Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Days of Wine and Roses

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Blake Edwards (1962)

    When PR man Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) meets boss’s secretary Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), they get off on the wrong foot.  She’s coolly dismissive when he tries to make amends.  These opening hostilities might be the starting point for a romantic comedy; instead, they’re the prelude to a torturous ‘social issue’ picture, a clumsy jeremiad about the perils of alcohol.   J P Miller adapted his own 1958 Playhouse 90 teleplay (with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie in the leads) and the construction is mechanical.   Kirsten’s switch from standoffishness to accepting Joe’s dinner invitation is sudden and unexplained – beyond the fact that Miller needs it to happen in short order.  Joe is baffled by Kirsten’s contempt, as she stands with her back to him in an elevator:  it’s a credit to Lee Remick that her face shows signs that Kirsten is more interested in Joe than he thinks.  Remick’s character is particularly ill served by Miller’s writing, which pushes Kirsten towards her alcoholic fate in easy, unconvincing stages.  When she first meets Joe, Kirsten doesn’t drink although she’s what would now be called a chocoholic.  He first tempts her with a Brandy Alexander.  Once they’re married and she’s at home with their baby daughter, Joe encourages Kirsten to have a drink or two in the evening before he comes in – so that she won’t notice so much that he’s been doing overtime at the bar.  The script requires that she succumb without a murmur of resistance, even though Remick in her early scenes suggests a believably self-possessed young woman, ready to speak her mind and argue for what she believes in.  Before long, Kirsten is drinking during the day too and manages to set the couple’s apartment on fire.

    Blake Edwards’ direction has the same strengths and weaknesses as in the previous year’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s but George Axelrod’s screenplay supplies many more bits than Miller’s which play to the strengths.  Edwards is less than imaginative with visual jokes, like the decapitation of tulip heads by a closing elevator door, and crude when he’s staging a comedy set piece.  There’s an overdone sequence in which Joe sprays insecticide over Kirsten’s apartment – driving the cockroaches centrifugally to the rest of the building and bringing all the other human tenants out of the woodwork in clamorous protest.  (The only consolation of the increasing gloom of Days of Wine and Roses is that the supposedly funny bits dry up.)  Edwards again shows skill in handling the early scenes between the two main characters (once they’ve started to like each other).  These nuanced exchanges have a real emotional current even if it’s easier to understand what Joe sees in Kirsten than vice versa.  Still, Jack Lemmon works so hard at his performance that, every once in a while, he seems to have to stop to draw breath; in these moments Lemmon/Joe’s exhaustion is rather endearing.   Not for the first time, Jack Lemmon brought to mind Pauline Kael’s description of Miranda Richardson’s acting in Dance With a Stranger:  it ‘took a lot of technique, and you see it all’.  Unless you’re prepared to accept it as genetic (we’re told Joe’s parents are a showbiz act in Las Vegas), there’s no real justification for the theatrical busyness of Lemmon’s playing.  He certainly works up a gnawing, hectic pressure but his turns tell us more about the actor’s resources than about the man he’s interpreting.  (Even at this level, Lemmon is occasionally overeager – for example, he anticipates the slap on the face that Kirsten gives Joe in the elevator:  the reaction comes before the blow has landed.)

    Although Days of Wine and Roses is set in San Francisco rather than New York, it’s interesting to watch a film based in the world of advertising/PR that’s not only contemporary with the Mad Men era but was actually made during the early 1960s.  The hard drinking in Mad Men is more remarkable than it is here because Don Draper et al, while they might appear to be alcoholics in terms of dependency, can function perfectly well – indeed prosper – in their professional lives.   Kirsten’s father (Charles Bickford, who also played the role on TV, and is good when he’s not required to be melodramatic) runs a gardening business in San Mateo.   The atmosphere there is clean and good, a million miles away from the clouds of alcohol fumes that pervade the big city.  On their first serious attempt to cure their drinking problem (and after Joe has lost yet another job), the couple go to work at the father’s place.  They fall off the wagon spectacularly one night; in case we weren’t finding things overwrought enough, it happens during a thunderstorm.  The way things happen, the descent into alcoholism appears to be principally a means of scaling ever greater histrionic heights.   Joe goes frantically searching for bottles of scotch that he hid in his father-in-law’s greenhouse and, in his violent frustration, starts dismembering potted plants.  Sally found this vandalism particularly upsetting but the whole sequence is so preconceived as one for Lemmon to knock us dead with that I found it hollow and unmoving.

