Daily Archives: Tuesday, February 23, 2016

  • Concussion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Landesman (2015)

    In 2005, a Nigerian-American neuropathologist called Bennet Omalu, with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, published in the journal Neurosurgery a paper entitled ‘Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [CTE] in a National Football League Player’ and called for further research into the disease.  Concussion, written and directed by Peter Landesman (Parkland, Kill the Messenger), is the story of how Omalu took on the might of the NFL and its vested interests to establish a link between American football and CTE.   The film’s opening scene takes place in a court of law.  Omalu is in the witness box, about to give expert evidence.  He is asked first to state his medical qualifications and reels off a list of degrees that’s meant to be almost comically lengthy.  Though the staging is clumsy, Will Smith as Omalu conveys an engaging eccentricity which survives into the immediately following sequences.  These show Omalu at work, talking affably to the dead bodies on which he’s doing autopsies. As soon as things start to get serious, however, Bennet Omalu’s individuality leaks away.  He becomes a-man-with-a-mission and Will Smith turns uninterestingly dignified.  (It’s possible that Smith felt he was on a mission too – to land at least a nomination for an Academy Award.)

    In response to criticisms of the film’s portrayal of one of the NFL players diagnosed with CTE, Peter Landesman has insisted that Concussion is ‘emotionally and spiritually accurate all the way through’.  One of the few moments that actually merits this description comes when Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), former team doctor to the Pittsburgh Steelers, is sufficiently exasperated by Omalu’s preachments to call him a ‘self-righteous son of a bitch’.  Otherwise, the picture is almost bereft of believable detail, in small things and large.  Omalu literally keeps making a point – his forefinger only centimetres away from the face of the person on the receiving end.  But no one ever tells him to stop the impassioned finger-jabbing:  it’s essential to the movie that exchanges like these are unmediated by the reality of human interaction. The main function of the other characters, regardless of the supposed animosity between them and Omalu, is to accept his irresistible arguments and help move the narrative on towards the hero’s vindication.  When his wife Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) loses the baby she’s expecting as a result of the trauma of being stalked by NFL frighteners, she sheds a few tears before composedly reassuring her husband that they will have a family.  A few screen minutes earlier, we’d watched Omalu, while Prema slept, speaking quietly to their unborn child; there’s no follow-up to this in his upset at the miscarriage – even though there’s a horrible resonance with the earlier chattering away to corpses.  A couple of screen minutes later, the Omalus have one infant child and Prema is heavily pregnant with the next one.

    In this idealised marriage, Gugu Mbatha-Raw has little to do as Prema but keep reminding her husband how noble he is.  (She needn’t have bothered.  Will Smith seems already too aware of the fact.)  The film could have made something out of Bennet Omalu’s being (a) deeply religious and (b) uninterested in watching American football:  in the circumstances of his profession and his crusade, both of these are distinctive qualities.  Instead, his Christian faith is treated as a part of Omalu’s developing-world-origins delightfulness (the fervent desire to become a US citizen is another part of Peter Landesman’s patronising attitude towards his protagonist).  There are a couple of references to the profound cultural importance of the NFL, including a suggestion that, as a Sunday fixture, it’s displaced the church in many American lives but Landesman doesn’t bother to suggest what Bennet Omalu might have felt about that order of hebdomadal priorities.

    When material of this kind is turned into poor drama, it’s tempting to suggest (as Geoffrey Macnab in his Independent review of Concussion did suggest) that it should have been done as a documentary instead.  The standard response to this argument is that a based-on-actual-events mainstream movie with a big star in it will do much more than a documentary could to raise public awareness of important subject matter.   Landesman, although he may have been driven by a desire to bring Bennet Omalu to the attention of a mass audience, has carried out the job without imagination or even confidence in the story he’s telling.  Concussion purports to be a celebration of scientific research but it’s made by people who are clearly nervous about blinding-slash-boring with science so the detail of Omalu’s discoveries is strictly rationed.  Just about all we get is a succession of images of CT scans, and of shots of Omalu and others peering into microscopes and stepping back to register astonishment at what they’ve seen.  These are feeble clichés but the commercial thinking behind them is sound enough:  the film’s box-office takings now comfortably exceed its $35m budget.   Peter Landesman’s deference to the one-good-man-against-the-system movie formula is such that Concussion is eventually confusing, though.  When Omalu gives a climactic speech to an NFL conference on concussion, the respectful reactions of his audience express sheepish recognition that he was right all along, and indicate acceptance by the powers-that-be of his research findings and their implications.  But the sequence seems to have been included only because the public vindication scene is a standard requirement of this kind of moral drama.  The legends on the screen ahead of the closing credits suggest that the NFL engaged in a more protracted battle to keep in the dark what Omalu strove to bring to light.

