Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Duplicity

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Gilroy (2009)

    Anyone who thinks that abstract noun titles belong to the days of silent cinema (Intolerance, Greed) is going to have to think again.  Hot on the heels of Defiance and Doubt comes Duplicity.   Tony Gilroy had a big success with the overrated Michael Clayton.  He’s unlikely to emulate this with Duplicity because the picture’s tone is more light-hearted.  Even so, on the evidence of D T Max’s admiring piece about him in the New Yorker earlier this month, the writer-director Gilroy takes himself very seriously indeed.  His estimation of his own talents seems to be complemented by his low opinion of the abilities of others.  Gilroy has written the screenplay for all three of the Jason Bourne films to date.  He’s proud of The Bourne Identity but didn’t like working with the director Doug Liman, who failed to appreciate that ‘My scripts are very, very difficult to fuck with’.  Liman was replaced as director by Paul Greengrass on The Bourne Supremacy but ‘Gilroy is still angry about it. “It was sort of like a crime against the gods of storytelling,” he says’.  He wrote the screenplay for the third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, on condition ‘that he would not have to speak with Greengrass’.   The latter, by this stage, seems to have been trying to annoy Gilroy for the hell of it.  He passed the draft screenplay on to four other writers (Tom Stoppard, strange as it may seem, among them) for reworking.

    In the piece in the New Yorker, Gilroy explains that effective cinema is all about tautness and economy.  The first of his ‘two fundamental rules’ is ‘Bring it in within two hours’ (a rule that Duplicity breaks, if only by five minutes) and there must be no fat in the writing:  ‘… Gilroy picked up a copy of his script and riffled it:  “It’s all about white space,” he said to me.  “It’s all about not writing” ‘.  Michael Clayton seemed to me overwritten.  It was very convenient, at any rate, that more than one of the main characters was inclined to verbosity (and all of them spoke in pretty much the same voice).    D T Max quotes, as examples of Gilroy’s lapidary gifts, lines from that film, from Duplicity and from Gilroy’s much earlier screenplay for The Devil’s Advocate (an extract which Max – possibly inadvertently but nonetheless revealingly – describes as ‘one of the more famous rants in recent movies’).  All of these quotations are excessively smart – no different, as far as I can tell, from a fragment of dialogue that Max also quotes as having been eventually rejected in the script for Duplicity because it gave off a ‘whiff of effortful wit’.

    In the pre-titles sequence of Duplicity, the two main characters, Claire Stenwick and Ray Koval meet at a party in Dubai.  She’s CIA, he’s MI6.  Claire thinks Ray is very obviously coming on strong to her.  He pretends to be shocked that she should think such a thing.   They go to bed (we’re later led to believe – which, in this film, may well mean misled to believe – that it’s she who, in the event, has seduced and drugged him).  Then Gilroy cuts, during the opening credits, to a bizarre slow-motion brawl on a rainy airport tarmac between two middle-aged suits.  Their respective entourages watch aghast.   (The explanation of the fight isn’t fully revealed until very late in the film.)  These first ten minutes are highly enjoyable, even elating, for two reasons.  One is Gilroy’s state-of-the-art technical assurance – there’s a pleasingly sleek look and movement to the images (the film is shot by Robert Elswit and the editor is Gilroy’s brother John).  The other is a more old-fashioned commodity:  the presence and connection of the two stars – even though Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are stars of a very contemporary kind.    It’s this second ingredient – far more than the direction – that keeps Duplicity going for a while.  The reason Roberts and Owen eventually begin to struggle is because Gilroy’s script is so up itself.

    As in Michael Clayton, the centre of gravity in high-powered espionage has shifted from governments to the corporate world:  Claire and Ray move from their secret service jobs to work for rival pharmaceutical companies.  (Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti – the airport pugilists – play the CEOs of the two companies.)  Gilroy’s structure is intricate but the story doesn’t develop any layers so the way it’s put together isn’t either intellectually or emotionally engaging.  All that seems to build is the director’s self-congratulatory tone, which gets in the way of the film even being easily entertaining.   The New Yorker profile presents Gilroy as a master of the ‘reversal’ and Duplicity might seem to be the perfect realisation of this talent.  It’s peopled by characters who use and lie to each other – and Gilroy, in orchestrating their story, evidently wants to demonstrate too how a director can continually exploit an audience’s trust in him, keep stringing us along and showing us what fools we were for taking what we saw at face value.  But once you get the point, which doesn’t take long, the film becomes increasingly weightless and abstract – and eventually boring.  The globetrotting narrative moves back and forth in time as well as geographically.  The effect is different from that of the Iñárritu films 21 Grams and Babel (where the fractured storyline ultimately seems a way of giving an illusion of complexity to a plot which, if presented lineally, would be less distinctive) but, because Gilroy concentrates so exclusively on the tricks of his trade, the technique doesn’t add either substance to the past events of the story or pressure to what lies ahead.