    The next scene Joe’s in cold turkey and a straitjacket.   He and Kirsten pass through received ideas of what alcoholism comprises as if the script were a checklist.  When Joe wants to try Alcoholics Anonymous, in-denial Kirsten declares, ‘I am not an alcoholic!’  For what feels like a long stretch, Days of Wine and Roses turns into an extended commercial for AA, with Jack Klugman as Joe’s mentor Jim, a reformed alcoholic who is now evidently addicted to soundbites about how to beat the demon drink.  It’s one of the few funny moments in the film when Klugman’s Jim begins a sentence, ‘At the risk of sounding preachy … ‘, although, to be fair, it’s one of Jack Lemmon’s best when, in spite of the relentless build-up, he reads the line ‘My name is Joe Clay and I’m an alcoholic’ in a fresh, surprising way.

    One good scene – an illustration of the only interesting aspect of the way in which the couple’s relationship is treated – comes when Joe goes to the motel the absconded Kirsten has booked into and where she lies blotto in her room.  This bit is dramatically effective because it’s Remick who’s doing the vigorous acting while Lemmon is reacting relatively quietly but there’s a strong idea at work here too:  Joe gives in and joins Kirsten in a drink because he loves her and knows they’ll feel closer if they’re both drinking.  It’s a pity that, as soon as he’s back on the bottle, Joe is again immediately and melodramatically inebriated.  He desperately breaks into, and stumbles as he tries to escape from, a nearby liquor store.  The pointlessly vindictive proprietor jeeringly pours a bottle of scotch over Joe’s head.  Then it’s back to another cold turkey session.

    Given the predictability of the piece, it’s surprising that Joe doesn’t have an outburst of remorse about getting Kirsten started on the road to ruin, less surprising that Edwards and Miller are very sketchy in describing the effect of what happens to the marriage on the couple’s daughter Debbie (Blake Edwards’ daughter, Jennifer).   It’s no surprise at all that the script contains such choice offerings as, ‘You and I were a couple of drunks on a sea of booze.  And the boat sank’.  There’s some strikingly wooden acting in smaller roles – especially Alan Hewitt as one of Joe’s bosses.   The film’s title is taken from a poem by Ernest Dowson, which book-reading Kirsten quotes early on in the story[1].   The theme song of the same name, by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, repeated the pair’s Oscar success of the previous year, if not the memorability of its predecessor, ‘Moon River’.

    27 January 2011

    [1]  ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

    Out of a misty dream

    Our path emerges for a while, then closes

    Within a dream.’

     

  • The Revenant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alejandro González Iñárritu (2015)

    The ballyhoo surrounding The Revenant is somewhat reminiscent of old-style Hollywood advertising of gigantic movies – ‘X years in the making – at a cost of Y million dollars ….’   Now, however, the emphasis is on the ordeals endured by the film’s director, star et al to get the picture on the screen.  It may be going too far to say that what’s ended up there is subsidiary to the production backstory.  Even so, and though The Revenant is also being promoted as an(other) ‘immersive’ experience in the cinema,  Alejandro González Iñárritu doesn’t want the audience to forget what he, his cast and his crew put themselves through.  So much for the magic of the movies – but perhaps the magic of twenty-first century movies is partly responsible for the hype.  We’ve got used to assuming that anything technically amazing before our eyes is thanks to CGI.  It’s not surprising if a director is determined to put us right when more extensive craftsmanship and arduous physical effort were actually involved.

    The Revenant is the based-on-a-true story of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), a frontiersman and fur trapper who, on a hunting expedition in the wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase in the 1820s, gets mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead.  As the title suggests, Glass comes back – to life and to settle scores with John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who not only makes the decision to abandon Glass but also kills the hero’s half-Native son, Hawk, and commits other nefarious deeds.  The film lasts 156 minutes and nearly everything in it seems to go on much longer than necessary – longer than it takes either to get the point of a scene or to remember the blood, sweat and frostbite that shooting it cost Iñárritu, DiCaprio and their colleagues.  This is true of even the most impressive sequences – like the opening ambush of the trappers by Arikara Native Americans and the grizzly’s attack on Glass (which does, of course, rely largely on a CGI bag of tricks).  You understand the protraction, nevertheless.  It’s the Lawrence of Arabia syndrome:  a director who masters the logistics of film-making on this scale needs to ensure we admire that mastery, as well as demonstrate where some of the production budget went.