    The cast also includes Albert Brooks, as Omalu’s supportive, principled boss, and Luke Wilson, as Roger Goodell, who takes over as NFL Commissioner at the height of Omalu’s campaign.  (Goodell remains in charge of the NFL today, ten years on.)  Among the various medics, Eddie Marsan, in a cameo appearance, brings a welcome jolt of individuality to proceedings.   Among the ex-players, David Morse registers particularly strongly as Mike Webster, the Pittsburgh Steelers center whose autopsy was the starting point of Bennet Omalu’s discoveries.  James Newton Howard’s score might be said to serve Peter Landesman’s purposes perfectly.  It’s relentlessly obvious.

    15 February 2016

  • Funny Face

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Donen (1957)

    The BFI front-of-house man that Sally can’t stand appeared at the start of the film to announce that we’d be watching the best print available but that it had Spanish sub-titles.  He hoped we wouldn’t find them distracting, which I did.  (I’m primed to read a sub-title when I see one.)  The print still wasn’t up to much:  this was obvious from the opening number ‘Think Pink!’, when pink doors in one shot had turned orange in the next.  So much Hollywood colour film from the 1950s has aged badly but the print quality here was especially frustrating, when you could still just about see how stylish and imaginative the original colour schemes for Funny Face were, and how well they work with the choreography by Fred Astaire and Eugene Loring.  A dance sequence with Astaire and Audrey Hepburn – set against a delicate blue sky with little white clouds, she in a white wedding dress with a bluish tint, he in a sky-blue cardigan, swans and doves decorating the scene – is especially pleasing.  Those subtitles got me in a bad mood from the start but it was some consolation that the best print the BFI could lay hands on wasn’t dubbed into Spanish.

    An American in Paris is in two minds about the meeting of popular American and high European culture:  Funny Face can be seen almost as a corrective to that ambivalence in the way that it lampoons Left Bank life in Paris.  The cultural counterpoint to the Left Bank is an American fashion magazine called ‘Quality’;  Funny Face pokes fun at the vanity and egos of the haute couture universe too but much more gently.  The bridge between the two worlds is Jo Stockton (Hepburn).  When we first meet her, she’s a bookshop assistant with no time for the frivolity of fashion and (we’re meant to think) no sense of humour either.  The circumstances of her collision with the ‘Quality’ gang aren’t likely to bring out anyone’s sense of humour.  They take over the Greenwich Village shop – Jo is minding the store while the owner’s away – as the venue for a fashion shoot.  Jo makes herself more ridiculous, however, by explaining her love of philosophy.   The photographer Dick Avery (Astaire) persuades the magazine editor Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson) that Jo could be a great new cover girl.  They want her for a big fashion event in Paris.  Jo has always dreamed of going there because it’s where Professor Emile Flostre, the leading exponent of a school of thought called ‘empathicalism’, is based.  For Flostre read Sartre, for empathicalism read existentialism.  When Jo eventually meets Flostre in a basement café where he’s lecturing, we see immediately (but she doesn’t) that he’s more interested in her looks than her mind.   In other words, all that brainy talk is just phony:  Flostre is really a sex maniac.  I’m not sure if this is another dig at Sartre – the received wisdom nowadays is that he had plenty of affairs.  Whether he did or not, they didn’t invalidate him as a thinker:  on the film’s terms, however, either you’re a philosopher or you’re a man.

    Complaining about this runs the risk of vindicating the film-makers’ attitude to the life of the mind – exposes you to the charge of taking a frothy musical too seriously.  I got hung up on this because I didn’t find the film as enjoyable as I’d hoped.  I couldn’t find anything light-hearted about the episode in the bookshop:  the fashion contingent’s attitude towards the books felt barbaric (and the whole idea of unwanted but unstoppable visitors invading your space always scares me).  When Jo delivers some books to the ‘Quality’ offices – and because Maggie now wants to find out what she’d be like as a model – she and her entourage ambush Jo:  I found this unpleasant and alarming too.  And though Jo had my sympathy because of these sequences there were times in Funny Face when, for the first time that I can recall, Audrey Hepburn’s cooing diction got on my nerves.  When, flustered and irritated, she first starts gabbling in the bookshop, I thought Hepburn was doing a foreign accent and, in a sense, she was,  The anti-intellectualism is thoroughgoing – it comes across in Greenwich Village as well as in Paris – but still you get the sense that the books with long-winded titles are somehow imported from Europe.  It’s a measure of the film’s antipathy to fancy thinking that an explanation of ‘epiphenomenalism’ is palatable only when it’s delivered by someone as unconvincing as a humourless brainbox as Hepburn is as Jo – when she extols the virtues of Flostre, she makes her enthusiasm sound like a schoolgirl crush.  Hepburn is great in other departments, though.  I hadn’t realised she trained as a dancer and she’s a very good one – as light on her feet as you might expect but excitingly slick too, and her palpable enjoyment doing the numbers is infectious.  Her black jumper and jeans routine in a Paris beatnik club is probably the highlight.

