Daily Archives: Friday, April 8, 2016

  • Chinatown

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roman Polanski (1974)

    Chinatown is famous not least for a disagreement between Roman Polanski and the screenwriter Robert Towne over how it should end.   In Towne’s script, the main woman character, Evelyn Mulwray, kills Noah Cross, the father who raped her when she was a teenager.  She kills Cross in order to save her daughter – their daughter – from him.  J J (Jake) Gittes, the private detective protagonist, helps the daughter, Katherine, get away from Los Angeles, where the story is set, to a new life in Mexico.  Polanski ‘knew that if Chinatown was to be special, not just another thriller where the good guys triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die’.  When Towne dug his heels in, Polanski rewrote the last scene, which takes place in the Chinatown area of LA.  Evelyn does fire a bullet at Cross and hits him in the arm.  She then makes a getaway with Katherine; the police open fire on their car and kill Evelyn.  The injury to Noah Cross isn’t serious enough to prevent his embrace of the young girl, shielding her eyes from the sight of her dead mother.  One of his sidekicks urges an ashen Gittes to ‘Forget it, Jake – it’s Chinatown’.

    The first film that Polanski made after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate, who was carrying their unborn child, was his adaptation of Macbeth (1971).  Pauline Kael noted of this that ‘Shakespeare’s offstage corpses and murders are added to the onstage ones, and they so dominate the material that it’s difficult to pay attention to the poetry’.  She also found it hard not to link Polanski’s gory staging of the murder of Lady Macduff and her children with Sharon Tate’s death at the hands of Charles Manson et al.  Kael didn’t like Polanski’s work on Chinatown either, contrasting ‘its beautifully structured script’ and ‘draggy, overdeliberate direction’, whereby ‘evil runs rampant’.  Polanski returned from Europe to Hollywood, for the first time since his wife’s murder, to make Chinatown and Sharon Tate was killed in Los Angeles.  This awareness can certainly affect the way you notice things in the film.  For example, the first bloodshed is caused by Polanski in front of the camera:  he has a cameo as a knife-wielding hood, who wants to put the frighteners on Jake Gittes and slits the detective’s nose.  But some of what Pauline Kael saw is puzzling and likely explained by her preconceived ideas of how Polanski would approach the material.   ‘Everything’, wrote Kael, ‘is … mauve, nightmarish … everyone is yellow-lacquered’.  It’s a surprising description of a visual scheme that sharply distinguishes the Venetian-blind-shadowed office interiors and sunny outdoors sequences, in which Polanski and his cinematographer John A Alonzo increase the atmosphere of mystery by throwing light on the subject.

    Chinatown made a big impression on me when I saw it on its original release.  I’ve probably seen it a couple more times in the decades since but the last time must have been at least twenty years ago.  I was struck by how many little details came back to me on this eventual return to it – things like how Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway handle their drinks, their cigarette cases and lighters. The picture has aged well, not least in the clarity of its colour – a refreshing change after some other recent BFI screenings of 1970s Hollywood films.  BFI euphemises these pink-brown prints as having a ‘magenta bias’ so a poorer print might have gone some way towards vindicating Pauline Kael’s point of view.  She was right, though, about the excellence of Robert Towne’s script.  Set in 1937, Chinatown is inspired by the California Water Wars of the early decades of last century; the plot centres on the disappearance and discovery of the dead body of Hollis Mulwray, the city’s water commissioner.  He appears to have drowned, in an empty reservoir during a drought.  Towne’s storyline is complicated but always clear; the themes expand easily into metaphors about the development of Los Angeles and the relationships of the main characters.  This is a city built on a desert (by extension, Hollywood is built on sand).  The motifs of parched ground and the diversion of water reflect the continuing lack of trust between the principals – and Evelyn Mulwray’s continuing evasions, in particular.

