Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Intolerable Cruelty

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joel Coen (2003)

    I hated it by the time the opening titles appeared.  The prologue features a TV producer returning home unexpectedly to find his wife being unfaithful with an odd job man.  Garishly overdone marital mayhem follows.  When someone of Geoffrey Rush’s calibre resorts to the kind of desperate overacting on display here (Rush plays the producer), you fear the worst.  The animated titles – a fussy confusion of hearts and putti and Victorian cut-out figures – are followed by elaborate shots of George Clooney’s teeth under dental treatment and you wonder when the Coens are going to give you a break from showing how pointlessly clever they are.  The break comes as soon as Clooney appears in person:  his star impact cuts through the hectic swill.  The Coens really are very lucky to have him.  If his filmography were different, Clooney’s inability to seem crude might be a limitation.  For as long as he keeps making pictures like this one, it’s a saving grace.

    Not that he’s at his best here – most of the time anyway.  He plays Miles Massey, a hot-shot divorce attorney, creator of a pre-nuptial agreement that’s never successfully been challenged (and on which the plot depends).   Clooney is funny in interviews with his clients, including the TV producer’s wife (Stacey Travis), and in court but he does too many double takes, as if trying to prove what genre of film he’s in.  (There’s also a sequence when he gesticulates too noticeably – the hand movements seem put on and they don’t recur.)  More crucially, there’s no connection between Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones:  the Coens may be too cynical to want Miles and Zeta-Jones’s character, the serial bride Marylin Hamilton Rexroth Doyle Massey, to feel something for each other beneath the relentless self-centred scheming that propels their relationship.  But the lack of feeling between the stars – it’s a lack of physical appetite too – is radically destructive to a romantic comedy, however ‘dark’ it’s meant to be.  Though he fails to spark with Zeta-Jones, Clooney brings off brilliantly a keynote speech at a gathering of divorce lawyers in Las Vegas.   (The organisation’s acronym is NOMAN and its tagline, displayed on a notice behind the lectern, is one of the better jokes in the script – ‘Let NOMAN put asunder’ – although the Coens rather spoil it by the daft explanation of the initials as ‘National Organisation of Matrimonial Attorneys Nationwide’.)   Miles takes to the podium thinking he is, through his impending marriage to Marylin and her shredding of the ‘pre-nup’, a fabulously rich man.  This causes him to recant his calculating lawyerly past and experience an outburst of fraudulent humanitarianism.  Clooney is wonderful delivering this hypocritical oration.  He engages so completely with it that he doesn’t only take in the audience in the hall.  He just about convinces us that he means what he says.

    Catherine Zeta-Jones isn’t a bad actress but she has a waxy look and a weightless presence here – she’s a simulacrum of a sexy film star.  She’s best when Marylin is slyly faking emotion in the witness box at the hearing of the divorce between her and Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann).   Zeta-Jones seems comfortable in a scene like this when the shamming is theatrical and when her performance can be largely self-contained (two things which explain why what she did in Chicago was mainly very effective).  When Marylin’s duplicity needs to be more subtle and elusive, Zeta-Jones is vacuous.  Partly because I’d got the wrong idea in my head that the Coens had based the film on a particular screwball classic (I began to think Adam’s Rib), I also started expecting Zeta-Jones and Clooney to be playing competing attorneys who fall in love.  There would have been some comic friction in the idea of being asked to believe in Catherine Zeta-Jones as a brilliant lawyer:  casting her as a mercenary tart doesn’t have the same effect.  (I wondered how much better the film might have been with Cate Blanchett or Gwyneth Paltrow in the role.)

