Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • I Could Go on Singing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ronald Neame (1963)

    I Could Go on Singing is about an unhappy, unstable American singing superstar, in London for shows at the Palladium and trying to get her offstage life sorted out.   Fifteen years ago, Jenny Bowman had an affair with David Donne, a young Englishman who was completing his medical studies in New York.  They had a child but Jenny couldn’t be a mother as well as an international star.  David and the woman he’d married ‘adopted’ the boy, Matt.  David’s wife has now died and, on her visit to London, Jenny goes to see him – ostensibly for a diagnosis on the state of her tonsils (he’s become a leading ENT specialist, she’s apparently neurotic about losing her voice) but really to try and see – and reclaim – her son.  Jenny is played by Judy Garland, and this was her last film.  Six years after its release, she died at the age of forty-seven, in London.   Although Jenny doesn’t die (the film ends with her redemption on stage at the last night of her Palladium run), it’s impossible not to link the character and the woman playing her.   Because of that – and our idea that Garland, at this point in her life, was a drugs-raddled basket case – her expressive but controlled acting comes as rather a surprise.   We may feel that she’s drawing very considerably on her own personality but that gives the hackneyed role she’s playing a vividness it would otherwise lack.  Her line readings are alert and she has a wonderful natural humour.

    Garland’s physique makes for remarkable contrasts between Jenny on stage and off.  She’s tiny and vulnerable away from the Palladium spotlight:  Garland’s puffy face and large eyes mean that you’re conscious of Jenny’s head to the virtual exclusion of the rest of her body.  When she’s performing it’s very different:  her long, shapely legs give her an unexpected ranginess below the waist yet her upper body seems bulky and constricted.  It makes for an electric tension. The problem I had was with Garland’s singing, which is compelling but disconcerting – the voice, overpowering yet fragile, sounds doped, clotted with emotion.  And three of the four songs that Jenny sings at the Palladium are awful – the exception is ‘By Myself’ (by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz).  Not knowing any of the others, I assumed they were specially written for the film, mechanical imitations of the anthems of determined, despairing self-affirmation that we associate with a Garland-like performer.  (I was late arriving at BFI and got into NFT1 just as the opening credits were ending so saw nothing about the songs.)  I was shocked to discover when I got home that Kurt Weill, with Maxwell Anderson, wrote ‘It Never Was You’ and that the title song was by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg.  The first number, ‘Hello, Bluebird’, by Cliff Friend, seems nothing more than (I suppose, is) a cheesy nod to ‘Over the Rainbow’.  The only enjoyable musical interlude is, surprisingly, when Jenny goes backstage after a performance of HMS Pinafore at Matt’s school and joins the boys in ‘I Am the Monarch of the Sea’, where Garland’s jazzy looseness works well against the conscientious style of the boys.

    One thing Dirk Bogarde does effortlessly is incarnate men who’ve reached the top of their profession – whether an academic or a lawyer or, in this case, a doctor.  It’s a combination of that upright bearing and the clear-mindedness that he exudes – and the quietly spoken authority.  Bogarde understands and conveys the essence of professional self-confidence – the certainty that you don’t need to speak long or loudly to make your point and settle the matter.  And, for as long as Bogarde doesn’t raise his voice, his inflections are often marvellously witty and incisive.  He’s a much less persuasive actor when he’s shouting – the display of that kind of anger feels forced and hollow.  All these aspects of Bogarde are in evidence in I Could Go on Singing:  for the most part, his relatively low emotional temperature makes him an effective counterpoint to Garland – although the lack of any sexual spark is a problem.  It’s hard to believe Bogarde’s David was part of a passionate affair even some years ago.  Jenny tells him when they first meet again that he’s changed (and he agrees) but Bogarde’s presence makes it hard to believe that too.

    I Could Go on Singing puts together two clichéd types of film story:  the mother who gave up her child, usually for selfish reasons, and now realises, too late, her terrible mistake; and the masochistic star performer whose one true love is her audience (it usually is a she) and who feels safe only when she’s on stage,   It’s not the first time the two themes have been linked but the screenplay by Mayo Simon is very clumsy:  much of the dialogue, rewritten by Bogarde (who refused a credit), is often better than the script’s construction.   In their crucial, climactic conversation in a London A&E department (Jenny got drunk and sprained her ankle), David tells Jenny he’ll stay with her as long as she needs him.   He gets her to the Palladium, where the sell-out audience has been kept waiting an hour already.  She goes on stage, without any preparation or changing her clothes, and he waits and watches in the wings.   Halfway through ‘I Could Go on Singing’, she already has the disgruntled punters eating out of her hand.  She turns to look at David again and he’s gone.  He’s concluded that Jenny is back (home) where she belongs and doesn’t need him any more.  We’re meant to feel he’s both right and wrong:  she doesn’t give the wings a second look; once the curtain falls, she’ll be alone again.

