and Detachment opens with the words of another – ‘and never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world’.  The in-two-minds implication of the Camus quotation is echoed in Henry’s asking the class to define ‘doublethink’ (it’s the eventual suicide, Meredith, who supplies the right answer) and the whole film, Tony Kaye’s first dramatic feature since American History X (1998)[1], veers between angry elegy for the American public education system and lament for how impossible and unhappy human life is anyway.   The screenplay is by Carl Lund, a former teacher.  No doubt his anger and regret are well-founded but they’re conveyed unconvincingly.  Henry’s older colleagues (James Caan and Blythe Danner) are nostalgic for a golden age of state-funded education which prevailed during their own professional lifetimes but just about all the staff we see are struggling against personal disintegration.  Are their personal lives outside the school so miserable because of their jobs or to make matters worse?

    Kaye’s and Lund’s two themes are illustrated chiefly in the personal history and the isolation of Henry himself:  he and the film-makers draw universal conclusions from his experience.  Detachment is elaborately put together.   There are cartoons that may or may not take as their starting point the Gerald Scarfe drawings for ‘Another Brick in the Wall’; swooping camerawork and subliminal flashbacks to the trauma of Henry’s childhood;  the doomed Meredith’s arty photography (which is so convenient for Tony Kaye’s purposes).  There are bitter, verbally fancy monologues not just from Henry but from James Caan’s jaded-but-still-compassionate Mr Seaboldt and from the school counsellor (Lucy Liu). The last of these is embarrassingly bad, as is the movie’s eventual dependence on clichés – which include the consequences of a teacher not being allowed to touch a pupil (also pivotal in the recent Monsieur Lazhar) and Henry’s change of heart as he eventually decides to take Erica out of care and back home.  (Kaye treats this bit perfunctorily – he seems irritated by the brief distraction of something good happening.)  There’s even one of the most recalcitrant kids on Henry’s first day saying on his last that he’s really gonna miss the teacher.   The suicide is familiar from high-school movies like Dead Poets Society although Kaye’s extravagant and garish staging of Meredith’s death is very different from Peter Weir’s ‘tastefulness’  The school’s principal (Marcia Gay Harden) is about to be pensioned off by the local authority after a distinguished career.  We see her husband (Bryan Cranston) dropping a vase to symbolise their shattered marriage.  We hear the principal’s voice over the school public address system and Kaye cuts back to her lying drunk (I assumed) on her office floor.  Autumn leaves and loose pages from exercise books blow together down a deserted corridor.  There’s no excuse for moments like these and no possibility of seeing them as anything other than meretricious.  Tony Kaye uses the social and educational tragedy of his subject as melodrama, as a pretext for sustained visual hyperbole.

    In most respects Detachment is a bad and preposterous film so why did I find it so absorbing?  Adrien Brody.  His long, angular, melancholy face is a work of art – a Christ’s face – but he doesn’t act as if knew it.  I remember thinking, when I first saw Brody in The Pianist ten years ago, that the power and charm of his performance derived largely from my not having seen him before.   He’s very familiar now but I look forward more and more to what he does next.   Henry Barthes is a man who looks to have cut himself off from normal relationships (his sort-of date one evening with another teacher (Christina Hendricks) leads nowhere) and his experiences with Erica and Meredith, in their different ways, seem to demonstrate to him the perils of being kind to another human being.  There’s no arguing with Meredith when she tells Henry, ‘You always look so sad’.  It’s very helpful to Tony Kaye that Brody appears to carry a burden of cosmic proportions but that he has humour too, and his rangy gait is oddly comical.   Both the young actresses are good, particularly Betty Kaye (the director’s daughter), and there are other people in the cast who are touching (James Caan especially) but it’s Adrien Brody who’s the alchemist here.  He makes Henry’s scenes with his dying grandfather and reactions to something like Erica preparing a home-cooked meal for him beautifully expressive.  You’re well aware that the relentless self-torture Henry goes through is excessive yet Brody makes you believe it.  This amounts to doublethink of an oddly rewarding kind.

    18 July 2012

    [1] Or the first one to be released anyway:  according to Wikipedia, his second feature Black Water Transit (2010) ‘is still not finished as the production company went bankrupt during the making’.

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