Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Get on Up

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tate Taylor (2014)

    I knew next to nothing about James Brown’s life and very few of his songs – I know ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ (or a bit of it anyway) only because it was used as the soundtrack for a commercial I saw repeatedly at the cinema.  So I’ve no idea whether this biographical film is accurate in factual detail, or in its presentation of Brown either as a performer or in his life offstage.  Tate Taylor, working from a screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, jumps backwards and forwards in telling Brown’s story.   Perhaps the fluid narrative is meant to reflect the genre-crossing musical talents of its subject but it left me wondering if a linear structure had been avoided in order to obscure the thinness of the script.  Get on Up seems like a collection of scenes from the life of James Brown.  It doesn’t build as a biography although it isn’t above biopic cliché:  as the protagonist becomes a star, power goes to his head and he alienates those who love him.  (Because the rise to fame isn’t structured conventionally, Taylor denies himself the impact of suggesting that Brown was a user and an egomaniac from strikingly early in his career:  this occurred to me only after the film was over and I started rearranging its scenes in my head in chronological order.)   The disease of superstardom reaches its climax in a familiar way.  Brown (Chadwick Boseman) and his long-time, long-suffering colleague Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis) have a row on the stage of an otherwise deserted theatre.  Brown derides Byrd’s inability to be a successful solo artist and tells him he’s no longer needed.  As he walks out, Byrd tells Brown, ‘You already alone’, and the camera pans across the empty seats of the auditorium.

    According to Wikipedia, Chadwick Boseman sings some of the numbers but mimes to Brown’s voice on others.  I haven’t seen Boseman before and found it hard to tell from this film how good an actor he is:  he sounds much of the time as if he’s putting on his speaking voice but he’s certainly an excitingly kinetic dancer.  Tate Taylor has Boseman speak regularly to camera – a device which seems less designed to create complicity with the audience than to assume that it’s predisposed in James Brown’s favour, which may well be the case for many viewers of Get on Up.   The scenes from Brown’s childhood have, at least compared with the rest of the film, an emotional depth – thanks to Jamarion and Jordan Scott, who play the child James, Octavia Spencer as his aunt and, especially, Viola Davis as James’s mother, Susie, who walks out when he’s a young boy.  Tate Taylor knows from The Help what he can get from Davis and Spencer and, although neither role involves much screen time, makes the most of them here.  The truthfulness of these actresses and the Scott boys is effective in giving Brown’s life story a grounding that stays with you.  Davis is also remarkable in a scene, decades later, when Susie arrives backstage following a performance  that James Brown has just given with his band, the Famous Flames.  Brown isn’t sure whether this woman claiming to be his mother is telling the truth.  Viola Davis somehow manages to sow the same uncertainty in the viewer’s mind – without the help of obviously disguising make-up.  By contrast, when elderly versions of James Brown and Bobby Byrd meet up, it’s hard to tell if their weird appearance is less than good ageing make-up or a comment on the pair’s financial ability to have cosmetic surgery.  (In the same scene, a white man is cleaning Byrd’s swimming pool and this causes Brown to remark, reasonably enough, that times have changed when a black man can employ a white one to keep his place tidy.)  The large cast also includes Dan Aykroyd as Brown’s manager and Allison Janney in an extraordinarily vivid cameo as a racist hotel guest.

    At 139 minutes, Get on Up is, for me, unnecessarily long but that’s largely because I’m not keen on the soundtrack.  There’s a scene in the film which I think I’ll remember because it helped clarify for me why I don’t much like listening to Brown – or plenty of other greats of soul, funk, rhythm and blues.  The R&B producer and talent scout Ralph Bass (Josh Hopkins) is trying to persuade the music executive Syd Nathan (Fred Melamed) of the merits of what became one of James Brown’s most famous songs, ‘Please, Please, Please’.   ‘He’s just repeating “please”’, says the baffled Nathan.  ‘“Please” – what?   “Please pay my rent”?  Where’s the song?’   ‘It isn’t about the song, Syd’, replies the exasperated Ralph Bass, ‘it isn’t about the song …’  I suppose that for me it is always about the song.  This is why I like pop melodies and their interpretation and don’t like music that’s all about the domination of a voice, however amazing that voice may be.

    24 November 2014

  • Fury

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Ayer (2014)

    David Denby in the New Yorker seriously – and characteristically – overrates Fury (‘one of the great war movies’).  Denby is right, though, that an interesting aspect of David Ayer’s film, for which Ayer also wrote the screenplay, is that the five American soldiers in the eponymous tank ‘feel like a losing army’, even though this piece of fiction is set in Germany in the very last weeks of World War II.  Legends on screen at the start of Fury stress the superiority of German Panzers and the heavy casualties among Americans who fought in relatively lightly armoured tanks.  For those who, like me, have always assumed that, by April 1945, the war was one-way traffic and heading for inevitable German surrender, it’s startling too to be reminded of the continuing intensity of the Nazi struggle until the very end.   Fury is very well made.  The principal element of the world that David Ayer and his cinematographer Roman Vasyanov describe is mud; the predominant colours are khaki and brownish grey yet the lighting of the mostly rural landscapes is delicate and clear.  Images of the tank’s wheels moving through the mud – the two seem nearly consubstantial – are an obvious but effective visualisation of the grinding grimness of the conflict.  The editing by Dody Dorn is highly dynamic but this (as David Denby also notes) is never at the expense of visual coherence.  The film is well acted too but Ayer, whenever he moves beyond quasi-documentary description of life inside the tank into dramatic territory, resorts to war movie cliché.  Fury, although in some ways sophisticated, doesn’t amount to anything original.

