Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Good Vibrations

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (2012)

    Terri Hooley opened a record shop in Belfast in the early 1970s and, a few years later, was sponsoring punk bands in the city.  The name of both the shop and the record label was Good Vibrations.  Hooley’s big breakthrough came when, after he had hawked the Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ all round London, John Peel played it – twice consecutively – on his Radio 1 show.  Peel became a big supporter of Hooley’s stable’s output more generally – although the legends on the screen at the end of Good Vibrations inform us that the label never had a Top 40 singles hit.  As the legends also explain, the shop has closed and re-opened more than once over the decades (it’s still going today).  Hooley, now in his mid-sixties, has been called ‘the Godfather of Belfast punk’ and Good Vibrations is a celebration of his achievements.

    Written by Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson, this is the second feature directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (the first was Cherrybomb in 2009).  It’s a confident and interesting piece of work.  The film-makers are very aware of the conventions of pop music rags-to-riches movies.  (In Terri Hooley’s case, ‘rags-to-riches’ is not to be taken in its literal financial sense.)  The characters are introduced and the narrative moves with an almost comic-strip vividness and simplicity.  The persistent counterpoint to the film’s good humour is of course the Troubles.  Barros D’Sa and Leyburn insert plenty of news archive.  For a while, this material is not only startling in itself; it makes Hooley’s enterprise seem all the more amazing.  But, once you get used to the technique, the newsreel footage becomes part of the design:  Good Vibrations eventually verges on reducing Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence to the context for pop biopic – albeit a very distinctive context.  In this kind of story, how much you like the type of music that’s at its centre is a factor, however much you try to ignore it; and I guess I’m more interested in punk rock as a socio-cultural phenomenon than in listening to it.  In the climax to Good Vibrations, Terri Hooley proclaims from the stage of the Ulster Hall that, in the world of punk, ‘New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers but Belfast has the reason!’  The film doesn’t, however, explore what punk means to the bands, Protestant and Catholic, who play it.

    Richard Dormer is Terri Hooley, under an unflattering 1970s hairdo and with a false glass eye.  (Hooley lost his left eye in childhood – the moment when he changed from being, in his own punning words in voiceover, from ‘Terry with a ‘y’’ to ‘Terri with an ‘i’’.)  Dormer is unrecognisably better here than in his supporting roles last year in Hyena and ’71:  he’s full of energy and wit and really inhabits the character, although I found little that he did surprising.  Jodie Whittaker is very beautiful:  as Terri’s wife Ruth, she’s effective both as an image – Terri’s image – of ideal woman and, because she’s a straightforward, truthful actress, as a real woman too.  I liked Karl Johnson as Terri’s old-time Socialist father, George (a Northern Englishman):  the character looks set to be a caricature but Johnson gives it just the right extra – as a result, George cuts deeper.  It’s a good joke that, although he deplores what he sees as Terri’s sellout to capitalism, the son’s lack of business nous means that he, in effect, stays faithful to the father’s principles.  The one time I laughed out loud came when, after Ruth has left Terri, he talks with George, who warns that Terri’s mother (Ruth McCabe) ‘has strong views about marriage … or she wouldn’t have stayed with me all these years’.  The cast also includes Liam Cunningham, Adrian Dunbar, Dylan Moran and David Wilmot.

    8 March 2015

     

  • Good

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vicente Amorim (2008)