    Jake Gittes used to be an LAPD police officer, based in Chinatown.  The area connotes for him an unhappy relationship, presumably a love affair, he had with a woman – someone he ‘tried to prevent getting hurt and made sure she was hurt’. The movie tends increasingly and inexorably back to Chinatown – as a physical place and a state of mind – in the structure of the main story and in various Chinese elements:  the ‘Chinaman’ joke that Gittes is told and tells his sidekicks; the Mulwrays’ Oriental house staff; the Chinese gardener there, whose pronunciation of English yields a clue to solving the mystery of Hollis Mulwray’s death.  The film is shot in Panavision but Roman Polanski gives it narrative spaciousness too.  The pace is unhurried in the early stages; the viewer has time to settle into the story.  Polanski builds gradually a sense of urgency, and of Gittes and Evelyn Mulwray being hemmed in.  The film is often funny, not just in the smart dialogue but also in episodes like Gittes’ and Evelyn’s visit to an old people’s home – the names of residents there are a crucial element in the financial skulduggery that Gittes uncovers.  (The climax to this episode is actually too broadly comical, as the senior citizens gawp at a brawl between Gittes and one of the heavies.)  The tonal variety of Chinatown is enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s music.  The beautifully mournful theme on the trumpet is, for me, one of the most memorable of all movie scores.  Goldsmith’s nervy glissandos and percussive effects are relatively obvious but they do their job.

    Towne wrote the role of Gittes with Jack Nicholson, already a friend of Polanski, in mind but the director also got his own way in casting the female lead.  The producer Robert Evans was keen for Jane Fonda to play Evelyn Mulwray but Polanski insisted on Faye Dunaway.  Robert Towne is, to say the least, alert to the tropes and types of film noir:  the hard-edged, wittily cynical detective who turns out to be an incorrigible romantic – he loses his heart and has it broken all over again; the black-widow femme fatale.  The sequence of events in the story and the quality of the dialogue give the actors the chance to reanimate and modernise the stock characters from which they derive but Jack Nicholson achieves this much more successfully than Faye Dunaway.   Gittes is a fine creation – coarse, droll, touchy, a fellow who keeps his emotional distance but who Aldo keeps wearing his heart on his sleeve.  Nicholson delivers the one-liners with a splendid sly panache but he’s also very inside this vulnerable man.  It makes sense that Jake’s natty appearance is repeatedly dishevelled; the white bandage he has to wear on his face, after Polanski’s knife man reminds Gittes of the dangers of being a nosey-parker, briefly turn him into a figure of fun.   Compared with Nicholson’s acting, Faye Dunaway’s is too studied.  Her Evelyn Mulwray is magnetically highly strung but you can always see Dunaway creating her effects.  She’s stronger in the closing stages but I wish Jane Fonda had played the role.  She and Nicholson never acted together.

    The cast includes, among many others, Perry Lopez, as the LAPD investigating officer and Gittes’s former colleague, and John Hillerman, highly convincing as Hollis Mulwray’s urbanely dodgy deputy in the Department of Water and Power.  Mulwray himself is played by Darrell Zwerling.  The supporting performances are dominated by John Huston’s portrait of Noah Cross.  (With its various biblical connotations, this is a finely suggestive name and Pauline Kael describes Cross well as a double rapist, of the land as well as of his daughter.)  Noah Cross’s wolfish grin switches on and off like a light, and contains humour only when Cross is enjoying getting the better of Gittes.  The grin and the old man’s pompous vocal delivery (which is quite close to Huston’s own) are a richly disgusting combination.  John Huston occasionally verges on the edge of overdoing the villainy but his final embrace of Katherine (Belinda Palmer) is a moment of true horror.