    Ronald Neame may have been attracted to the idea of directing Garland but you sense that, by temperament, he was more at home with the offstage drama, and the script is just too weak to give him a chance of succeeding with it.  Gregory Phillips, as Matt, has a very engaging quality but can’t carry the dramatic weight his character’s eventually expected to bear – when Matt finds out not only that Jenny’s his mother but that the man he thought was his adoptive father is his biological one.  Jack Klugman is Jenny’s agent and Aline MacMahon her companion-dresser: they’re good but the scenes involving them are perfunctory.   The only performer who registers apart from the three principals is Pauline Jameson, as David’s sinisterly attentive secretary.  Garland’s children, Lorna and Joey Luft, appear briefly as two kids on a Thames riverboat.   The little girl asks Jenny Bowman for her autograph.

    6 August 2011

  • I Am Michael

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Justin Kelly (2015)

    Michael Glatze was born in Washington in 1975.  After graduating from Dartmouth College, he worked on the magazine XY in San Francisco.  Recognised as a particularly well-read, articulate and vigorous advocate of gay rights, Glatze was in a relationship for some ten years with a man called Benjie Nycum, whom he met at XY.  They moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia and, in 2004, founded another magazine, Young Gay America.  (Whereas XY was aimed specifically at a male gay market, YGA catered for young LGBT readers generally.)   Over the course of the next couple of years, however, Glatze became a Christian and politically right-wing.  He distanced himself not only from the gay rights movement but from his own homosexual past.  In 2010, after a brief period as a Mormon, he started a course of study at a Bible college in Wyoming.  In 2013, on completion of his studies there, he married a fellow student – a female one.  He’s now the pastor of a church in rural Wyoming.  The trajectory of Michael Glatze’s personal and professional life is the opposite of what you might expect in a film selected to open BFI’s Flare/LGBT Festival – as I Am Michael did a few days ago.  Michael Brooke, introducing the second BFI Flare screening of Justin Kelly’s account of Glatze’s change of heart, stressed the importance of a film that forces ‘us to grapple with expectations of what a gay film is’.  The movies in BFI’s regular Flare slot raise this kind of question in my mind nearly every month:  a film seems to be Flare-worthy if it’s made by a contemporary director known to be gay, or if it exposes attitudes towards homosexuality of film-makers of bygone days, or just by including, even as subsidiary figures, one or two sexually ambiguous characters.  Still, I Am Michael is, on the face of it, a refreshingly challenging choice to headline a festival of queer cinema.

    Only on the face of it, though.  Justin Kelly’s first feature isn’t ‘the remarkably even-handed account’ that Variety’s Peter Debruge perceived in his review of the film that featured in the BFI programme note.  Kelly’s surface objectivity functions as a barrier to probing the complexities of Michael Glatze’s ‘conversion’.  It’s true, of course, that Glatze’s reasons aren’t easy to understand but Kelly and his co-writer Stacey Miller explore them less than Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Glatze’s former colleague at XY, did in the 2011 New York Times article (‘My Ex-Gay Friend’) on which the screenplay for I Am Michael is based.   (Michael’s partner in the film is named Bennett – a conflation of the real-life Benjie and Benoit?)  Justin Kelly does acknowledge that, even in his XY days, Michael (James Franco) was uncomfortable with the labels ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, which he describes as ‘social constructs’, but Kelly doesn’t present any conflict between Michael’s restless intelligence and the simplistic political and moral opinions which he comes to espouse.  According to I Am Michael, the central character doesn’t merely change his mind:  he loses it – to the bafflement of those who love him.

    Before his U-turn, Michael, Bennett (Zachary Quinto) and a young student called Tyler (Charlie Carver), who’s moved in with them and whom they share sexually, travel the country to make a documentary about being young and gay in America.  One of those they interview, in ‘Jerry Falwell country’, is a young man who’s a practising Christian and who explains that, while some people insist that being Christian if you’re gay is a no-no, he believes ‘that’s just as crazy as the anti-gay brigade’.  Although Justin Kelly makes clear that these words register strongly with him at the time, Michael doesn’t appear to spend much time trying to reconcile his own new-found Christian faith with his gay feelings or advocacy.  In contrast, Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s piece makes clear that:

    ‘…  by the end of 2004, after his health scare, Michael was devouring books by openly gay theologians like Mel White and Peter Gomes and trying to integrate his sexuality and spirituality. He was initially drawn to a liberal interpretation of the Bible and argued against a fundamentalist approach to Christianity. “People have been raised incorrectly to believe that the prejudices they’ve been taught by their pastors are God’s word,” he wrote in a 2005 Y.G.A. issue devoted to spiritual questions. “The only Truth is Love.”’