    While they’re in Paris, Jo and Dick Avery fall in love and Hepburn’s face registers the crisis points in the romance with an amazing blend of unaffected simplicity and star effulgence.  When she’s made up for, and inches along, the catwalk, Hepburn is somehow diminished – perhaps because her normal movement on screen is so much part of her charm.  When she’s able to move freely on the tour-of-Paris fashion shoot with Dick, she’s glorious in the Givenchy clothes (this is one of the best bits in the Funny Face)  The only likeable bit in the bookshop comes when Stanley Donen has her do some dancing business with a hat and long scarf that the fashion people have left behind.  Aside from the Hepburn-in-Paris numbers, Edith Head did the costumes including, I imagine, the one that Jo wears in the bookshop and on her visit to the fashion magazine offices:  Hepburn looks no less beautiful in this bookish outfit.  (The idea of Audrey Hepburn playing someone mousy is a good joke per se and she’s even more attractive with her hair down than when it’s pulled back from her face, as it is when she’s become the face of ‘Quality’.)    Hepburn sings well too – at any rate with sufficient individuality to make you wish she’d done her own singing in My Fair Lady.

    Fred Astaire was (and looks) thirty years older than Hepburn but no one comments on this aspect of Dick and Jo’s falling in love.  As his name suggests, Dick Avery is based on Richard Avedon – perhaps it’s because he’s a ‘real’ person, and Astaire was by this stage of his career a legend, that Donen and the scenarist Leonard Gershe don’t bother to give the character much detail.  (Avedon – who was only a few years older than Hepburn – designed the elegant title sequence and was a consultant on the film.)   For the most part, Astaire gives more of an impression of liking Hepburn than of being in love with the girl she’s playing but there are compensations.  When Dick Avery sees a cow go by on a cart in a Paris street, it inspires a bullfight dance (the Spanish subtitles might have come into their own here but it’s wordless).  This Astaire solo alone – Dick using his mac as a cape – makes Funny Face worth seeing.   As always, Astaire’s innate modesty as a personality creates an elating tension with the brilliance of his dancing.   (You realise this especially in an essentially comic routine like this one.  You can imagine how diminished it would have been be if the assertively extrovert Gene Kelly had performed it.)  As Maggie Prescott, Kay Thompson (whose screen appearances were rare) is an insistent and a slightly monotonous actress but, with her rangy insouciance, she’s a great dancer and an enjoyably strong yet effortless singer.  (Maggie’s arrival at the ‘Quality’ offices suggests where they got the idea for Meryl Streep’s entrances in The Devil Wears Prada.)   Robert Flemyng is amusing as a (French) prima donna-ish dress designer and Michel Auclair does creditably in the thankless role of Flostre.

    I’d not realised just how young Stanley Donen was when he directed the Hollywood musicals for which he’s best known:  he was thirty-three when Funny Face was released, which means only twenty-eight when he and Gene Kelly made Singin’ in the Rain.  Most of the songs here are taken from a 1927 stage musical of the same name by George and Ira Gershwin, including the two best known (‘S’Wonderful’ and ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’), as well as the title song.   Not unusually in a musical, the screenplay is relatively weak.  I’d not heard of Leonard Gershe before but the surname is oddly and unfortunately apt:  Gershe falls short of the Gershwins.  I’d rather have Europe-tainted philosophy than the international fashion industry any day.  What saves Funny Face is that, in the end, the film’s opposition is between snooty intellectualism and a different kind of superficiality – American song and dance, which wins hands down.  The most incisive making-fun-of-the-French moment in the film has nothing to do with intellectual pretension.  It comes when Maggie, anxious to get hold of Dick, phones his hotel and the man at reception informs her that he’s just left.   ‘Then run after him!’ Maggie insists.  The hotel man puts the phone down momentarily then picks it up and reports languidly, ‘Sorry, Madame.  I tried but it was too late’.

    7 January 2011

     

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