    29 March 2016

  • Lonesome Jim

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve Buscemi (2005)

    Jim went to New York City to be a writer, paying the rent by walking dogs and working at Applebee’s.  Now he returns in defeat to his small town home in Indiana:  the closest he can get to the reality of writing are the pin-ups on his wall – famous names who, although they made the grade, committed suicide.   Jim feels he may be able to emulate these illustrious names – Hemingway is at the centre of this photomontage – in this respect if no other.  He’s so self-centredly fond of his own voice that he tells his older brother Tim – a divorced father of two, who hoped for a career with the local police but is now back working in the factory owned and run by his parents – that ‘If I were you I’d kill myself’.   The conversation takes place at the end of a school basketball game:  Tim coaches the team of kids, including his own young daughters, and in none of their league matches to date have they got any points on the board.  As Jim moans about the meaninglessness of life Tim can’t get a word in edgeways but he leaves the gym and tries to take his brother’s advice and his own life (not for the first time, we gather).  He drives his car into a tree but, like everything he and Jim do, it’s a failure.  Tim, although seriously injured, survives.

    One of the nurses at the hospital where he’s taken is Anika, whom Jim met in a bar the day after his return home and with whom he had short-lived (thanks to his premature ejaculation) sex.   Jim wants to see more of Anika, even when it turns out that she’s a single mother whose young son Ben goes just about everywhere with her (including a salt-in-the wound outing for Jim to a local Applebee’s).   Anika is drawn to Jim too but she’s distressed that he wears his misery on his sleeve.  ‘What exactly is wrong with you?’ she asks.  ‘Chronic depression,’ says Jim, adding bitterly of Tim, ‘I came home to have a nervous breakdown but the bastard got there first’.  Anika is tenaciously cheerful.  At one point she gives Jim a cut-out smiley mouth to stick over the photo of Hemingway but he thinks ‘it doesn’t feel right like before’.   When she protests that it was depressing before, Jim agrees, ‘Yeah, more lifelike’.

    While Tim is out of action, Jim takes over his work at the factory and the basketball coaching.  When Sally, the young men’s desperately positive-thinking mother, is arrested for shipping drugs through the factory’s FedEx account, this family disaster is also thanks to Jim – or at least to the sort-of friendship he’s formed with one of the other employees, known as Evil, who gives him recreational drugs and has persuaded Jim to open a bank account for him.   Jim feels bad about his mother’s arrest – but then he feels bad about most things.   He explains to Anika that his problem is that he doesn’t much like his family but he loves them:  he treats them shittily to express his snagged feelings, to get some distance from them.

    You might wonder – as does Anika – what she sees in Jim and the answer is Casey Affleck.  His thin, whiny voice and quality of trying to withhold an inherent charm are perfect for this role.  In the early stages Jim, if he’s not actually asleep, always seems on the verge of nodding off, as if because there’s nothing worth staying awake for.  Affleck is believable as a depressive – but also as someone who’s merely fed up but aiming for real depression.  He does a fine job of delivering Jim’s pep talk to the basketball team before their final match.  His idea of inspiration is to tell them he’s a much bigger loser than the team is:  this makes you laugh but the kids are painfully baffled and concerned, especially Ben.  Affleck gives us hints of Jim’s own concern that he may become a role model for the boy.   When, near the end, he’s leaving town for Las Vegas and Anika and her son come to see him off, Jim warns Ben, ‘Don’t get too apathetic – at least not until your teens’.  Affleck has an even better moment in this sequence when, as he prepares to go from the waiting area to his bus, Jim takes a deep breath that sounds as if he’s summoning courage to speak his mind.  Then he says, ‘Bye’.