    The ‘health scare’, and the existential crisis that appears to have precipitated it, are the turning point in I Am Michael.  Both of Michael Glatze’s parents died when he was a teenager: his father suddenly, from a previously undiagnosed heart condition; his mother subsequently, from cancer.  The film shows Michael becoming preoccupied with thoughts of death and whether there is life after death – his anguish is centred on the loss of his parents.  When he visits the spot where his mother’s ashes were scattered, in woodland near his home town (Olympia, Washington), he finds some dusty residue at the foot of a tree and decides ‘She’s still here’.  He experiences palpitations and is convinced, in spite of assurances from a succession of doctors, that he’s inherited the heart complaint that killed his father.  Michael emerges from this psychosomatic trauma ever more desirous of being reunited with his parents in an afterlife – and increasingly anxious that his homosexuality will send him to hell and prevent this reunion.  (Neither his mother nor his father was actively religious although Michael seems not to be concerned by the post-mortem implications of this, even when he’s become a fundamentalist Christian.)  A movie character who weeps and sweats and imagines he’s having a heart attack makes for more exciting viewing than one reading books but Justin Kelly’s concentration on Michael’s crisis makes a political point too.   While it’s believable that neurotic and infantile fears played a part in setting him on his Road to Damascus, their dominance in the film helps to reinforce the idea that Michael’s reversal is bereft of reason.

    I liked the way Justin Kelly used obsolescent illustrations of furtive homosexuality to describe Michael’s apprehensions of religious faith.  At one point, he goes into a church the way that a repressed homosexual, in a film two or three decades ago, might have sneaked into a gay bar.  He sits ashen-faced in his room – anticipating, like the kid who has to tell his parents that he’s gay, the moment when he comes out, to those closest to him, as a Christian.  But I Am Michael has no real sympathy for its protagonist.  It doesn’t show him even as the victim of the societal forces that his former partner Benjie, according to Benoit Denizet-Lewis, blames for what has happened to Michael:

    ‘“To me, Michael is a victim of this insane society we live in, where we grow up with all these conflicting messages and pressures around sexuality and religion, and where we divide into these camps where we’re always right and the other side is always wrong. Some people are susceptible to buying into that, and I think Michael is one of them.”’

    Instead, Justin Kelly presents Michael as an inexplicably ridiculous hypocrite.  (What he did and said elicited increasing laughter in NFT1.)   During the process of reorientation, he becomes friendly with Nico (Avan Jogia), a gay Buddhist, and joins him on a retreat.  As soon as his new friend makes a move on him, Michael coldly reproves Nico.  In order to prove the falseness of Michael’s claim that he’s become heterosexual, Kelly shows him picking up a girl in a bar then walking out on her once she’s stripped down for sex:  this glosses over the fact that Michael, who by this stage is well on the way to fundamentalism, is presumably uncomfortable with extra-marital relations even if he does find women physically attractive.  (Kelly similarly keeps off the issue of whether the ménage à trois involving Tyler made a difference to Michael’s breaking off his relationship with Bennett.)  Rebekah (Emma Roberts), the student Michael meets at Bible college and eventually marries, is a virgin from ‘a very conservative family’.  There’s barely a hint that Michael might genuinely have loving feelings towards her:  he’s shown, rather, as exploiting her sexual inexperience.   Rebekah is so innocent that she finds out about Michael’s gay past only after other girls at the college have done so and drop heavy hints to her.  It’s surprising that Michael has even tried to keep this past a secret, given that he’s publically notorious as someone who has – on the internet – renounced homosexuality.  (The film virtually ignores the possibility that he experienced any difficulties in convincing his new Christian brethren that he was a changed man.)

    One of Michael’s favourite verses from the Bible (he quotes it several times) is Matthew 10:39 – ‘He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it’.  The final shot of the film is a close-up on Michael’s face, as he smiles to welcome his congregation in Wyoming.  The smile then fades, to confirm the simplistic, how-can-he-live-with-himself message of I Am Michael.  (The score, by Jake Shears and Tim K, suggests insistently that we’re watching a man losing rather than saving his soul.)  In his introduction to the screening, Michael Brooke reasonably described the film as a ‘going in’ rather than a ‘coming out’ story and this has dramatic implications beyond the specific subject matter.  We naturally expect an actor, as a film or play progresses, to reveal more of the personality and motivations of the character he’s playing.  James Franco as Michael has to go in the other direction.  He does this impressively:  his facial muscles harden into a mask; his gait becomes gradually more guarded.  Franco’s inexorable closing off from the viewer may not be a problem if you’re content to see Michael Glatze’s story as an aberrant cautionary tale but I found it frustrating – partly because of the intrinsic interest of Justin Kelly’s subject, partly because James Franco is an actor who effortlessly draws you in to his character (as he does in the early stages here).  His portrait of Michael may succeed in confirming the political prejudices of many members of the audience but it also demonstrates the deficiencies of the film as a character study.  I Am Michael is a strange combination – an undernourished drama and, at the same time, a constipated one.

    20 March 2015

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