Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • 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

     

  • Dad’s Army

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Oliver Parker (2016)

    Several BBC comedies of the 1960s and 1970s became feature films that were dismissed by critics but did well at the box office – Steptoe and Son well enough even to spawn a big-screen sequel.  Dad’s Army first became a movie at a relatively early stage of its television life:  filming took place in the late summer of 1970, shortly before the third of the nine TV series was broadcast, and the picture was released in March 1971.  In contrast, neither The Likely Lads nor Porridge returned to television screens after they’d become movies but this wasn’t because they’d failed as such.  Much of the cinema audience for all four of these sitcoms would have realised they were weak distortions of the TV originals but would have felt too that they were, in every sense, harmless.   And so it proved:  the movies are long forgotten but the place of these shows in the TV comedy pantheon is secure.  Because the BBC nowadays puts out an old episode of Dad’s Army what seems like every Saturday evening, it’s easy to take for granted.  The best thing that can be said about this new cinema version is that it makes you cherish the television original.  Henry Fitzherbert in the Express has it right:  ‘There really is no reason for the film to exist’.

    It was usual practice for a sitcom-turned-movie to find itself stranded in the great outdoors, and saddled with a plot that had thirty-minute legs but was required to do service for ninety.  Studio-based TV sitcoms naturally tended to take place indoors and the best ones made a virtue of this necessity:  the interiors reflected a claustrophobic element that was integral to the material.  Porridge is only the most obvious example.  The settings of Steptoe and Son and Fawlty Towers reinforced Harold Steptoe’s and Basil Fawlty’s sense of being trapped in lives of infuriating routine, and Dad’s Army comes into this category too.  Although the series used a relatively greater range of locations, the Walmington-on-Sea home guard is based primarily in the church hall.  That location is itself disputed territory, in a running battle with the vicar and the verger, but it is – to Captain Mainwaring’s occasionally voiced frustration – far removed from the World War II front line.

    The plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests that the first Dad’s Army movie edged nervously away from this crucial premise in order to up the ‘action’ quota for the big screen.  Oliver Parker’s remake, with a screenplay by Hamish McColl, contradicts it extravagantly and inanely.  The new film is set in 1944:  Mainwaring’s men – and he particularly – foil a German plot to thwart the D-Day landings.  There’s a fight-them-on-the-beaches climax, involving a U-boat, gunshots, explosions and barely a hint of this being a spoof-action finale.  Before that, there’s a German spy to be unmasked.  The spy’s identity is revealed to the audience immediately.  She’s Rose Winters, a femme fatale posing as a journalist:  Rose claims to be writing, for the Lady magazine, a profile of the Walmington home guard.  Oliver Parker spends time (and money) on sequences that show the Nazi high command in Berlin in radio communication with Rose – as if ‘realism’ of this kind will help us suspend disbelief in the Germans’ belief there’s key British military intelligence to be gained from infiltrating Mainwaring’s platoon.

    Parker’s film features a strong line-up of actors – assembled, it seems from the piece in Radio Times the other week, through one of those casting snowball effects:  one biggish name hears that another has signed up, follows suit and attracts a third.  You’re aware that you’re watching talented people but even more aware that they’re the wrong people.   Playing a part made famous through a long-running TV show is very different from playing a character immortalised in a movie (although that’s problematic enough).  With something like Dad’s Army, it’s not simply a matter of Arthur Lowe et al having made an indelible impression: as the series continued, Jimmy Perry and David Croft clearly wrote scripts with the particular actors’ characterisations in mind.   The performances of the new cast are bound to be ultimately unsatisfying but the poor direction turns them into something worse and uncoordinated:  in some cases, semi-impersonations of the originals; in others, attempts to resist impersonation, which make little sense. The famous Dad’s Army catch phrases occur at regular intervals, as if for moral support to the cast.   The effect is increasingly desperate.

