Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Defiance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edward Zwick (2008)

    In 1989 Pauline Kael described Edward Zwick’s Glory as ‘a good film on a great subject’.  Since then, Zwick has strengthened his reputation as a director of thoughtful action films (Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond).  I’ve seen none of his work since Glory but I can understand why he seemed to have the right CV for Defiance, which tells the true story of the Bielski partisans, three brothers from a Jewish farming family, who escape from the Jewish ghetto of Nowogrodek in Nazi-occupied Poland into the forests of Belarussia.  There they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavour to build a community in order to protect themselves and others from the Nazi invaders.   This is another true story made incredible in the telling; it reduces real heroes to war film stereotypes and is the kind of picture that gives Hollywood its reputation for crass traducement of reality for commercial purposes.   The film begins in 1941 and describes approximately the first year of the Bielskis’ life in the Naliboki forest.  The what-happened-afterwards legends at the end of the film include a note that the community continued for two more years, in the course of which they set up a school and a hospital.   It soon becomes clear in Defiance that Zwick and Clayton Frohman, with whom he wrote the screenplay (adapted from a 1993 book by Nechama Tec), aren’t interested in imparting any sense of how boring, as well as often terrifying, the community’s existence must often have been.  They want to concentrate on the physically exciting or visually arresting elements of the material.   According to these criteria, creating community services is too dull to merit any screen time.  In fact it’s hard to resist the suspicion that Defiance ends when it does because all the best fighting occurred during the first year of the Bielskis’ enterprise.

    According to Wikipedia, Zwick started writing the script for Defiance in 1999, after he’d bought the film rights to the book, but eight years (production began in September 2007) wasn’t long enough to make it good.  Except for its several violent set pieces, Defiance – which runs 137 minutes – is dramatically inert.  Zwick may well have wanted to fuse the human interest and action elements of the material but all his talent has gone into the action and Defiance, as it slowly progresses, seems to be increasingly determined by generic requirements – which operate in isolation from the characters whose story Zwick is telling.  From the start, when their parents have been killed in the ghetto, the motives of the two eldest Bielski brothers, Tuvia and Zus, are sharply contrasted.  Tuvia wants to save the lives of his family and his fellow Jews, Zus to revenge his family and his people on the Nazis.   Yet it’s Tuvia who shoots dead the Polish collaborators he finds out were responsible for his parents’ death.  You want to know how this act of retribution affects how Tuvia sees himself and how Zus sees him but there’s no follow-up at all.   Once the shocking scene of Tuvia’s vengeance is in the can, he remains the calm humanitarian and Zus the angry avenger, as if nothing had happened to modify these conceptions.

    Shortly after they set up camp in the forest, Tuvia decrees that there must be no pregnancies – the community can hardly feed itself, let alone newborn children.  It wasn’t clear to me (especially when he takes a lover himself) whether Tuvia was insisting on celibacy or just prudent use of contraception.   In any case, there’s no suggestion that he has reservations about his sexually inexperienced younger brother Asael getting married.  Any such reservations might have got in the way of one of Defiance‘s set pieces, when Asael’s wedding is intercut with scenes of the killing of German soldiers by Soviet partisans, whom Zus has left the community to fight with.  Later on, one of the women reveals to Tuvia’s lover Lilka that she is pregnant with – on the point of giving birth to – the child of a German soldier who raped her.  Lilka says she’s sure that Tuvia will understand but the woman, in great distress, says he mustn’t know.   In the next scene, Tuvia hears a baby crying, sees the newborn, and gets mad.  Lilka pleads with him – but doesn’t explain how the woman came to be pregnant until there’s been an opportunity for Tuvia to rant and Lilka herself to get upset.

    The photogenic imperative is very strong here (the cinematographer is Eduardo Serra) so that it sometimes takes precedence over other kinds of cliché.   A shot of a hammer trying to crack ice tells us that winter has arrived but that turns out not to be the harbinger of scenes of the community suffering in the freezing conditions.  Instead, the snow is used principally as a magical, beautifying feature of the sylvan wedding of Asael and his young bride.  (The fine white horse that Tuvia rides – until he sacrifices it to keep the community in food – completes the effect.)   Spring comes, the women bathe in a stream, and they look mostly healthy as well as pretty.  It’s nonsense when Bella, the woman who holds a torch for the absent Zus, says that she’s become a skeleton.   (The members of the community are sometimes dirty and pale but, except for the death scene of an elderly schoolmaster, they rarely look seriously ill.)