    The Coens don’t have the temperament for successful screwball comedy.  They despise their characters too much – they rarely see them as fallible and sometimes ridiculous but with redeeming aspects of personality.  This seems to go for everyone in Intolerable Cruelty:  George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones are exempted by the Coens only because they look good – not because they turn out to be interesting or likeable people.  The crack timing of Richard Jenkins (who has a fine doleful professionalism as Marylin’s attorney) and Billy Bob Thornton (easily droll as a soap actor pretending to be the Texan magnate whom Marylin marries between Rexroth and Miles) makes their performances enjoyable but they’re the only two, apart from Clooney.  Not for the first time in the Coens’ world, the worthlessness or turpitude of many of the characters is typically conveyed by behaviour of gross stupidity and a physical appearance to match.  This can be unpleasantly creepy:  the octogenarian senior partner of Miles’s law firm (Tom Aldredge) is grotesquely geriatric – sequestered in a darkened office where, at death’s door and with tubes coming out of his decaying face, he croakily recites the statistics of a lifetime’s professional success.   (Miles, hardly surprisingly, has nightmares of turning into this horror film figure.)   More often, it’s just feeble:  why would someone as smart as Miles have a right hand man as unrelievedly dumb as Wrigley (Paul Adelstein)?   The Coens’ galloping derision is comedically counterproductive with a character like this one:  when Wrigley starts blubbing at weddings, it would stand a chance of being funny if he’d seemed heartlessly incisive at work.  Since the Coens have to make him a twit throughout, reducing him to tears doesn’t mean anything.  In the Coens’ hands, the screwball hallmark of sustained wisecracking dialogue is sporadic and not integrally connected to the characters speaking it.  The lines come across as yet more showing off by the writer-directors.

    23 October 2009

  • Into the Woods

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Marshall (2014)

    Twenty-eight years after the first staging of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical reaches the big screen as a Walt Disney Pictures production.  Sondheim and Disney are strange bedfellows and it’s tempting to imagine negotiations between them, the studio reassuring the composer that his dark materials are in safe hands:  we’ve done loads of fairy tales, even made them scary!  James Lapine has written the screenplay for Into the Woods but various changes have been made to tone down the violent and sexual aspects of the theatre piece and the film was released in the US for the Christmas holiday – even though the result is still far from a family musical.  The CGI is surely not extraordinary enough to excite connoisseurs of special visual effects. The pyrotechnics are enough, however, to distract attention from Sondheim and Lapine’s deeper themes – parent-child relationships, growing up in order to accept responsibility and reality, moral complexity, the importance of storytelling, etc.  The cast list also has a bets-hedging look:  it includes an eclectic mix of big names that seems to have been assembled to appeal to different audiences.  Yet the studio’s commercial thinking has evidently paid off – less than a month after its release, the film’s box-office takings are already approaching three times its $50m budget.

    Into the Woods is well performed on the whole, especially on the distaff side.  What’s more, the characterisations – a skilful balance of stylisation and humanisation of fairytale personnel – are well orchestrated by Rob Marshall.  In other respects, his direction is fatally uncertain.  He seems to want the audience to be excited by what happens as if this were a conventional fantasy adventure story.  The integration of the various fairy stories is, in the first half, no more than perfunctory:  the woods are meant to be a unifying landscape but the characters don’t properly inhabit it.  (Alan Scherstuhl in the Village Voice describes this well:  ‘Marshall simply cuts from one tale to the next, isolating his actors. There’s little sense that the fairytale space is a shared one — it’s just a bunch of noisy incident transpiring in unrelated treestands’.)  There are moments when the film is stuck in a limbo between stage and screen, with the characters grouped like a theatre tableau and the fidgety camera trying to prove this is a movie.  The last third of Into the Woods corresponds to the stage musical’s Act II, entitled ‘Once Upon a Time … Later’, which deals with what happens beyond the happy-ever-after conclusion to Act I.   In Rob Marshall’s hands, this afterlife part is merely flabby and confused.  Cinderella, Red Riding Hood et al work uncertainly through character-forming experience to a glumly affirmative but still sentimental ending about finding yourself and doing well by your children.

