Daily Archives: Thursday, February 18, 2016

  • For Your Consideration

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Guest (2006)

    Christopher Guest’s reputation as a pioneer figure in the mockumentary genre is unchallengeable:  he wrote and acted in This is Spinal Tap and has directed well-received films like A Mighty Wind (about a folk music reunion event) and Best in Show (a dog show).  We gave up on This is Spinal Tap after half an hour; we managed even less of A Mighty Wind, even though that had twenty years’ less excuse for seeming primitive.  For Your Consideration isn’t exactly a mockumentary but it is a lampoon of the inside world of another branch of entertainment.  It’s about the making of a picture, a low-budget Jewish family melodrama set in the American South.  There are no stars in the cast of ‘Home for Purim’ but rumours get started that one then another of its actors is a dark horse for an Oscar nomination.   The Hollywood awards industry might seem almost too easy a target but there should still be rich pickings for any satirist worth their salt.   But For Your Consideration is tediously crude – in the way that made Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, for me, unwatchable.  I think the only reason I watched this one all the way through was because its subject was impregnably appealing.

    The film is bad because the script is bad – and certainly doesn’t meld with the largely hyper-realistic style of performance.  If the dialogue was mainly improvised by the actors (as is claimed on Wikipedia – although the screenplay credit goes just to Guest and Eugene Levy) they must all have been unsuccessful gag writers in a past life.  The lines don’t even sound as if they might have been improvised originally but too much worked over by the time the film was shot.  The script is never able to go for more than a couple of exchanges without a punchline and it’s rarely a good one.  The pattern of the writing is established right from the start.  As aging, careworn actress Marilyn Hack drives into the film studios, the man at the gate asks if he knows her face from a particular film.  When she says no, he tells her where he recognises her from, and, when she denies it, goes into a little routine, ‘You weren’t in that movie?  You sure you weren’t in that movie?  You should have been in that movie.  That was a good movie’.

    Marilyn, who plays the dying matriarch in ‘Home for Purim’, is the first of the cast to be whispered for an Oscar nomination.   Then it’s the turn of another veteran, Victor Allan Miller, a public face through his enduring career in frankfurter commercials; then the young Callie Webb, whose background is in failed feminist stand-up comedy.  The only person who doesn’t get a whisper is Brian Chubb, Callie’s boyfriend until, stressed by the prospect of a nomination, she dumps him for not being ‘supportive’.  On the day the Oscar nominations are announced, the embittered Brian doesn‘t want to know about them and determinedly sleeps in.  He’s the only one nominated (for Best Supporting Actor, obviously).   It’s typical of For Your Consideration’s laziness that there’s absolutely no follow-up to this.  Brian’s nomination is the punchline – we never see him again, let alone find out how the news affected him or his relationship with Callie (or if he won).  This is in spite of the fact that we’re given contemptuous, completely unsurprising back-to-real-life-after-the-moment-of-fame updates on Marilyn, Victor and Callie.

    When Marilyn, suddenly replete with breast implants and facial cosmetic surgery, goes on the talk show circuit to campaign for the newly-renamed ‘Home for Thanksgiving’, she reminds the TV audience that Thanksgiving is ‘not only non-denominational but the start of the awards season’, a remark which exposes FYC’s concentration on the Oscars to the exclusion of all other film prizes.  The breathless succession of nomination and award announcements from late November through to the Oscars in (currently) mid-February could have supplied some kind of comic spine to the film.  The proliferation of awards is a big part of what makes them ridiculous.  Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the scene knows that the Oscar nominations are preceded by the Golden Globe nominations, and that regional critics’ circle prizes emerge on a nearly daily basis from Thanksgiving to Christmas.  Guest doesn’t make use of this because he’s not actually interested in satirising the awards industry.  FYC is laughing more at the egos and the brittle vanity of actors, a theme which isn’t sufficiently new or distinctive to support an entire picture.