    Even allowing for the deficiencies of the writing, most of the acting is impersonal.  This is the sort of film where the actors’ faces express their awareness of being involved in an elevating, honourable enterprise (or they think it is, anyway) but not much else.  Daniel Craig has a particular difficulty in this respect – as well as playing Tuvia, he’s also at pains not to be playing James Bond.  As a result, Tuvia is even more opaque in the playing than in the script.   On hearing the news that his wife has been murdered in the ghetto, Tuvia continues reading and Zwick cuts away before Craig has the chance to express even self-control.  When the other partisans set about a lone Nazi soldier and bludgeon him to death, Tuvia looks on inscrutably – too civilised to join in but not, although he is the leader of the community, disposed to intervene (nor, as far as we can see, reminded of his own avenging actions earlier in the story).   The dying schoolmaster says that he nearly lost his faith as a result of the Nazi atrocities but that Tuvia has restored it – ‘You were sent by God’:  as Tuvia hears these words, Craig’s face is hard to read but he doesn’t appear to disagree.   Whether or not it’s intentional that Tuvia is as alienatingly superior as he comes across as, this helps Liev Schreiber, as Zus, give by far the best performance in Defiance.  Schreiber brings to the role some humour (he has a great laugh, which seems to come from deep inside) and human believability.  He convinces you that Zus’s joining the Russians is motivated partly by a need to get away from the suffocating righteousness of Tuvia.  Although he eventually rejoins his brothers with (ludicrous) action-hero timing, Zus returns to the fold virtually as a prodigal brother – as if accepting that Tuvia was absolutely right.

    The ethnic implications of the casting and the playing are generally unfortunate.   Perhaps because they have no characters to develop, most of the actors in the minor roles – whether they’re playing Jews, Soviets or Nazis – tend to fall back on conventional racial mannerisms (and a black German shepherd dog seems to be especially aggressive because of his Nazi allegiances).  There are exceptions but they make matters worse.  Allan Corduner as the schoolteacher and Mark Feuerstein as an intellectual who, in practical matters, is a schlemiel, are playing familiar Jewish characters – in familiar Jewish character style.  Alexa Davalos, Mia Wasikowska and Iben Hjejle, as the love interest of, respectively, Tuvia, Asael and Zus, don’t need to be played as Jewish stereotypes because their roles are defined in terms of gender rather than ethnicity.   As physical types, Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell (as Asael) are an unlikely trio of brothers – at least, Schreiber looks very different from the other two.  (Until I looked up the film online after seeing it, I’d completely missed the fact that there was a fourth, much younger brother – Aron, played by George MacKay.)  That might not have been a problem but Zwick has everyone speak in middle-European-accented English, and Schreiber is both much more comfortable than Craig or Bell doing this and able to give easy Jewish inflections to his lines.  This has the effect of emphasising that one of the three actors has conventional Jewish looks and the other two don’t; and, more troublingly, making Zus’s questionable aggressive attitudes seem Jewish behaviour, while Tuvia the hero looks like a Gentile.

    Edward Zwick is quoted on IMDB as follows:

    ‘You have these chapters of history that get lost … Sometimes that’s down to political agendas or because mythologies are created. Ideas and events that are contradictory to those myths often disappear.  That’s what’s happened here. The image of European Jews going passively to their deaths is inaccurate. We hope this film corrects that view, while also exploring the specifics of the Bielski story.’