    As a result, Duplicity seems far too long.  Even though Roberts and Owen are expert sparring partners, they’re hampered by the fact that too many of the scenes in which they’re reunited after some kind of separation are structured in exactly the same way – without the repetition of the sequence of mood changes within these scenes being used for comic effect.   And, although a scene which they play three times – word for word but each time in a different location – is very effective, the two stars are not helped elsewhere by lines that sound smart but don’t mean much – and aren’t believable – when you give them a moment’s thought.  (Claire:  ‘If I said I loved you, would it make any difference?’  Ray: ‘If you said it or if I believed you?’  It would obviously make a difference if he believed her.)   Roberts and Owen have assaulted each other with stylish dialogue before, in Closer.  On that occasion, Owen won hands down – he had the better lines, which he delivered with complete and dazzling confidence.  The writing in Closer is considerably more skilful than in Duplicity but one of the best things about Gilroy’s film is that the two protagonists seem reasonably evenly matched.   Owen gives Ray a chip on his shoulder, which seems to derive from more than the professional humiliation he suffered at Claire’s hands at their first meeting in Dubai.  Ray’s flair for verbal combat has a wary edge – and David Edelstein’s description of his charm as ‘wolfish yet needy’ is spot on.  Julia Roberts gets some friction into her character.  Claire is briskly efficient but the briskness seems designed partly to keep her mind off what she really thinks of her immorality – Roberts’s spectacular face sometimes looks pasty, expressing Claire’s weary cynicism with her work and herself.   For an hour or more, these are very satisfying performances – not just because it’s so agreeable to watch Roberts and Owen together but because they’re both convincing in suggesting people good at their jobs but unhappy in them.  This gives the brief romantic interludes between Claire and Ray a bit of emotional depth as well as a sexual spark.

    Tony Gilroy has some serviceable comic ideas as plot motors but he seems relatively uncomfortable writing more explicitly light-hearted dialogue (like Ray buying pizza at a bowling alley) or eccentric situations – such as one involving a gullible colleague of Claire’s whom Ray seduces, even though this character is well enough played by Carrie Preston.   Others in the cast who make an impression are Kathleen Chalfant, as one of the team of corporate scientists working on the miracle product which the two companies are fighting over, and Denis O’Hare, if only because his ubiquity in supporting roles in prestige American films at present is getting to be uncanny.   There’s a real disappointment in the climax to Duplicity in that (unless I misunderstood – always a possibility) not all concerned are revealed to have been duped.  I don’t want to encourage Tony Gilroy in Coenesque superiority to his characters but, if this final and bathetic surprise is supposed to be a crowning ‘reversal’, it doesn’t work.

    22 March 2009

     

  • Il Divo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paolo Sorrentino (2008)

    There are plenty of subtitles to read in addition to the dialogue.  At the start, there’s background information on the Italian Christian Democratic Party, the Red Brigade, the P2 masonic lodge and the political career of the title character, Giulio Andreotti.  As the narrative gets underway, we’re told, at the first appearance of nearly every sizeable character, who he (it always is a he) is.  This continues at a number of subsequent points, right through to the start of Andreotti’s trial, which began in 1993, in which he was accused of having connections with the Mafia.  At this point, legends on the screen summarise the outcome of the trial and we go into the closing credits.  The writer-director Paolo Sorrentino is right to supply the facts like this – but only because he doesn’t get them across more imaginatively.  (How much will be absorbed – even for the duration of the film – by an audience that isn’t already well versed in modern Italian political history is another matter.)  Imparting information in this way seems an admission of dramatic failure.  But narrative development and exploration of character is evidently not what Sorrentino is into.

