Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Great Expectations (2012)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Newell (2012)

    My father loved Dickens.  I was never sure how many of the novels he’d read; I am sure it was plenty more than I’ve managed.  Great Expectations is perhaps the only Dickens that I’ve reread.  I remember that when I enthused about it my father disagreed.  That was what tended to happen when I enthused about anything but in this case I can remember what he said to explain his lukewarmness:  ‘Pip’s a creep’.  A dramatisation of the novel is likely to be seriously weakened if the actor playing Philip Pirrip suggests nothing more than a creep.   That certainly wasn’t the case in the 1999 BBC mini-series:  Ioan Gruffudd, with his complicated charm and emotional alertness, was the best Pip I’ve seen.  In this latest cinema version of Great Expectations, the boy Pip is played by Toby Irvine, in his first movie.  He grows into Toby’s brother Jeremy, already familiar from War Horse and who’ll be seen next as the young Eric Lomax (he ages into Colin Firth) in The Railway Man.   It’s the younger brother who’s the more expressive.   Toby Irvine is good at suggesting feelings in Pip that he wants to conceal (shame, when Estella insults him on his early visits to Satis House) or of which he’s at first not fully conscious (dissatisfaction with life with Joe Gargery).   When Jeremy Irvine first appears, Pip is hard at work at the forge.  The sound of the hammer blows gets across the relentless, erosive labour that seems to be Pip’s lot in life.   But Irvine’s appearance immediately strikes a false note.  He’s lit so that the glow of the furnace emphasises his film-star good looks.  Even if you’d never read the novel, the news of Pip’s sudden prospects in a world beyond the smithy would come as no surprise.  Jeremy Irvine was likeable in War Horse but he’s not able – or not yet able (he’s twenty-two) – to fuse a character’s conflicting feelings satisfyingly.  He switches between shocked innocence and snobbishness without making any connection between them.  In the middle ground of Pip’s personality, he emotes conscientiously but imprecisely.  Irvine goes an unfortunately long way towards vindicating my father’s summary of Pip.

    To be fair to Jeremy Irvine, the direction and screenplay don’t help him.   The challenge of compressing the novel into 128 minutes shouldn’t be underestimated but Mike Newell’s beat-the-clock approach gives the impression he had little more than two hours of shooting time.  Swift cutting is one thing (the BBC’s 2005 Bleak House, though excellent and innovative, hasn’t been a wholly good influence on screen Dickens) but the conversations often seem rushed and the actors’ timing off.  This is a particular problem with the less experienced players, especially the child Estella (Helena Barlow), who doesn’t feel her lines.  One of the regrettable omissions from David (One Day) Nicholls’s script is Dolge Orlick and what happens to the termagant Mrs Joe, for which Orlick may be responsible[1].  This is a visually dark-toned Great Expectations but I missed the metaphorical darkness of Orlick’s character.  Sally Hawkins is a refreshingly pretty Mrs Joe but her vividly apoplectic quality is largely wasted as we never see the character reduced to silence.  (Her death is simply reported.)   And though Ewen Bremner is good as Wemmick, retaining the Aged Parent (Frank Dunne) is pointless if you’re going to reduce the role to a few seconds of the Wemmicks’ domestic routine.  (Once Jeremy Irvine nods his head vigorously at Aged P and the cannon’s been fired, Newell considers the job done.)  What’s most frustrating is that precious screen time is wasted on other things.  In a lame effort to make the material ‘filmic’, Newell and Nicholls provide uninspired reconstructions of Miss Havisham’s wedding morning, Magwitch and Compeyson in the dock together, etc.  These sequences are superfluous anyway when the characters still explain to each other and to us what happened before the story began.  In what appears a similarly clumsy attempt to keep Dickens socially ‘relevant’, several minutes are spent staging gatherings of ‘The Finches of the Grove’ with their Bullingdon Club associations.

    Mike Newell comes up with some striking images – the horribly burned face of the dying Miss Havisham, the massive ship hulk bearing down on Pip and Magwitch at the climax of the failed attempt to get the latter out of England.  Newell also deserves credit for some unpredictable casting:  it’s unfortunate that his lack of patience or imagination or both means this doesn’t pay dividends.  I liked Ralph Fiennes’s Magwitch in the opening scenes; he makes you realise that it’s Magwitch’s desperation that makes him more frightening.   As the film goes on, however, Fiennes’ portrait becomes more conventional – in contrast, Robbie Coltrane’s Jaggers is increasingly persuasive.  Helena Bonham Carter’s relative youth enables her to show that trauma rather than time has withered Miss Havisham.   Bonham Carter is erratic, though:  the depth of her loathing of life and herself registers strongly when she snaps back at Pip, ‘Who am I, for God’s sake, that I should be kind?!’ but she’s also mannered in a self-conscious way.  A larger problem is that this casting turns out, in visual terms anyway, to be less original than it sounded:  Helena Bonham Carter has looked so extraordinary in Tim Burton films in recent years that her make-up and costume here don’t have a lot of impact.   Holliday Grainger is an odd Estella.  She doesn’t have much variety but her face and bearing make Estella seem trapped and old beyond her years, which feels right.  David Walliams, needless to say, delivers a showy cartoon Pumblechook; he’s instantly tedious.  There are two excellent supporting performances, though. Jason Flemyng plays Joe Gargery with a fine, affecting sensitivity – his Joe is a reminder that you don’t need brains to get your feelings hurt.   Alec Guinness’s achievement in making Herbert Pocket not merely tolerable but just about delightful is perhaps the very best thing in David Lean’s Great Expectations.  Olly Alexander isn’t in that class but he’s genuinely and easily eccentric in the role (and Charlie Callaghan as the child Herbert also does well).