    Of course what the Bielski partisans did deserves commemoration (even though – at least if Wikipedia is to be believed and – there are more controversial aspects of their activities between 1941 and 1945 that are not mentioned in this film).   The legends at the end of Defiance explain that Asael (although there’s no suggestion that he’d be inclined to do this) joined the Red Army and died in 1945; after the war, Zus emigrated to New York and set up a trucking business; Tuvia (and Lilka) joined him there subsequently.  Tuvia and Zus are both now dead but they have descendants; there must be people around who knew them in New York, and perhaps even some survivors from the forest community.  Zwick might have done better to structure the film around such ‘witnesses’, as Warren Beatty did in Reds.  The director, as well as the audience, could then have learned more about the reality of the brothers’ relationship.  If Zwick had delivered on the intention he suggests in the IMDB quote, Defiance might have been another ‘good film on a great subject’.  As it is, it seems an example of a filmmaker who was drawn to a subject with decent intentions but who has wrongly assumed that ‘an amazing true story’ must, by its very nature, make a credible human drama.

    14 January 2009

  • Room

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lenny Abrahamson (2015)

    Lenny Abrahamson’s Room comprises two distinct parts.  The first is much stronger than the second.  The opening half of the film takes place entirely within the room in which a young woman called Joy Newsome (Brie Larson) has been kept prisoner since she was abducted, as a seventeen-year-old, seven years ago.  Her abductor-jailer (Sean Bridgers) regularly visits the room, to deliver food supplies and to rape Joy.  She shares the space with her infant son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), who was fathered by the man keeping them prisoner and whom they call Old Nick.  The room is, in other words, the only environment that Jack has ever known.  It contains a bed, bath, toilet, basic cooking facilities, a few bits of furniture, a television and a skylight window too high to see through.  First thing each day, Jack bids good morning to the elements of his world in turn – plant, chair, toilet, lamp, etc.  Joy has told him there is no reality beyond ‘Room’ and that everything he sees on the television is a made-up world.  Soon after Jack’s fifth birthday, with which the film begins, Joy decides to start educating him in the truth of their existence.  This puzzles and discomforts her son but ‘Ma’ knows there’s no turning back.  She plans to trick Old Nick so that Jack can escape into the outside world and, once he’s there, tell whoever he first sees that Joy Newsome is his mother.  The first attempt fails, the next succeeds.  Old Nick is arrested and Joy freed soon after Jack has escaped and been picked up by a police car.  Mother and son spend a night in hospital then go to live in Joy’s mother’s home.  The second half of Room is now well underway.  What follows is a description of the struggles of Jack and Joy to adjust to life outside Room.

    The screenplay is adapted by Emma Donoghue from her lauded 2010 novel, which is narrated throughout by Jack.   Except for two or three short pieces of voiceover, his first-person narration has been jettisoned in the film – understandably so. Telling the story from the boy’s perspective obviously couldn’t be fully achieved unless Lenny Abrahamson’s camera restricted what the viewer saw to what Jack sees.   Abrahamson does adopt the boy’s viewpoint at important moments – most notably, Jack’s first experience of the world beyond Room – but the camera is, for the most part, objective.  This isn’t a problem for as long as it stays within Room.  The audience is forced to adapt to this unusual screen environment.  We also get a sustained sense of how both Jack and Joy view their surroundings.  It is a problem, though, once they’re out of captivity.  The tight focus of the first part of the story is lost in more ways than one:  the reduced visual intensity is accompanied by slacker writing and direction.

    The planning and preparations for Jack’s escape are gripping even though you feel that Old Nick is rather easily taken in.  (First, Joy pretends Jack is ill and needs to be taken to a hospital.  When Old Nick refuses, she then pretends the boy has died:  she rolls Jack up in a piece of carpet and teaches him to lie still as a corpse until it’s time for him to run.  Old Nick falls for this.  He removes the rolled-up carpet from Room and takes it off in his pick-up truck.)  We’re so preoccupied with what will happen to Jack that we may not even notice that we don’t see Joy’s reaction to being separated from him – even though this must be overwhelming to her, even though the possibility of salvation for her child also entails increased risk, to his safety and her own.  Jack’s disorientation – when he sees the sky, when he clambers out of his ‘coffin’ in the back of the truck, in the subsequent argy-bargy between Old Nick and a man walking his dog – is powerful.  And the immediate aftermath of the boy’s delivery into the outside world is a relief:  the red truck is identified on Old Nick’s premises, he’s apprehended by the police and Joy is rescued the same evening that Jack gets out.  We’re thus spared not only her captor’s revenge on Joy but also a prolonged, torturous search for her whereabouts.

