Daily Archives: Tuesday, February 9, 2016

  • Everybody Wins

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Karel Reisz (1990)

    What turned out to be Karel Reisz’s final feature is based on one of Arthur Miller’s very few original screenplays.  In spite of this pedigree and Pauline Kael’s admiring New Yorker review (one of her last), it’s a poor film.   The first meeting of the two principals is promising.  Angela Crispini (Debra Winger) wants Tom O’Toole (Nick Nolte), an ex-cop turned private detective, to look into a murder which, she says, resulted in a miscarriage of justice – she insists she has proof of this.  The words Angela uses in her opening conversations with O’Toole suggest that she’s in awe of his integrity and passion for justice (she’s seen him on television although I didn’t understand why a man in O’Toole’s line of work would be a celebrity).  The look in her face and the tone of the voice, however, make clear that she wants to seduce him, and she quickly succeeds.  Debra Winger’s bounteous vivacity and Nick Nolte’s rugged wit make these early exchanges enjoyable.   But once the minor characters are introduced and Angela’s reluctance to impart the clinching evidence she claims to have has become a main element of the story, it’s increasingly obvious where Everybody Wins is going – and I couldn’t see that Reisz and Miller meant this to be obvious.   As an elderly judge, Jack Warden is vivid and funny but it’s clear this old man will turn out to be shrewdly self-interested.  It seems to take ages (even though the film runs only ninety-seven minutes) to expose the various hypocrisies at work – and the limits to the characters’ willingness to tell the whole truth – in the New England city where the story is set.

    As might be expected, Miller’s script is wordy and the words are sometimes too fancy.  There’s one monologue in particular that Debra Winger speaks which, although the actress delivers it with aplomb, doesn’t belong in the mouth of Angela, an ex-hooker who’s bright but not highly educated.   Winger is less varied when Angela is mournful, which she’s required to be for quite a stretch.  Nolte, partly because Tom O’Toole really does have integrity (but also knows when he’s beaten), eventually gives the more satisfying performance.  Karel Reisz keeps changing the mood as if to remind himself that Everybody Wins is meant to be, at some level, a mystery thriller:   Mark Isham’s score gamely keeps up with these shifts but, in doing so, exposes the lack of a coherent tone.   It’s the three songs on the soundtrack sung by Leon Redbone – ‘Seduced’, ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’ and ‘A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’ – which tell the story and illustrate the eventual triumph of self-interest.  Some of the editing looks shaky in the latter stages.  The cast also includes Will Patton, Judith Ivey, Kathleen Wilhoite and Frank Military, who’s good as the young man wrongly in jail.

    18 April 2014

  • Everlasting Moments

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick

    Jan Troell (2008)

    According to Wikipedia, the germ of this Swedish film was a series of interviews which Jan Troell’s wife, Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell, conducted in 1986 with Maja Larsson, the daughter of Ulfsäter-Troell’s father’s cousin, Maria.  Maja is the narrator of Everlasting Moments, which is set in the first years of the twentieth century and tells the story of Maria Larsson, a working-class wife and mother, who wins a camera as a lottery prize and starts taking photographs.  The setting is Malmö, Jan Troell’s home town, although the real Maria Larsson lived in Gothenburg.  This is very clearly a personal film for Troell and his wife, who worked together on the screenplay with Niklas Rådström – and the material has an inherent meaning to them that the narrative structure doesn’t fully express.  Maja is a quiet observer of her family’s life (and Nellie Almgren, who plays her as a child before handing over to Callin Öhrvall for Maja’s teenage years, is particularly good).  Even so, the she-is-a-camera perspective is a limited device.  There are many scenes that don’t involve Maja and you don’t get a strong sense of how her personality and attitudes were influenced by her parents or siblings.  Everlasting Moments is, nevertheless, a lovely and affecting paean to the camera and, by extension, the movie camera.  Troell’s love of moving images is conveyed particularly in sequences involving an early video recording and the public screening of a Chaplin movie.  Troell and Mischa Gavrjusjov are jointly credited as the cinematographers and the quality of light in the film is extraordinary (even as a recording from television, which is what I watched):  Troell recreates the past in a way that is both literally and metaphorically illuminating.  The wonderment you feel from this chimes with what the characters in the story, especially Maria, experience through their discovery of the miracles that a camera can achieve.

    The two main relationships in the film are the conscientious, resilient Maria’s marriage to volatile, alcoholic, womanising Sigfrid (Sigge) and her friendship with an older man – the courteous, benign, unobtrusively dapper Sebastian Pedersen, who runs a local photographic business.  Everlasting Moments is more effective in dramatising the personal details of the characters’ lives than in realising their social and political context on a larger scale.  The description of industrial action in the Malmö dockyards, where Sigge finds employment as often as he can, is workmanlike rather than imaginative.  Jan Troell is, however, acutely insightful about the heroine and her circumstances:  we learn that, in spite of her passion for photography, Maria simply puts away her camera for several years as a result of the family’s moving house and two more children being born to her.  Although the character doesn’t develop much, Mikael Persbrandt imparts very well both Sigge’s capacity for easy enjoyment, which Maria doesn’t share, and his brittleness.  There’s the occasional frustrating omission – it would have been good to see, for example, the reaction of the husband when one of the children contracts polio – but a subplot in which Sigge takes care of a horse, out of a combination of natural fondness for the animal and pride in its becoming his private property, is persuasive.  The eventual reconciliation of Maria and Sigge seems too pat but both the actors concerned are excellent throughout in hinting at the couple’s original feelings for each other:  Maria Heiskanen indicates economically but incisively what once attracted Maria to Sigge, even though she now finds him, more often than not, offensively exasperating.

    The Great War, in the words of Maja’s narration (voiced by Birte Heribertsson), goes ‘on and on’, and so does Sigge’s domestic tyranny.  Some will find Maria’s long-suffering nature and self-denial vexing but this, again, is a credible comment on the situation of women of her time and class – a comment animated through Maria Heiskanen’s skilful individualisation of Maria.  Jan Troell means us to feel both frustration with Maria and admiration for her.  He achieves this successfully and not manipulatively.  The best scenes in Everlasting Moments, however, are those between Maria and Jesper Christensen’s Pedersen.  (Pedersen is, like the actor playing him, a Dane; Maria Heiskanen is a Finn and Maria Larsson was from Finnish stock.)  Christensen’s acting is beautiful.  There’s sadness and humour in Pedersen’s face:  the sadness is held in check and the humour allowed full extrovert expression only when Pedersen is playing a musical accompaniment, on his fiddle, to the Chaplin film.  Christensen limns these qualities of melancholy and amusement in a perfectly natural way and makes Pedersen’s neat, precise gestures wonderfully eloquent.  He suggests a life lived long before the camera started rolling.  (One event in the relationship between Maria and Pedersen seemed to me misplaced, though – I didn’t understand why it was so long after she’d taken a photograph of Pedersen that Maria gave it to him.)  Compared with the finely-shaped lead performances, some of the actors in smaller roles are too eager to make the most of their relatively slender opportunities.  Creditable exceptions include Richard Ulfsäter (Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell’s nephew) and Maria Lundqvist as assistants in Pedersen’s shop and studio.

    2 April 2015

     

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