    19 December 2012

    [1] I hadn’t realised, until I watched the 1946 film again the following day, how closely Newell and Nicholls follow the David Lean version – not only in what their adaptation retains of and omits from the novel but occasionally in shot selection too.

     

  • The Bad and the Beautiful

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincente Minnelli (1952)

    The career of one-time big-time movie producer Jonathan Shields has gone down the tubes.  He calls from Paris, trying to interest three people he once worked with – Fred Amiel (a director), Georgia Lorrison (an actress) and James Lee Bartlow (a screenwriter) – in a comeback project.  The first two aren’t even speaking to him.  Bartlow says, ‘Get lost’ before putting the phone down.  Another of Shields’s former associates, producer Harry Pebbel, wants to help his old sparring partner and invites the trio to his office to try and persuade them to think again.   The Bad and the Beautiful tells the story of Shields’s relationship with each of Amiel, Lorrison and Bartlow in succession – how he exploited and made implacable enemies of them.  As each memoir is completed, Pebbel reminds the enemy concerned that her or his association with Shields was the start of something big:  Amiel is a successful filmmaker; Lorrison is an enduring star; Bartlow, originally an academic, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood.   So will they work again with Shields?  At the end of the interview with Pebbel, all three still say no.  But, as they’re leaving, Georgia Lorrison becomes curious and the two men quickly follow suit.  They want to know what Shields is saying on the other end of the line and listen in on a phone in Pebbel’s outer office.  The film ends with the three edging closer and closer to the receiver to hear more.

    The film – which I’d expected to be an exuberant, melodramatic skewering of industry egos and machinations with lots of lively, bitchy wit – gets to be surprisingly dull.   The three stories are told at some length. There’s no ingenious connection between them (and very little surprise or suspense within them).  When the director, the star and the writer are lured irresistibly back to Shields’s pitch, this is surely meant to say something essential about the addictive mixture of ambition and masochism at the heart of Hollywood but the three actors line up for the closing shots with little conviction – they seem to be intrigued only because that’s what the script says.  The Bad and the Beautiful is historically interesting as one of that generation of pictures made when Hollywood was getting old enough to examine itself – and around the same time as the public examination of its un-American activities by Senator McCarthy et al.   But the picture has none of the self-lacerating force of Sunset Boulevard or the vibrant comic satire of Singin’ In the Rain.

    An interview with the producer, John Houseman, which comprised the BFI programme note, lists some of the sequences in The Bad and the Beautiful which feature caricatures based on real film people – all of which had passed me by.   (While inside jokes won’t necessarily add substance to a piece, you naturally tend to enjoy things more if you get the references.)  Some of the jokes which don’t rely on this kind of recognition are good enough:  Shields’s father was also a hated producer – so hated that, at his funeral, the son has to hire and pay extras to make up a crowd of mourners.  Except for the first, intentionally amusing scene between Dick Powell (as Bartlow) and Gloria Grahame (as his Southern belle wife), the sequence I found funniest was immediately after the story of Georgia Lorrison’s relationship with Shields ends, and Walter Pidgeon (as Harry Pebbel) embarks on a clumsy, extended exposition of what happened next.  But I did like the ways in which that Minnelli and the cinematographer Robert Surtees visualise the artificiality of the film’s world.  This occurs mostly in the filmmaking-within-the-film sequences.  The recording equipment is revealed at either the beginning or the end of these sequences, as Surtees’ camera zooms down onto or pulls back up from the action being filmed.  But there’s also a striking moment when we’re made to assume that we’re watching a studio scene being shot then realise we’re being shown ‘reality’.

    Most of the main characters come across as either dreary or animated only at the level of stereotypes.  With the first group, the fault is probably a combination of the script (by Charles Schnee, from a short story by George Bradshaw) and the dull actors in the roles in question (Pidgeon, Barry Sullivan as Amiel).  Kirk Douglas is far from dull. As Jonathan Shields, he’s forceful and assured but the unscrupulous Shields is an idea rather than a character.  Douglas tends to suppress his charm here; there’s something controlled and eventually desiccated about his performance.  When Shields tells Georgia Lorrison that her test was lousy in technical respects but that ‘When you’re on screen people can’t take their eyes off you’, he might be describing the strengths and weaknesses of Lana Turner, who plays Georgia.   In her early scenes, Turner’s presence is essence-of-screen-goddess incandescent (talk about the camera loving someone) but the effort of acting gradually diminishes her.   Dick Powell is really witty as the writer for as long as Bartlow is a dry, semi-detached observer on the action; the individuality of the character disappears once he gets emotionally subsumed in the melodrama.   On her arrival on the scene as Bartlow’s wife Rosemary, Gloria Grahame gives the film an immediate lift.  Rosemary too is a caricature but at least she’s a caricature from a world beyond the film industry.  Grahame has a lovely blend of flightiness and shrewdness and she plays the role to the hilt.  (Given how thin it is, though, it’s probably as well that Rosemary is killed off before the performance starts to grate.)

    The Bad and the Beautiful won no less than five Academy Awards (Supporting Actress (Grahame), screenplay, and black-and-white cinematography, art direction and costume design).  This just about emulates the number of Oscars lined up in Harry Pebbel’s office.  Perhaps the Academy liked it because the subject was Hollywood (and because the exposé of the soul of Hollywood is too clumsy to do much damage).  And maybe the ingratiating credit at the end – grateful thanks for permission to feature the statuettes in the picture – went down well.  (Released in the same year, Singin’ In the Rain, notoriously, didn’t win a solitary Oscar.)

    6 November 2009

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