    Doubts as to where Room is heading set in soon afterwards, though.  When Jack wakes up the following morning in hospital, his and Joy’s bed is in a room on a high floor.  The blinds on the windows have already been drawn up.  Jack gets out of bed, wanders tentatively over to the windows and stares out at the world miles below.  You fear for his safety; fortunately, he’s startled by what he sees and jumps back into the bed.  Although the scene is instantly effective, you’re just as immediately struck by the unlikelihood of two people in these extraordinary circumstances – especially the child – being left by hospital staff to wake unsupervised.  This is the first example of how the narrative ignores the medical and psychological care that Joy and Jack must surely be given after they’ve left Room.  Although the lack of screen time devoted to counselling sessions isn’t a great loss per se, this seems a real omission once Joy’s post-traumatic stress problems kick in.  She appears to have literally no one to turn to.  The fact that it’s Joy’s rather than Jack’s predicament that’s unconvincing connects to two larger, interconnected weaknesses in the second half of Room.  First, the film now seems in two minds as to how to divide its attention between Jack and Joy and, as a result, doesn’t explore either of their struggles in any depth.  Second, Lenny Abrahamson tries to compensate with illustrations of the ‘issues’ that arise from a situation of this kind.  These sequences are shallow and obvious.  A familiar, baying press-pack ambushes the family home to make the point that, very soon after being released from one behind-locked-doors existence, Joy is grateful to take refuge in another.  Her parents split up while Joy was in captivity; the mother, Nancy (Joan Allen), now lives with a new partner, Leo (Tom McCamus), but Joy’s father, Robert (William H Macy), joins the household for a meal – so that he can fail to make eye contact with Jack and the film-makers can feel they’ve dealt with the matter of how tough it is for Joy’s parents to face up to how their first grandchild came into the world.  Joy instantly castigates her father but this major difficulty, once it’s been raised, is checked off the list and forgotten about.  There’s no follow-through to the scene, or any hint of tension in the next one featuring Joy and Robert together.

    Abrahamson and Emma Donoghue may have felt that concentrating on Jack would have asked too much of the child actor playing him – even one as good as Jacob Tremblay turns out to be – but the upshot is that they dilute the story they’re telling.  Jack’s apprehension and subsequent feelings of regret about leaving Room hint at the strongest theme in the material – the idea that a child’s first world, with his mother, is a secure environment, and that Jack’s life in Room is horrifying to Joy (and to the viewer) but not to him.  It’s normal life.  What he’s never had he’s never missed.  Besides, he does have what every child – every boy child, especially – is thought to want:  the virtually undivided attention of his mother.  There’s no avoiding the long Freudian shadows cast by the set-up in Room.  Jack and his Ma take baths together and share a bed, except during Old Nick’s visits:  Jack sleeps in a wardrobe while his mother is being raped by the man who fathered him.  This doesn’t mean Jack need be shown to have a full-blown Oedipus complex to contend with once they’ve left Room and he’s sharing Ma with other people in a different way.  But the film gives us little sense of the effects on the boy of the loss of his extraordinary former partnership with his mother, of whether Jack experiences this as separation even before Joy has attempted suicide and is hospitalised for some time afterwards.  It’s only a matter of time before Jack bonds with his grandmother, Leo and Leo’s dog.  In comparison, Joy fails to cope, and we see her failing to cope.  The banal implication is that kids as young as Jack are naturally resilient and able to adapt in a way that grown-ups struggle to do.

