Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Parkland

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Landesman (2013)

    This wouldn’t be a good movie at any time but the film-makers might have fared commercially better if they’d not done the obvious thing – not brought it out to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination.  The early October release date in the US perhaps seemed like a shrewd move – to get in quick before the welter of commemorative television documentaries on and around Friday 22 November, the very day that Parkland opened in this country, but this $10m picture has so far recouped less than a tenth of its budget at the box office.   Peter Landesman’s film is very weak compared with both the main documentaries screened in Britain last month:  Alistair Layzell’s One PM:  Central Standard Time, which had a special showing at Curzon Soho on 11 November and appeared in a shorter version as JFK:  News of a Shooting on More4 on the anniversary of the assassination; and Leslie Woodhead’s The Day Kennedy Died, broadcast on ITV on 14 November.   Parkland has no clear focus or style or point of view.  It purports to be about people whose lives were scarred by the day of Kennedy’s death but Landesman, who also wrote the screenplay, is in two minds about whether to concentrate on people unknown to the world before that day.  You infer from the early stages that he will do this – that JFK, Jackie Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson will feature only in the inserts of news film – but Sean McGraw eventually makes a couple of brief appearances as LBJ and, after twenty minutes of editing that seems meant to ensure you never quite see her face, Jackie also becomes part of the action.  Kat Steffens, who plays her, is pretty but not at all extraordinary to look at – except in terms of the amount of blood that gets caked on her clothes.   I saw Parkland just a week after The Butler:  the grisly decoration of the pink suit, white gloves and stockings in fictional screen accounts of the killing seems to be more crudely exaggerated with every new telling.  Even so, Kat Steffens’ appearance is completely eclipsed by that of Brett Stimely, who plays JFK.  Although his face isn’t clearly shown at any point, much of the rest of his body is, including his grievously injured head.  Anthony Lane in the New Yorker is right to describe Parkland as tasteless in both senses of the word.

    The screenplay is based on a 2007 book by Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F Kennedy, but that book, according to Wikipedia, focuses on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.  Landesman would have done better to be similarly selective – concentrating on perhaps three of the characters in his movie:  Oswald’s brother, Robert;  Abraham Zapruder; and a secret service agent called Forrest Sorrels.  It’s pointless to reduce Lee Harvey Oswald (Jeremy Strong), the chief nobody who became a somebody that day, to a cameo.  It’s pointless to cast Zac Efron, not much of an actor, as Jim Carrico, the young doctor at the Parkland Hospital who desperately tried to restart Kennedy’s heart:  the role is sketchy and Efron looks merely to be trying to disguise his usual screen presence – he expresses nothing.  It’s equally pointless to cast Marcia Gay Harden, a considerable actress, as a nurse at Parkland since the character has no context whatsoever.  At the other extreme, the part of Oswald’s crazy mother is overwritten, and overplayed by Jacki Weaver.  For most of the first half of Parkland, Peter Landesman is merely reconstructing the events of 22 November 1963, as if a hidden camera had recorded everything that happened, including what happened in the emergency room at Parkland.    Even though the number of gory shots of the patient is excessive, the frantic activity there is the most distinctive part of the movie and, assuming that what Landesman shows is factually correct, I learned things from this that I didn’t know before – most notably, Carrico’s insistence that there is a heartbeat when he first starts working on the President.