    As Anika, Liv Tyler has a lovely openness:  it’s a difficult role because Anika is written to be the bringer of joy into Jim’s glum world but Tyler makes her expansively individual.  She’s highly skilled at conveying, subtly but clearly, the differences in the emotional register of Anika’s equally friendly conversations with the bedridden Tim (who thinks she fancies him) and Jim (who’s quickly jealous of how nice she is to his brother).  Mary Kay Place plays Jim’s mother with great accuracy and sympathy:  her slight resemblance to Bette Midler is almost a relief – without it, what the hapless Sally has to endure would be hard to take.  Just how much Sally cheerfully infantilises her sons – Tim is her ‘big baby’ and Jim her ‘pretty boy’ – is clear from an early stage.  Jim, just home, is taking a bath – his mother takes in some towels then bends over the bath tub to hug him.  Rather than reciprocating the hug, he arranges his hands strategically.  When, later on, Sally asks him where she and her husband Don went wrong that both boys have turned out so unhappy, Jim replies that he thinks some people just shouldn’t have kids.   Mary Kay Place’s still smiling devastation as she flinches and absorbs this is piercing.  The remark is pretty typical of Jim.  He likes to think he feels compelled to be truthful yet, in this same exchange with Sally, when she first enters the room and asks what he’s doing, he’s watching porn:  he hurriedly switches off the video and tells her he’s writing.  Once the harsh words are out, he knows he’s hurt his mother but then he can feel good feeling rotten about this.

    Sally husband Don is as consistently pessimistic as she is upbeat – although one of the very best moments of Seymour Cassel’s superb portrait comes when Jim is making his father feel so gloomy that even Don puts on a sunny face and cheerful voice for the benefit of his wife and, you feel, to thwart his son.  Anika’s son Ben is played by Jack Rovello, unforgettable as the little boy in The Hours and still remarkably miniature when he made this film three years later (when he was eleven years old).  He’s a little more self-aware here but he’s still fluid and he has both expert timing and real emotional depth.  Kevin Corrigan as Tim and Mark Boone Junior as Evil have fewer opportunities to make much of their characters but they both do well.

    Steve Buscemi handles the cast impeccably but there’s more to Lonesome Jim than the acting.  The sequences in the factory and the domestic details at the family home seem very right; the flat, colour-drained landscape is unassertively expressive; and there are some highly effective motifs.  The story takes place during the days just after Christmas:  the decorations hang on stubbornly but, each time we see them, they look more forlorn.  I liked the repeated shots of basketballs failing to meet their target – until the moment when Jim, alone in the gym after he’s just rejected Anika, distractedly throws a ball and the basket he scores ironically confirms the cock-up he’s made of the relationship.   His recurring drinks of water work well too.  When he first arrives home Jim says he’s dehydrated and just about the extent of his altruism is, on visits with his parents to Tim in hospital, to say ‘I’m getting some water – anyone want anything?’   As he prepares to leave town, he makes abortive efforts to get bottled water out of a vending machine at the bus station.   Ben has another go after Jim has departed and succeeds where he failed.   Jim, meanwhile, has second thoughts, gets off the Greyhound and runs after Anika’s car, with Ben yelling at his mother to stop.   When Jim gets into the passenger seat, the boy hands him the bottle of water from the back.

    The excellent screenplay is by James C Strouse; I don’t know how autobiographical it is but suffice to say that Strouse shares not only his first name but his home town – Goshen, Indiana – with his protagonist, and Tim’s daughters are played by Strouse’s own.  Since Lonesome Jim, he’s written two pictures, which he also directed:  Grace is Gone (2007), about a widower with two daughters; and The Winning Season (2009), which (according to IMDB) is ‘A comedy centered on a has-been coach who is given a shot at redemption when he’s asked to run his local high school’s girls basketball team’.

    This film about being miserable is often very funny but you still yearn for things to turn out right.  Buscemi and Strouse judge very well how good things can reasonably get in the circumstances:  in the final basketball match, Ben scores the opening basket – it’s a euphoric moment for us as well as him, even though the final score is 28:2 to the other team.   But then we do get a happy ending, when Jim decides against leaving for Las Vegas.  This sounds like a copout and, with Jim chasing after Anika and Ben’s car, it rather looks like one too.  Yet the actors are so secure in their characters that it feels true.  The whole relationship between Jim and Anika is so unexpected to them both that you think – and can believe that they think – that stranger things have already happened.

    21 January 2011

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