    Toby Jones is a fine comic actor, who shares with Arthur Lowe a natural eccentricity and the ability to make that eccentricity funny by playing straight.  Jones does some good comic business here, like choking on a piece of cake and struggling desperately to make nothing of it.  I liked the moment when Mainwaring was walking down a dark street, attempting in vain not to be seen:  two passers-by say, ‘Evening, Mainwaring’, and he says good evening back.  But Jones is too thoroughly an underdog; his speech rhythms, gentler than Lowe’s, tone down Mainwaring’s pomposity; and he doesn’t build up enough military pretension.  You’re especially aware of this when a deflated Mainwaring says, shortly before his climactic heroism, ‘I only wanted to do my bit’.  Only wanting to do his bit is the impression Toby Jones has given throughout.   Bill Nighy expresses Sergeant Wilson’s antipathy towards Mainwaring more blatantly than John Le Mesurier ever did.  Nighy’s playing is tenaciously coherent but he makes Wilson charmless.

    Tom Courtenay showed last year, in 45 Years and in his surpassing performance in Unforgotten on television, that his screen acting is as good now as it’s ever been.  He’s surprisingly uncertain as Corporal Jones, although one of the few times I just about laughed was thanks to him:  Mainwaring interrupts Jones and Mrs Fox on the sofa where they claim to be deep in a jigsaw puzzle; Courtenay gets to his feet hurriedly from the sofa and explains, ‘We were just doing a bit of sky’.   Bill Paterson’s Frazer is weird.  He’s just benign and rather distinguished until, in a brief, late outburst of Carry On comedy, he reveals to the Germans what Scotsmen don’t wear under their kilts.  Although he plays Godfrey with finesse, Michael Gambon is too imposing for the role.   (A particularly inept example of Oliver Parker’s direction comes when Jones is camouflaged as a tree and the weak-bladdered Godfrey mistakes him for the real thing:  this is filmed in a way that makes it impossible to see how Godfrey could make the mistake.)   The capable, naturally humorous Daniel Mays is OK in the attenuated role of Walker.  Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners) is hopeless as Pike – he seems to be sending up the character.

    The few pleasures of the new film include seeing cameos from the original Pike and the only other survivor of the original cast.  Ian Lavender has been amusingly elevated from private to the role of a brigadier.  Frank Williams, who’s now eighty-four, is still playing the vicar:  the effect is almost of a real person ‘as Himself’.  Martin Savage is disastrous as the ARP warden.  Bill Pertwee’s angry exchanges with Mainwaring in the television show always had a lovely, playground-name-calling quality:  Savage comes across as merely nasty.  The actresses in the TV Dad’s Army didn’t all make the same lasting impression as the actors.  Pamela Cundell’s Mrs Fox was by far the best of them but Alison Steadman, who now plays the role, is welcome proof that having a hard act to follow isn’t an insuperable obstacle.  Steadman’s saucy warmth, as well as being theatrically enjoyable, comes across as essentially truthful.  In contrast, Felicity Montagu as Mrs Mainwaring has no act to follow at all – and, to that extent, an open goal, which she misses.  It was a good running joke of the TV series that Mainwaring’s wife was a formidable presence in her husband’s life, in spite of never being seen.  The film succeeds in achieving the opposite.

    In a weedy subplot, most of the wives and girlfriends are members of a female home guard unit.  As if Mavis Pike would be seen dead in such a group … Hamish McColl is not Sally Wainwright yet Sarah Lancashire tries to play Mrs Pike naturalistically: the result is jarring.   Annette Crosbie and Julia Foster do pretty well as Godfrey’s sisters, worked up into a pair of mini-Miss Marples who identify the German spy long before the patronising men do.   As Rose Winters, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s star glamour is mildly funny at first – it makes Rose all the more incongruous in Walmington-on-Sea.  It’s hardly Zeta-Jones’s fault that she can’t find a stable tone as the film progresses: she’d probably have done better to play the character ‘Allo ‘Allo-style.  It says a lot that the final shot – in which the frame freezes on Catherine Zeta-Jones’s shapely backside and the words ‘The End’ appear on screen – is one of the wittier things in Dad’s Army 2016.

    11 February 2016

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