    When a bad film is based on a successful stage play it’s not unusual to hear that the fault is entirely in the adaptation and that the original was a masterpiece.  Although this is sometimes hard to believe (in the case of The History Boys, for example), that’s not the case with Good, which arrived on cinema screens some twenty-seven years after the first production of C P Taylor’s celebrated play, in October 1981 (just a couple of months before Taylor’s death, at the age of only fifty-two).   I’ve not been able to track down a detailed plot synopsis of the play online but it’s in two acts.  I guess that the narrative is linear so that the audience gets to know the protagonist, John Halder, as a ‘good’ man – morally thoughtful, politically liberal and dutiful towards his family, including his ailing mother.   If the events of Halder’s story are told in chronological order on stage, it’s not hard to see that an audience might be greatly shocked by the metamorphosis of this mild-mannered academic, who also writes fiction, into an influential Nazi.  (The impact might be particularly powerful if the change occurs in the interval between the play’s two acts.)    The film of Good, with a screenplay by John Wrathall, begins in 1937, when John Halder is summoned to the Reich Chancellery; his interview with an official there ends with questions about why Halder has never joined the Party.  The film then cuts back to John’s family life in Frankfurt in 1933, the year in which he also published a novel about a man who kills his wife out of love for her.  Viggo Mortensen, who plays John, makes it clear from the opening conversation at the Chancellery that he lacks the strength of purpose to resist Nazi pressure.  The obviousness of Mortensen’s characterisation combines with the non-linear structure of the film to ensure that John Halder’s transformation is neither a revelation nor a surprise.

    There’s a lot more wrong with Good as a movie than the sequence of events and the weakness of the central performance.  Although the early stages suggest that the subject is specifically how a politically naive artist can be corrupted (the Nazi high command likes the idea of adapting John’s euthanasia novel both as a piece of cinema and as larger social policy), the development of this element is pretty sketchy.  Most of the dialogue sounds to be post-recorded:  as it’s also mostly stagy and/or stiff Good often gives the impression that it’s been dubbed into English.   I assume that John’s adultery with one of his students is meant to foreshadow the greater betrayal that he perpetrates in becoming a member of the SS (and to imply – since being unfaithful in a marriage is common – how easily many ‘ordinary’ Germans also signed up to Nazism).   But the point is blurred because John’s pianist wife Helen, as played by Anastasia Hille, is inexplicably loopy; you can’t blame him for wanting some relief from her.  I assume too that his friendship with Maurice Gluckstein, a Jew who fought in the German army with John in the Great War and is now a successful psychoanalyst, is central to the play.   In the film, the role of Maurice shows signs of clumsy abbreviation.  (It’s presumably intentional that the names of these German characters are anglicised – to suggest what happens could have happened in Britain too?)  Jason Isaacs is forceful and sometimes witty but Maurice switches, in the space of a few lines of dialogue, from a light-hearted caricature (they’re-sex-mad-these-psychoanalysts) to a solemn cliché – a vehemently bitter man whose humour has vanished as completely as his civil rights.

    John Wrathall and Vicente Amorim describe John Halder’s regular conscience-stricken outbursts in ways that make them ridiculous.   A conversation between him and his eventual boss Adolf Eichmann (Stephen Elder) has the latter asking suspicious questions about John’s continuing friendship with Maurice before Eichmann tells John he’s being given a top job in the Jewish ‘resettlement’ programme.  John then asks another bureaucrat for information about Maurice Israel Gluckstein, at which point Eichmann walks off, without seeming to react to this at all.  (This is a pattern in the film:  the Nazis are meant to be eagle-eyed but never appear to notice John’s demonstrating his divided loyalties very obviously and in unignorable situations.)   When John arrives at the concentration camp, he’s focused on finding Maurice, and so is the director:  Amorim seems not to realise how offensive it is that the life and death of the Jews in the camp is turned into background to John’s guilty desperation to find his ex-friend.   There’s a laughable sequence involving John’s trying to buy Maurice a one-way ticket to Paris (life’s too short to explain how many things are wrong with this bit).   Mark Strong has a good, callous urbanity as the official who interviews John at the start but the only major character who’s at all convincing is Jodie Whittaker’s Anne, who seduces John and becomes his second wife.  Whittaker manages to suggest, more tellingly and more economically than Mortensen, someone who’s shallow and therefore capable of anything.   With Gemma Jones as Halder’s increasingly demented mother and Steven Mackintosh as a keen young SS man who discovers to his horror that he and his equally impeccably Aryan wife can’t breed.

    19 October 2012

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