    I have to admit to a deaf spot for most of Stephen Sondheim.  I realise that his music is sophisticated and his words are witty but the small, introverted melodies and the clever rhymes always feel like a marathon version of the improvised songs in Whose Line Is It Anyway?  Sondheim is revered for repeatedly taking the Broadway musical to new places, thematically as well as musically, and Into the Woods is regarded as one of these innovations.  It’s supposedly inspired by Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.  In this book, according to Wikipedia:

    ‘Bettelheim discusses the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales at one time considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm. Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose.’

    The Uses of Enchantment was published in 1976 but Bettelheim was hardly the first psychologist to venture onto the dark side of fairy tales, into the woods of their unconscious meanings:  Freud and Jung had been there long before.  Michael Schulman posted a piece in the New Yorker online last month, called ‘Why Into the Woods Matters’[1], in which he described the great apprehension felt by self-confessed diehard fans of the original Into the Woods like himself about the upcoming screen adaptation (and his ambivalence about the end product).  Schulman’s piece is amusing and insightful but it still didn’t help me to understand how Sondheim and Lapine’s play, although it may be a thematically radical musical, breaks new ground as a psychoanalysis of fairy tales.  And I think (I think) it’s more interesting to read about these ideas than to see them dramatised.

    Which leaves the performances (and the splendid costumes by Colleen Attwood) …  The plot centres round a baker, his wife and the witch whose curse has meant the couple are childless.  The Witch instructs them to obtain four objects which will allow the curse to be lifted.  She does so with a degree of self-interest:  she also wants to reverse the curse that turned her, a once beautiful woman, into a crone.   The baker and his wife’s quest brings them into contact with characters from Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel.  The Baker is played by James Corden, who does well enough with some of the comedy bits but lacks emotional depth in ‘Once Upon a Time … Later’.  It was a mistake to have the story also narrated by Corden in voiceover – his reading is bland.  Emily Blunt is excellent as the Baker’s Wife:  she has a rosy-cheeked beauty and wholesomeness but gives her lines a modern twist.  She gets the humour of the conception she’s playing but engagingly so – without seeming to make fun of it.  Her character’s death is muffled – it’s as if Rob Marshall, whatever the script says, is nervous to admit that someone in the story has actually died:  the same goes for the demise of Jack’s mother, played by a vigorously funny Tracey Ullman.  Meryl Streep’s involved interpretation of the Witch is very successful in the first half:  she’s a blend of traditional hag and exhaustingly eccentric old woman next door and her theatrical panache gives proceedings a lift.  The magical re-beautifying of the Witch is amusing enough but the new look and Streep’s characterisation don’t mesh so well in the second part and the Witch’s final exit is anti-climactic (the director’s fault rather than the performer’s).  Streep’s singing is very good, though, and the Witch’s neediness comes through strongly.

    Anna Kendrick also sings particularly well but, expert though she is in the role of Cinderella, her neurotic charisma seems to reflect the whole film’s location in a no man’s land between a movie for children and a movie for grown-ups.  Christine Baranski as Cinderella’s stepmother and Tammy Blanchard and Lucy Punch, as her daughters, are spot on and work beautifully together.  Whereas Lilla Crawford is a thoroughly eccentric Red Riding Hood, Daniel Huttlestone’s Jack is thoroughly conventional (and a very close relation to Huttlestone’s Gavroche in Les Misérables).  Somehow, however, these contrasting approaches jell – you don’t worry either about the mixture of English and American accents in the woods.  Johnny Depp makes a fine entrance as the Wolf but his human appearance then detracts from the impact of the grandmother-in-bed scene:  Rob Marshall appears simply not to have thought this through.  His most confident (and camp) staging is of a duet for the two handsome princes of the story, played by Chris Pine (Cinderella’s prince) and Billy Magnussen (Rapunzel’s) – but these are two more characters that fizzle in the second part.  Simon Russell Beale, Annette Crosbie and Frances de la Tour have cameos as, respectively, the Baker’s father, Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and a giantess.  Having a CGI-enlarged de la Tour in the last of these roles isn’t a bad joke but it looks, from what’s left of their performances, as if Russell Beale and Crosbie were wasting their time signing up for the film.

    13 January 2015

    [1] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-into-the-woods-matters

     

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