    Imprisoned between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, Joy has lost a large part of her youth yet can’t regret the experience of giving birth to Jack and raising him.  As soon as she’s free again, she has to cope with the shock of her parents’ marriage being over.  The film’s dramatisation of Joy’s confused and upsetting state of mind is hardly imaginative.  When she gives an interview to a TV talk show, the phony-sympathetic interviewer’s questions expose Joy’s inability to take on the implications of who Jack’s father is, and so on.  (The interviewer is overplayed by Wendy Crewson:  I thought I recognised the name and see from the note on Away from Her that I didn’t like her contribution to that film, for similar reasons.)  A big row between Joy and her mother is too deliberately built towards and Joy’s feelings of resentment are then too clearly articulated:  the scene would have more impact if the argument seemed to happen accidentally – and if Joy’s anger was partly due to her not being able to explain her anger.  It’s a pity that Lenny Abrahamson and Emma Donoghue didn’t go for the artistically (and, I realise, commercially) more daring option of sticking with Jack as the central consciousness ­– and have Joy remain, as she is in the novel, Ma.  This would have allowed Room to present her post-captivity behaviour as relatively opaque – or, at least, as circumscribed by Jack’s understanding of what’s going on.  With Joy’s travails pushed into the foreground in the way they are, the dimensions of the film threaten to shrink to those of a glorified soap opera.

    Brie Larson is a capable actress with a lovely open face.  She gives a strong showing as Joy but the prizes she’s getting are another example of the well-known awards season phenomenon of an actor’s winning thanks to the role they’re playing more than for the performance they’re giving in it.  Larson is required to be emotionally in extremis virtually throughout and the effect is, to be honest, rather monotonous.  As Jack, Jacob Tremblay, who’d just turned eight when the film was shot, is more nuanced.  His good timing makes his one-liners sometimes funny, and water in the desert.  Tremblay isn’t – unlike the film, the direction, the lead actress and the screenplay – up for an Oscar for Room.  He was tipped by some for a Best Supporting Actor nomination that didn’t materialise.    The supporting category is perhaps more competitive this year than the Best Actor field but Jack is, in any case, a lead role – even with the adjustments that have been made to the novel.  Jacob Tremblay wasn’t at any stage mentioned as a serious possibility for a lead actor nomination.  I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise when I say Tremblay’s acting in Room is much better than Leonardo DiCaprio’s in The Revenant but the comparison is obviously pertinent.  All this makes you wonder why the Academy no longer hands out special Oscars for outstanding juvenile performances outside the conventional acting categories.

    Although Room is mostly disappointing from halfway, Lenny Abrahamson deserves credit for the earlier scenes and for his skilful direction of Jacob Tremblay in particular.  Apart from the two main characters, the parts are pretty thin.  William H Macy is a bit too intense in his brief appearance as Joy’s father but Joan Allen does well to suggest mixed feelings in the mother that the script doesn’t supply.  Sean Bridgers is creditably low-key in the thankless role of Old Nick.  There are lots of good things in this film.  Although Stephen Rennicks’s music sometimes gets in the way, it comes across as genuinely sensitive.  During his first five years, Jack has grown very long hair, which he’s not prepared to have cut until after Joy’s suicide attempt and hospitalisation.  He calls his hair ‘my strong’.  It sounds (and is) a bit corny that he agrees to be shorn once he-has-to-be-strong-for-Ma but the lock of his hair that he gives her chimes touchingly with Ma’s bad tooth that fell out while they were still in Room and which she gave to Jack as ‘something of me’.  I liked the repeated and eventually resonant canine influences in the story:  we’re told that Old Nick shot a line about a dog to trick Joy, when he first abducted her; Jack has an imaginary dog in Room; a dog-walker’s real one sends Old Nick scarpering when Jack is trying to escape his clutches; Jack makes friends with Leo’s dog.  In the film’s final scene, at Jack’s request, he and Joy, who by now has returned home, briefly revisit Old Nick’s garden and the shed that contains Room.  There’s no arguing that this finale is emotionally effective, even if you wonder how likely it would be for the police to agree to the pair’s visiting what is still a crime scene.  Jack finds that his first world has grown smaller (as Dylan Thomas did, when he revisited Fern Hill as an adult).  The boy formally says farewell to the objects he used to greet each morning.  He concludes with ‘Goodbye, Room’ and turns to go.  One of Brie Larson’s best moments comes as Joy repeats the two words, in a tiny whisper and with a look in her eyes that’s ineffable.

    20 January 2016

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