    His previous film, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), featured some ‘ironic’ supernatural elements and this new one proves that Iñárritu’s gifts include reading my mind.  The first line of the screenplay which he and Mark L Smith have written for The Revenant (adapted from a 2002 novel of the same name by Michael Punke) is, ‘It’s all right, son – I know you want this to be over’.   (This features in a dream that Hugh Glass is having and is delivered in, I guess, Pawnee – with an English subtitle.)  Yet there’s a sort of unspoken pact between the director and the audience for a long-winded survival story of this kind, which the to-hell-and-back publicity for The Revenant can only have enhanced.  Most of those who watch the film will, I expect (and hope), get more out of it than I did.  I suspect, though, that the positive feelings viewers have leaving the cinema will include, as they did for me, a measure of self-satisfaction, mixed in with relief, that they’ve made it.

    The audience’s sense that, like Hugh Glass, they have to keep going and see this thing through also helps people to identify with and root for the protagonist. That wasn’t so easy for this viewer.  I’ve mixed feelings about Leonardo DiCaprio winning the Best Actor Oscar for The Revenant, as he surely will.  It’s regrettable that normal service is resumed in this film:  DiCaprio’s previous performance, in The Wolf of Wall Street, was a big improvement on what he’d done before.  But the backlog of his dull, overrated work over the years has left an animus towards him that I find it hard to shake off.  As he’s such a moderate actor, I would rather see DiCaprio rewarded for reasons other than the quality of his acting.   And he will win now (a) because he hasn’t won before and (b) for suffering so much in order to play a role – rather than for what he delivers to the camera.  Hugh Glass suffers – at the hands of other men, wildlife, forces of nature – largely in silence.  This helps DiCaprio, who retches, groans and pants more impressively than he reads lines.  Of course there’s no doubting his physical commitment to what he’s doing (which, in the circumstances, is just as well).  Otherwise, it’s the usual Leonardo DiCaprio – conscientious, straining to be interestingly expressive, failing.

    Even in his Oscar-winning performance, we see DiCaprio upstaged – by Tom Hardy, as the dastardly John Fitzgerald.  The role is an obvious one but Hardy has an unpredictability and an ability to hint at emotional complexity that are way beyond the leading man.   There are moments when, no doubt assisted by the camerawork, Hardy’s swift, close-to-the-ground movement even brings to mind the evil-doers in Ingmar Bergman’s great film The Virgin Spring.  It’s true that Hardy’s quality of mystery here is the result partly of its often being hard to work out what he’s saying but he’s a strong, troubling presence.   Will Poulter is good too, in the role of a principled rookie trapper; and Domhnall Gleeson gets across the unavailing decency of the leader of the trapping party – though Gleeson’s acting also involves a degree of DiCaprio-ish forced grimness.  Grace Dove, as the ghost or memory of Glass’s deceased Native American wife, appears several times (often enough to make you realise the film’s title must surely refer to her as well as to Glass).  Although the real Hugh Glass (1783-1833) did marry a Pawnee woman, you feel that if she hadn’t existed it would have been necessary for Iñárritu to invent her, for the sake of political correctness.  It’s a little ironic that, because she and Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) both have a startling pallor, it’s hard not to be reminded, as you look at them, of the use by Native Americans of the term ‘paleface’ in Hollywood Westerns of another century.

    In the several dream sequences, the unstressed movement between – in effect, the proximity of – reality and imagination is one of the subtler aspects of this mainly unsubtle film.  There’s no denying, however, that The Revenant is visually impressive. The shifts between movement and stasis are often striking; Stephen Mirrione’s editing is excellent; and Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki create images that are often both awesomely beautiful and dynamic.  The ideas underlying the visual scheme aren’t original:  much of what we see illustrates the violent futility of nature and, particularly, of human activity in nature.  Still, the mingling of blood and snow and shots of small figures in a huge white landscape make for some fine pictures.  A sequence in which, during a blizzard, Glass finds warmth and shelter inside the carcass of a horse that he’s disembowelled gives a new impact to the phrase blood and guts.  Unless you have a monster TV screen at home, The Revenant is a movie that demands to be seen in the cinema, and that’s a good thing; but its spectacular scale is a reminder too of the narrowing range of movies that have to be seen in this way.  Once all the main characters except Glass have been killed, you know that you too have survived.  As indicated above, that’s a good feeling but it didn’t make me think the film amounted to more than supercharged bombast (of which the masochistic accounts of its making are part).  When Iñárritu closes in on Leonardo DiCaprio’s face for a final half-crazed-by-trauma stare (or that’s the idea) to camera, I didn’t want The Revenant to continue but I couldn’t help thinking:  ‘Yes … and?’

    19 January 2016