    It’s no surprise, then, that ‘Home for Purim/Thanksgiving’ is far too crap for any self-respecting awards aficionado to condescend to give it a second thought.  In this respect too, the joke seems to be less on Hollywood than on the hopeless self-delusion of the company of losers involved in the making of the film.  Guest and Levy could have been more daring and politically incorrect about the kind of sleeper picture that regularly springs into contention at awards time.  Seeing The Soloist the following night made me all the more aware of how anachronistic FYC‘s ideas were of what the industry might go for.  The Soloist does have stars (and it’s probably too lethargic actually to get awards nominations) but, as a prescription for Academy Awards consideration, it’s a credible satirical notion for twenty-first century Hollywood:  black, mentally ill, artistic-genius performer meets hard-bitten journalist who has never learned how to love.  And it’s Based On A True Story.  ‘Home for Purim’, with its archaic melodramatic acting and situations, might have worked better if Guest and Levy had had one of the people behind it realise the film was so bad that its naffness could be its commercial salvation – with an audience different from the one for which it had been originally designed.  (Even then it wouldn’t have been likely to get awards buzz – but Guest and Levy might have made that happen as a result of the expected contenders all turning out to be so boringly worthy that they died at the box office.)  I expect plenty of people are happy to enjoy FYC at this dumb level and that they’d see the criticisms I’m making as ‘taking things too seriously’ – but I bet plenty of the same people will also be ready to applaud the film as a razor-shape exposé of the movie industry. Guest and Levy make no effort to try to suggest why film producers and agents might be seen as ridiculous.   They rely on really hopeless jokes to make people look silly:  for example, virtually no one involved in ‘Home for Purim’, behind or in front of the camera, is able to use the internet.  In 2006.

    There are plenty of evidently talented people in the cast, including Catherine O’Hara (who actually won the National Board of Review Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as Marilyn), Harry Shearer (Victor), Parker Posey (Callie), Christopher Moynihan (Brian) and, in smaller parts, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley Jr and Sandra Oh.   Guest himself plays the director of ‘Home for Purim’ and Levy an agent.   At one point Ricky Gervais turns up as a studio executive (it’s he who gets the film’s title changed so that it’s not ‘too Jewish’).  Gervais is a very limited performer but his presence here reminds you how sophisticated The Office was compared with the mockumentaries with which Christopher Guest is associated (although I’ve not seen Best in Show).  Gervais’s Extras was also much more sympathetic than For Your Consideration is to the desperate ambitions of actors and writers.

    7 October 2009

  • For Ellen

    Old YorkerFilm review

    So Yong Kim (2012)

    Joby Taylor sings and plays guitar in a heavy metal band that hasn’t made it.   He comes to an anonymous town – we don’t know from where exactly – to conclude his unsuccessful fight with his estranged wife for shared custody of their young daughter Ellen.  He eventually hitches a ride on a timber lorry and disappears back into nowhere, leaving his girlfriend asleep in their motel room, unaware of his departure.   The ending of For Ellen clearly acknowledges – right down to the timber lorry – that of another movie about a shiftless, discontented man in whose life music plays an important but troubling part.  Although So Yong Kim’s movie is wan and small beside Five Easy Pieces, the ending is one of its more arresting moments – if only because you’re not sure what’s going on in Joby’s mind.  Is he traumatised by the brevity of a happy couple of hours he spent in Ellen’s company the day before, shortly before signing the papers that ensure he won’t see his child again?  Or was his daughter Joby’s latest bound-to-fail project now come to (as it were) fruition, and leaving him clueless as to what to do, where to go next?

    As played by Paul Dano, Joby is abysmally asocial:  it’s nearly always a long journey from the start of one of his sentences to the end.  While Dano’s halting, tortured delivery may express part of Joby’s personality, it’s also characteristic of For Ellen as a whole.  The writer-director and her lead actor confuse deliberateness with depth.  (This is the first picture I’ve seen that Paul Dano is expected to carry.)  The key images are held for too long in order to underline their meaning.   The film opens with Joby driving through a snowy landscape, looking unhappy and uncertain of where he’s going.   This would be enough to make the point but the sequence culminates in his losing control of the car on the frosty but deserted road; the car skids and bumps to rest against a snowbank, and the camera is stuck with it.  (The winter world of the film is, though, at least more fully integrated than in A Late Quartet.)  Something similar afflicts Paul Dano’s solo scenes:  he describes Joby’s misery without revealing anything much about it.  What makes For Ellen worth seeing are the parts of it in which Dano is sharing the screen with either Jon Heder, as Joby’s lawyer Fred Butler, or Shaylena Mandigo, who plays Ellen.

