Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • It’s Complicated

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nancy Meyers (2009)

    Maybe the writer-director Nancy Meyers got her basic plot idea from The Philadelphia Story, where the bride-to-be eventually dumps her dull engineer fiancé and gets remarried to the irresistible cad from whom she’s divorced.   In It’s Complicated, Jane Adler has an affair with her egocentric but supposedly hard-to-deny ex-husband Jake.  This occurs before (and during) a relationship with a new man in her life, a mild-mannered architect called Adam Schaffer (who’s designing an unnecessary extension to Jane’s vast kitchen).  Meyers appears to think it wouldn’t do to have a simple happy ending.  Jane is too experienced in life for that; only a few minutes before the final credits the door seems to have closed gently on her relationship with both men.   The tentatively hopeful postscripts Meyers then supplies are tacked on without conviction.

    The fundamental premise of It’s Complicated  – that people in late middle age having sex/getting drunk/smoking pot is a comedy per se – is feeble and pretty embarrassing.  When Jane takes off her robe, Jake is so overcome that he has a dizzy spell and keels over.  A doctor has to be called and there’s a run-through of Jake’s various medication (including the tablets for prostate trouble).  Much of the time, the couple’s three kids, in their twenties, seem to regard their parents as lovable curiosities – that is until the point at which they have to lurch into tearful concern about them.  And Meyers (who’s sixty) seems depressingly clear and unambitious about her target audience – middle-class, middle-aged women.  (The characters in It’s Complicated are professional or business people – Jake is a lawyer, Jane owns and runs a successful bakery:  money being no object is taken for granted, and certainly isn’t mined for comedy.)  The sequences in which Jane and her fifty-something ‘girlfriends’ whoop and cackle about sex and marriage, are hard to take.  The risqué tone of the proceedings is exquisitely shallow – as the mellow, innocuous score by Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira keeps reassuring you.   But the main performers make the film a pleasure in spite of itself – and in spite of the fact that you’re so disengaged from the story you’re enjoying them in the abstract.

    There’s a particular danger in flimsy material like this that Meryl Streep, because of her supernatural technical command, will seem to be playing an actress who is playing a woman in a marital comedy.  The character of Jane, on paper, isn’t any kind of a stretch for her.  There’s plenty of detail and perfect timing to enjoy (like the moment when Jane dismisses Jake from a family meal, he exits trying and failing to catch her eye, the door shuts behind him and she looks up).  But Meryl Streep gives a performance that’s not only greatly accomplished but mostly very charming.  She looks her age here but also, perhaps consequently, beautiful in a different, transparent way – I kept seeing her younger self (glimpses of the way she looked nearly thirty years ago), an experience I don’t remember having before.  All this culminates in Jane’s final scene with Jake, as they talk together on a swing seat in her garden – Streep seems exhausted and open, and the effect is lovely and touching.    Nancy Meyers hardly deserves the unexpected depth that Meryl Streep gives to the aging theme in It’s Complicated but I’m glad she gets it.

    The principal men here are a self-centred user and someone unassertive to the point of wimpiness.  Jake is an emotional bully:  the great merit of Alec Baldwin’s performance is that he doesn’t hold back on expressing this but still gets across Jake’s egoistic charm.  Baldwin has a funny portly grace and does great things with his eyes (not so much come-to-bed as come-to-bed-or-else eyes).  Steve Martin is relatively wasted as the architect; in some of his early scenes he doesn’t suggest enough going on under Adam’s bland exterior.   Still, it’s worth waiting for what Martin does to elevate the pot-smoking sequence from its mediocre conception.  After the party where they’re stoned (a graduation party for her son), Jane and Adam go to her patisserie and she bakes chocolate croissants – this midnight feast has an aphrodisiac spirit which Julie and Julia could have used a bit more of.   Martin’s chemistry with Streep, both comic and romantic, is good (as is Baldwin’s).  As Jane and Jake’s son-in-law, John Krasinski is excellent – he’s polished and natural and he has great timing:  he hits the target with every look and every line.  The three children don’t register much – although it was interesting to see Zoe Kazan, even in a sketchy role like this, only weeks after enjoying her work in Me and Orson Welles.  (The other daughter is played by Caitlin Fitzgerald and the son by Hunter Parrish.)  Lake Bell can’t do much with the thankless role of Agness, the (much) younger woman Jake left Jane for.  This character seems altogether wrong:  you don’t believe that a self-server like Jake would get involved with a woman as obviously challenging as Agness.  Jane’s gruesome friends are played by Mary Kay Place, Alexandra Wentworth and Rita Wilson.