    The hospital aspect is, as the film’s title suggests, obviously central to what Peter Landesman had in mind.  Kennedy’s arrival there on the Friday afternoon is followed by Oswald’s forty-eight hours later, and the differences and similarities between the hospital staff’s attempts to keep them alive are stressed.   But, unless the story was told in real time, what happens at Parkland isn’t enough for a feature film and Landesman’s attempts to work the material up are crass and gratuitous.  The scenes in the hospital are accompanied by James Newton Howard’s edge-of-your-seat-thriller music but we know that JFK won’t be saved.  In the unlikely event of anyone not knowing that when they take their seat in the cinema, Landesman announces in legends at the start of the film that Kennedy died that day in Dallas.  And all but one of the other people in the emergency room mean next to nothing to the viewer – that’s why Landesmann eventually has to make use of the sole exception, Jackie Kennedy, to bring the scene to a climax.  The ‘suspense’ of getting LBJ from Parkland onto Air Force One, the staging of which seems to come out of a very routine action movie, is similarly lame.   By this stage, the pseudo-documentary pretensions of Parkland have all but vanished:  once the action takes a relative breather so that characters have conversations of more than a few seconds, the film turns into clichéd melodrama.

    Parkland does momentarily address the issue of poor taste through Abraham Zapruder’s horror at what he’s caught on camera.  He protests to the man from Life magazine (Jeffrey Schmidt) that JFK ‘was a dignified man – and this was not a dignified end …’  And Landesman does show some discretion in not showing all the frames of the film once it’s been developed in a Kodak unit at Love Field.   It’s frustrating that we don’t see more of Zapruder the man, given how much Paul Giamatti gives to the role, and the same is true of Robert Oswald.  This is the best acting I’ve so far seen from James Badge Dale:  he’s particularly good at suggesting how mixed Robert’s feelings are when his brother is shot by Ruby.  Billy Bob Thornton as Forrest Sorrels, although the role is more slender, gets across the agent’s terrible professional shame at losing ‘my man’ for the first time in a long career.   But the actors are all, needless to say, upstaged by the news film.   It’s not only that this is powerful however many times you see it.  There’s also always something you’ve never seen before – often something no film-maker could dare to invent in a fictional drama.   At Fort Worth, Kennedy is presented with a Stetson – the man who gives it to him says ‘we wanted to protect you … from the rain’.   The President gracefully jokes that he’ll wear the hat ‘if you’ll come to the White House to see me in it on Monday’.

    25 November 2013

  • One Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lone Scherfig (2011)

    David Nicholls’ very popular novel One Day follows two young people, Emma and Dexter, through their encounters on years and years of the same date (July the fifteenth) – from their graduation from Edinburgh University in 1988 to, in Dexter’s case, the present.  Even if, like me, you haven’t read the book you probably know about its nifty structure but if this screen adaptation is anything to go by (and Nicholls did the screenplay), the source material is swill.   The repeated postponement of the moment when this made-for-each-other couple finally decide to spend their lives together is tiresome.  The piffling bits of humour are often embarrassing.  Because One Day is not only very popular but also ‘much loved’, it’s soon clear that, in order for the story to acquire a semblance of depth, Nicholls will have to parachute in supplies of extreme tragedy; clear too that the recipient of these supplies, in order to give him a bit of substance, will have to be the egotist Dexter rather than decent, industrious, quietly humorous Emma.

    For most of Lone Scherfig’s film, I didn’t understand on what basis we were meant to accept that the pair, from the moment they spend graduation night together, were emotionally inseparable.  They’ve never spoken to each other during their student years and, though they share a bed, they don’t appear to have sex that first time:  we seem meant to believe rather that they’re best friends at first sight.  When Emma dies in a road accident, Dexter keeps her alive by remembering her.  He starts having flashbacks to 15 July 1988 so that, right at the end of the movie, what they had going between them from the start becomes a little clearer.   (And it’s an unexpected bonus to see Edinburgh again – including Salisbury Crags and views from high up in them – after its disappearance only five minutes into the picture.)  It remains a mystery, though, what Anne Hathaway’s Emma sees in Jim Sturgess’s Dexter.  He’s not an infuriating-but-irresistible bastard:  he’s just perennially callow, innocuously good-looking, puppyishly uninteresting.  Dexter’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) tells her son from her deathbed that she’s sure he’s going to be a fine, honourable, compassionate human being in time but that, just at present, he’s not as nice as he used to be:  Dexter’s been corrupted by transient fame and fortune as a TV celebrity, and the drink and drugs that go with it.  I had no idea what his mother was talking about.  As far as the viewer can see, Dexter remains the same selfish lightweight he’s been from the word go.