    I may have completely misunderstood the middle part of the film, when Fred, who lives with his mother, invites Joby for supper.  After giving him a litany of bad news about the terms of the settlement with Ellen’s mother Claire (Margarita Levieva), Fred suggests to Joby he come over to try ‘my Mom’s really awesome lasagne’.  The little we’ve seen of the young lawyer up to this point suggests a nerd but, from the point Joby enters his home, I assumed that Fred was a repressed homosexual, who, as well as feeling genuinely sorry for his client, fancied him:  Jon Heder is full of nervously smitten glances at Joby.  It struck me as an interesting idea that Fred should use his briskly amiable mother (Mara Pelifian) both as a means of getting to spend the evening with Joby and as a guarantee that nothing happens between the two men.   When Joby suggests, after supper, that the two of them go to a bar, Fred appears both scared and excited – things are going further than he’d intended or hoped for.   At the bar, as Joby gets drunk, the normally abstemious Fred seems to sense danger:  anything could happen.   I liked the way that Paul Dano gave Joby an almost unconscious but nonetheless powerful awareness of his ability to dominate Fred as he pleased.  But there’s nothing in any review of For Ellen that I’ve read to support this reading:  Fred is referred to as ‘deeply uncool’ and a ‘man-child’ but he seems to be regarded as asexual.

    What So Yong Kim really had in mind probably excuses lines that struck me as unconvincing if it mattered deeply to Fred that the evening turned out well – such as his failing to check that Joby’s not vegetarian until the lasagne is being served.  Even so, I’m not convinced that Kim has thought things through in the script.  Shortly after his meeting with Ellen, Joby’s girlfriend Susan arrives, hoping to give him a nice surprise.   Jena Malone is very likeable in the role – it’s certainly a pleasant surprise to the viewer that someone as disconnected as Joby has this kind of centred, supportive partner.  Yet he’s so mournfully remote from Susan from the moment he sees her that you can’t believe she’s oblivious to this, as she seems meant to be.

    For Ellen has plenty of handheld camerawork, some costive improvisation and several artily composed images – a sequence in which a fly buzzes round a sleeping Joby and into his ear, a static, peopleless shot of ladies’ and gents’ toilets in a department store (Ellen has briefly gone missing and Joby has disappeared to find her).  But the movie, for all its indie-auteur cred, comes to life at the point at which it more closely resembles a conventional tug-of-love picture.  In a desperate phone call to Claire, Joby reminds his wife that, if it hadn’t been for him, she would have had an abortion when she was pregnant with Ellen – and that he has documents to prove it.   This is enough to persuade Claire and her attorney (Julian Gamble) to let Joby see the girl, under strict conditions of what can and can’t be said, for two hours.

    When Ellen enters the scene, the prevailing hesitancy of the film comes to mean more.   We see that it’s hard for Joby to express himself to someone to whom he wants to express himself; hard too for him to read this wary, puzzled child, who stares unsmiling at him before breaking into a – for Joby – miraculous grin.  Ellen’s silent snail’s pace round a toyshop, to replace the doll Joby bought her but which she already has, is broken suddenly by, ‘I want this one’.  When she first says thank you to him he replies, ‘You’re welcome’, a phrase she repeats each time he thanks her, as he finds increasing reason to do.  Shaylena Mandigo is really good as Ellen; she’s able to suggest, at the same time, that she’s got the upper hand and a kind of yearning for Joby.  During their last moments together, Ellen is practising ‘Für Elise’ on a virtual keyboard.  Joby makes a supposedly unobtrusive exit through the window that the child opened to let him in through.  It’s a pity this bit is so contrived.  It would be difficult, in the physical circumstances of the scene, for Joby to disappear without Ellen’s noticing yet we see no reaction from her.  And the For Ellen/’Für Elise’ connection is merely pat.

    19 April 2013

     

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