    13 and 29 January 2010

     

     

  • It’s Always Fair Weather

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen (1955)

    It’s Always Fair Weather begins in 1945 but most of the action takes place ten years later.  During that time, each of the three GIs we meet in the opening scenes – Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey) and Angelo ‘Angie’ Valentine (Michael Kidd) – have watched their lives turn disappointing.   Ted, who was going to be a lawyer or a politician or some kind of great man, is a far from high-ranking boxing promoter.  At the start of the film, he receives a ‘Dear John’ letter and he still hasn’t found the right girl a decade on.  Doug’s wife now wants a divorce and although he’s a successful advertising executive he wanted to be an artist.  Angie, who has not only a wife but a surfeit of kids, had ambitions of being a top chef:  he calls the place he runs ‘Cordon Bleu’ but it’s actually a hamburger stand.  The trio swears undying friendship on their last evening together at the end of the war; they vow to meet again in ten years’ time – on the tenth of October 1955.  They keep the date but find, when they’re reunited, that they get on each other’s nerves.  These soldiers three, exuberant in New York at the start, naturally echo the sailors on a day’s shore leave in On the Town, made by Kelly and Donen six years earlier:  plenty had happened to those two as well in the meantime.  By the time Fair Weather was made, their relationship had just about broken down and Kelly was depressed by MGM’s continuing refusal to release Invitation to the Dance.   The characters’ sense of disillusionment and the tensions between them when they get back together mesh with the film-makers’ state of mind.  This helps to create one of the most satisfying musicals I’ve seen.

    The film may be more impressive – as well as much more enjoyable – at this distance in time than it was when first released.  You might think the predicament of Ted, Doug and Angie spoke to that of many of their real-life contemporaries but audiences of the time evidently didn’t want acridness in screen musicals:  It’s Always Fair Weather was a box-office failure.  The very title, as well as picking up on the idea of inconstant friends, seems to poke fun at the received idea of the musical as a genre of determined optimism.  The combination of the principals’ self-reproach and an unambiguous contempt for the symbiotic worlds of television and advertising must have been as potent as it was unfamiliar.  Yet what may have felt subversive in 1955 seems, more than half a century later, refreshingly disenchanted and emotionally gritty for a Cinemascope musical of the era – you don’t need to make the usual adjustments to believe in the world  you’re seeing and hearing.   André Previn’s agreeable music is nothing special but that throws into stronger relief the witty lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who also did the screenplay.  And because the melodies have the quality of being made up as they go along, and there are no over-inflated production numbers, It’s Always Fair Weather is one of those musicals where breaking into song and dance seems a truthful and natural expression of a character’s feelings (an effect which Kelly and Donen underline through the reactions of some of the onlookers on the screen).

    Watching Gene Kelly here, I genuinely liked him for the first time.  He might not be specifically believable as an aspiring lawyer or embryo politico but that works – it serves to reflect Ted Riley’s sense that his life isn’t working out as he planned.  Kelly may or may not be drawing on his own recent disappointments but he’s convincingly subdued.  The dejection is organic, not performed; he seems a little physically reduced too (he probably is a few pounds lighter than in On the Town).  Because he’s less shiny, more introverted than usual, the few sequences in which he is upbeat are treasurable, especially the solo on roller-skates – when Ted likes himself and Gene Kelly is enjoying himself.   As Doug, Dan Dailey has a humorous melancholy and naturalism, an irredeemably middle-aged quality, which give depth to the film.  His increasingly drunken and sarcastic solo ‘Situation-Wise’ is one of the highest highlights.  Dailey’s and Michael Kidd’s physical presences complement Kelly’s perfectly, as does their dancing.  Kidd, best known as a choreographer, is vivid and charmingly funny in what’s essentially the Sinatra role.   The trio numbers are terrific – whether the vigorous ‘The Binge’ (which includes the dustbin lids sequence the film is best remembered for); or the scene in a restaurant when Ted, Doug and Angie glumly chomp celery sticks and voice their negative thoughts about each other to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz that’s playing in the background; or dance on a split screen – synchronised but in three separate rooms.   (It’s a pity, though, that the projectionist couldn’t get Dailey, in the left-hand segment, fully on the screen.  And although there was no apology from BFI, the print quality was ragged in several places.)

    As Jackie, the TV producer Ted falls for, Cyd Charisse doesn’t have the vocal skills needed to do full justice to Comden and Green’s lines but the exceptional wit of her movement makes up for it.  Her legs are at their most astonishing in the boxing gym number (‘Baby, You Knock Me Out’) where the contrast between her elegance and the persuasive grunginess of the fighters she dances with is very amusing.  Dolores Gray is superb as the unconquerably smiling TV chanteuse Madeline:   the satirical brio of her main number (‘Thanks A Lot But No Thanks’) is exhilarating.  As a fight-fixing Mr Big, Jay C Flippen has a splendid brutal leer and David Burns, the owner of the bar to which the three protagonists keep returning, is a fine foil to them.

    The dancing is wonderfully varied, both in style and mood.  The ex-soldiers regain their corps d’esprit in a climactic fight sequence with the boxing crooks in the theatre from which the ‘Midnight with Madeline’ TV show is being aired.  This is superbly staged by Kelly and Donen:  it’s thoroughly rhythmical but never overly choreographed.   As recently noted, applause at the end is becoming nearly par for the course at BFI.  On this occasion, someone clapped even as the film was starting, and there were little outbursts of applause after two or three of the numbers.   Although I’m disinclined to clap in a cinema, I felt increasingly that I’d want to join in at the end.  Yet the diminuendo of the last sequence is so effective that, when the moment came, I didn’t.  As the three men go their separate ways again – Ted with Jackie, Doug and Angie back to their respective (and repaired) marriages – the screen says ‘The End’ and we have the sense of an ending in more ways than one.  This was the last time Kelly and Donen worked together and their filmographies from this point on are very spotty, although Donen made a few good non-musicals like Charade.  It’s Always Fair Weather is a great leave-taking.

    13 December 2011

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