    As someone who loathed Peter Flannery’s mid-1990s television serial Our Friends in the North, with its strenuously contrived connection between the events in the four main characters’ lives and the larger social and political upheavals happening around them, I’m not exactly complaining that the outside world in One Day barely seems to impinge on Dexter and Emma – but their universe is remarkably self-contained.   (It may be that this hermetically sealed quality is part of the book’s appeal – that it helps to make the tale seem a ‘timeless’ love story.)    There are a very few references to films and the odd pop song on the soundtrack (which at least makes a change from Rachel Portman’s obvious score), and that’s about it.  You might think that limiting the narrative to a single day should simplify the task of adapting a novel for cinema but there are clumsy and untidy bits in Nicholls’s screenplay.  In 1994, Dexter’s father comes to the television studio during rehearsals for the show that his son hosts:  the visit is hilariously pointless except that it imparts the information that Dexter’s mother has passed away – although it could hardly be more obvious from Patricia Clarkson’s turn in the 1993 episode that she won’t see another year.   When Dexter visits Emma in Paris c 2003 she’s become a best-selling children’s writer:  we never see or hear any more about this not insignificant career development, aside from a glimpse of her quaint portable typewriter.

    Lone Scherfig showed in An Education  how well she can direct actors.  Except for Sturgess and the miscast Clarkson, she proves it again here, with material that’s much inferior.  As in Love Story, the boy comes from a privileged background; the girl has to work for everything she gets.   In the early stages, Hathaway’s Northern accent and calculated eccentricity make her Jane Horrocks-ish but it takes a lot of determination to dislike Anne Hathaway and she settles down to give a performance that’s not only charming but very skilful.  (And she gets the Northern twang to work for her in a sequence in which, waitressing in a Tex-Mex-type eatery, Emma rattles off, word perfect, what distinguishes a burrito from an enchilada etc.)  I gather from Sally that Emma’s meant to be a beautiful person rather than a terrific face and figure but casting Anne Hathaway in the part brings its own pleasures:  as in The Devil Wears Prada, the doomed-to-failure attempts to make her look less than lovely are amusing.  (In the early years, Emma wears clumpy boots and wire-rimmed spectacles and doesn’t care what her hair looks like.)  When the pair’s reversals of fortune have occurred and the divorced, career-less Dexter visits Emma in Paris, and she’s on the verge of turning into J K Rowling, Hathaway wears a dark blue dress in which she looks stunning.  This brought a smile to my face – and kept it there for as long as she remained on screen in this costume.  It’s a mark of what an effortlessly strong presence Hathaway has become (and of the gulf between her and Jim Sturgess) that, although most of what happens to Emma is less ‘dramatic’ than the events in Dexter’s life, she’s the one in whom you stay interested.

    Thanks to their intelligence as actors and Scherfig’s sensitive handling of their scenes, Rafe Spall and Romola Garai both do well in what should be the hopeless roles of, respectively, Ian, the reliably unfunny stand-up manqué with whom Emma spends years of her life, and Sylvie, to whom Dexter’s briefly married and with whom he has a child.  Every so often, Spall looks worryingly like Steve Coogan but the sympathetic depth and human detail of his portrait of the no-hoper Ian keep reassuring you that resemblance is only superficial.   Playing a girl without a sense of humour, Romola Garai is often very funny (especially in a sequence at a wedding).   She also shows, and very economically, Sylvie developing as a character – in a way that even Hathaway doesn’t always quite manage.  The Emma/Ian and Dexter/Sylvie relationships are utterly incredible but three of the four players concerned make them more tolerable to watch than they deserve to be.  Even allowing for the fact that father and son don’t get on, Ken Stott isn’t convincing as Dexter’s father but the actor’s weary wit just about sees him through.

    29 August 2011

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