    The cliché crystallises around the character of the youngest of the five men inside Fury.  Norman Ellison is a recently enlisted army typist. (I assume it’s credible that he moves straight from a desk job to this kind of action although this surprised me.)  Norman is to be educated in what it means to be a fighting man:  to indicate how far he’ll need to go, David Ayer shows him early on, in a quiet moment, reading a book.  In the long and pivotal scene that follows the Americans’ capture of a small German town, Norman accompanies the tank commander, Don ‘Top’ Collier, into a house where they find two young women (who are cousins).  There’s a piano in the house and Norman sits down to play classical music on it.  Top then instructs him to take the younger woman, Emma, into the adjoining bedroom and do what a red-blooded male should.  The virginal-looking Norman obeys and, although he talks sensitively to Emma when they’re first alone together, he emerges from the bedroom with a quietly self-satisfied look on his face.  It’s this sexual initiation that appears to set Norman on his way to becoming a proper soldier.   The literally battle-scarred Top (the make-up is very good) is required, for his part, to deliver aphorisms every so often.  This works well enough when they’re embedded in action – when, for example, Top yells repeatedly at Norman to shoot his first Nazi, Norman refuses and protests that ‘it’s not right’, and Top replies, ‘We’re not here to do right – we’re here to kill Nazis’.  The words of war wisdom are less successful when they’re spoken in a more considered way, as when Top announces that, ‘Ideals are peaceful, history is violent’.

    The episode involving the two German women is not just a crucial stage in Norman’s progress.  As a break from the warfare, it also provides an opportunity for Ayer to sow the seeds of Top’s increasingly paternal attitude towards his young comrade and for the audience to see more of the personalities of the other three men in the tank – nicknamed Gordo, Bible and Coon-Ass.  Irma and Emma are the only two female characters of any importance in Fury.  Anamaria Marinca, as the former, evinces a believable combination of apprehension and dislike of the Americans.  Alicia von Rittberg, as her younger cousin, is good enough but Emma has to go through more obvious and mechanical ups and downs in the course of a single, albeit lengthy scene.  She’s paralysed by fear, then, when Norman starts to play the piano, accompanies him in a sweet (too confident) voice.  She’s frightened by the prospect of rape but is glowing when she returns from the bedroom with Norman – until she’s scared by the arrival of the other men from the tank, in particular the boorish Coon-Ass.   It’s a tacky, melodramatic misjudgement on David Ayer’s part that, after the five men have left the house and it’s blown up, the corpse of Emma is pictured lying among the remains of the piano.

    As Top Collier, Brad Pitt does his best acting since Moneyball:  convincingly alert, he’s especially good at suggesting the conflict between Top’s professional tunnel vision and thoughts that he can’t let surface.  Pitt’s calm, undemonstrative quality provides an effective counterpoint to Top’s fanaticism.  As far as I could hear, Ayer supplies no backstory for Top but the man has become almost pathologically attached to his tank.  When it’s immobilised by a landmine and the crew have the chance to flee an approaching column of SS infantry, Top refuses to leave Fury:  it’s another cliché that the others all choose to stay with him and easy to predict the sequence in which they will die in this act of heroic defiance – and that Norman, against all the odds, will survive.   The much-maligned Shia LaBeouf does well as the prayerful Bible; so does the reliable Michael Peña as Gordo.  The uncouth Coon-Ass is a familiar type and Jon Bernthal gives a performance to match, even though I don’t recall having seen this actor before.  Logan Lerman is increasingly likeable as Norman, especially good when the young man, the morning after the climactic battle with the SS, wakes to find himself still alive.  I liked the way he covers Top’s dead body and, once he’s found by American troops, stumbles away from the tank in one incredulous piece.  Jason Isaacs has a cameo and a strenuous American accent as a captain who advises Top on the tank’s next assignment.  I wonder what the point is in casting a British actor in a role as small as this – when there’s no time for him to do anything but stick out vocally.

    That only Norman survives (and that Brad Pitt doesn’t) may sound like a nod to realism but Fury‘s Armageddon still has a spectacularly improbable outcome.  Scores of Germans are killed, thanks to the courage and ingenuity of the five men in the American tank:  a final aerial shot displays the many Nazi corpses arranged round the remains of Fury.  You realise, as you hope against hope that Top and Norman and the others will win through, that you’re responding to this final battle in a traditional way and David Ayer hardly discourages this kind of response – even if he also encourages the audience to think they’ve seen an unusually tough and thoughtful combat film because the relentless physical detail of warfare as presented in Fury is anything but glorious.  As if to compensate for the muted tones of the previous 135 minutes, Ayer plays reddened newsreel images of Hitler et al under the film’s closing titles.   The effect is crude and garish.

    5 November 2014

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