    I can’t work out from the film and Wikipedia entries whether Andreotti served as Italian prime minister on three or seven separate occasions.  He certainly held high office in seven Italian administrations between 1972 and 1992, when the Italian Christian Democrats were submerged in corruption scandals which virtually extinguished them as a political force.  Nor do I fully understand the relationship between the Mafia trial that began in 1993 and the murder trial that ran for three years from 1996, in which Andreotti was investigated for his role in the 1979 murder of Mino Pecorelli – a journalist who had published allegations that Andreotti had links not only to the Mafia but also to the Red Brigade’s abduction and assassination of Aldo Moro, Andreotti’s predecessor as prime minister, in 1978.  According to Wikipedia, Andreotti was acquitted in 1999 but he was convicted on appeal in 2002 and sentenced to 24 years imprisonment, before being immediately released pending an appeal. In 2003, an appeal court overturned the conviction and acquitted Andreotti of the original murder charge; and the court of Palermo:

    ‘… acquitted him of ties to the Mafia, but only on grounds of expiration of statutory terms. The court established that Andreotti had indeed had strong ties to the Mafia until 1980, and had used them to further his political career to such an extent as to be considered a component of the Mafia itself.’

    Andreotti is still alive (he celebrated his ninetieth birthday in January this year) and Sorrentino’s film amounts – I assume – to a politically engaged statement about him.  Comparing this with the two BBC films about Margaret Thatcher that have been screened in the last few months provides fresh evidence of the continuing lack of any tradition of filmmaking in this country that treats British political leaders in a serious way.  You might have thought that Mrs Thatcher – given how many people (a) are willing to admit that she truly changed the country and (b) really did and do hate her – might buck the trend but evidently not.   The more recent of the two films (the ingeniously named Margaret), about the Tory leadership elections she won and lost in 1975 and 1990 respectively, was merely feeble.  The earlier one, Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, which I haven’t yet seen, may not be much better but the title is significant.  Echoing the title of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography seems designed for a laugh – to emphasise the relative triviality of Mrs Thatcher’s political journey.

    It might still be possible in Britain to make a film of earnest intent about the consequences of the Thatcher government’s policies but the kind of ‘political’ filmmaker impelled to describe the effects of mass unemployment would likely think twice about cross-cutting between these and the political personalities who brought about the demise of mining communities.  Because politicians – current and recent ones anyway – are treated as a joke in this country, their appearance would risk diluting or confusing the emotional force of the material.   The contrast between the buttoned up, inscrutable Andreotti – encased in his heavy-framed spectacles and dark suits that look bullet-proof – and the trail of corruption and violence that’s linked with him might seem to present a similar problem.  This colourless, humourless man looks far removed from anything red-blooded.  But the effect is different.  Il Divo is a very limited piece of work but Sorrentino does at least communicate anger about Andreotti – and manages to connect the image of the man with the events for which Sorrentino holds him responsible.

    There is, though, an intrinsic difficulty in making a film – at least for the international market – about a corrupt politico.  High-level political skulduggery may be treated as a serious theme – Il Divo won the Prix du Jury at Cannes in 2008 – but admirers of this film, outside Italy at least, would be more honest if they admitted that a story about an Italian politician who wasn’t corrupt would be a more radical idea – given the assumptions we make about the Italian political system (and whether those assumptions are right or wrong).  Sorrentino makes clear his point of view immediately.  What follows contains no surprises.  Some of the actors make an impression through their physique and physiognomy but – because they don’t come to mean anything to us as characters and in spite of a few bits of flashy violence – there are no real shocks either.   (The film is visually striking – but often in the style of a sophisticated commercial or pop video.)

    As Andreotti, Toni Servillo gives a remarkable performance:  Mark Kermode, rattling on about the film on BBC News 24, wasn’t too far wide of the mark when he described Il Divo as essentially a vampire movie.   Servillo’s determined greyness and (except for the comically folded-over ears) anonymous features seem antithetical to celebrity charisma.  Yet his hunched glide and toneless hushed voice give Andreotti a magnetising undead quality.  This is all the more startling given how few other people who come within his orbit manage to remain undead too.  But what you see and hear from Servillo in the first ten minutes of the film is pretty well what you get for the remaining 100:  there’s no deepening or expansion of his portrait.  The biggest jolts to our understanding of Andreotti occur at the rare moments when he betrays some kind of humanly believable detail – such as when he confesses to an adolescent passion for the sister of the famous actor Vittorio Gassman.    Perhaps this is also why it’s his relationships with the only two significant women in the story that register more strongly than any others.  His wife Livia (Anna Bonaiuto) is clenched and blinkered in her loyalty to him.  His secretary Enea (Piera Degli Esposti) scolds Andreotti but generates more warmth of affection than anyone else in his chilly life.

    29 March 2009

     

Posts navigation