Daily Archives: Saturday, April 9, 2016

  • Lovelace

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (2013)

    The directors made their name as makers of documentaries and perhaps they should revert to them.  They’ve chosen interesting subjects for their dramatic biopics and unusual structures for telling the subjects’ stories – it’s understandable that Epstein and Friedman were excited by the idea of these structures but they don’t translate to the screen.  I enjoyed Howl in the cinema but it seemed much weaker when I watched it again on television, with the way it was put together now deprived of its novelty value.   (I was also conscious from early on that Sally didn’t rate Howl:  whenever I’ve seen something on my own and liked it, and we then watch it together on my recommendation, I feel responsible for the film and am hyper-aware of everything wrong with it.)   In Lovelace, Epstein and Friedman, working from a screenplay by Andy Bellin, tell the story of Linda Lovelace in two parts.  The first describes how Linda Boreman became the star of Deep Throat, probably the best-known and commercially the most successful porn film ever made.  This working-class girl in her early twenties wants to have more fun than her Catholic parents are ready to allow but she has no ambition to star in blue movies.  It’s her husband Chuck Traynor, a minnow in the East Coast porn industry, who wants to use Linda so that he can become a big fish.  The second part of the movie is framed by Linda’s taking a polygraph test so that a prospective publisher can decide whether Ordeal, the autobiography that she’s written, is true.  Epstein and Friedman show what was going on behind the scenes as Deep Throat became a phenomenon.  This consists chiefly of showing how Traynor bullied and physically beat Linda.  As I watched the first half of Lovelace, I thought it was to the directors’ credit that they weren’t harshly judgmental of the porn film-makers.  Once you see the second half, you wonder if this generosity isn’t designed to ensure that Chuck Traynor is unchallenged as the exploitative villain of the piece.

    If so, Epstein and Friedman needn’t have bothered because Peter Sarsgaard as Chuck dominates the movie anyway (which seems wrong in itself).  Epstein and Friedman may have been taken by the idea that Linda Lovelace didn’t want to be a porn star and so defies the biopic convention whereby the protagonist is determined to make it at all costs.  If the Wikipedia article on her is anything like accurate it seems that Epstein, Friedman and Andy Bellin have exaggerated Linda’s innocence and the brevity of her career in porn but a much bigger problem with their take on Linda is its effect on Lovelace as a drama.  Making the heroine entirely unassuming and obedient puts huge pressure on Amanda Seyfried, who plays her.  Because she doesn’t choose to become a dirty movie star and you have no sense of what Linda would rather be, Seyfried has no opportunity to express motivation.   And because she’s being used both by her husband and by an industry that’s inherently exploitative there’s no essential difference between the two tellings of her story, only a change of tone on the part of the directors.  (I can’t believe that, if they’d made a documentary about Linda Lovelace, they would have limited Linda in this way.)  The four movies I’ve so far seen Amanda Seyfried in amount to an odd polarity of her roles:  I suppose the Linda of Lovelace could be seen as an ingénue to follow the ones she played in Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables but the decidedly sexualised context aligns it more with her character in Chloe.   The only strength evident in those other performances was Seyfried’s remarkably sweet singing voice.  In spite of the crippling constraints placed on her by the film-makers’ conception of Linda, she suggests in Lovelace much more potential as an actress.

    Epstein and Friedman have got together a very talented cast.  Sharon Stone overplays Linda’s bitterly reproachful mother and Robert Patrick, to a lesser extent, her father but Juno Temple is good as her Florida friend Patsy.  (The Boremans moved from New York to start a new life in Florida after Linda, at the age of nineteen, had given birth to a child she wasn’t allowed to keep.)     Wes Bentley has a nice cameo as a sympathetic photographer (Amanda Seyfried is excellent in her scene with him).  Chloë Sevigny appears momentarily (it literally is a single shot) as an interviewer.  James Franco doesn’t do much with Hugh Hefner but on the film set Adam Brody is witty as Linda’s co-star Harry Reems (his bad acting is just right).  Both Hank Azaria and Bobby Cannavale supply tangy caricatures as, respectively, the director and one of the financial backers of Deep Throat.  But the grungy relish of their turns is incongruous in the second half of Lovelace and Azaria and Cannevale’s characters virtually disappear from it.  Peter Sarsgaard is problematic in a different way.  He’s such a strong and truthful actor that he makes Chuck deeply creepy from the start.  The man’s darker side is no surprise (this is the fault of the undernourished script, not the actor).  When he comes to the Boremans’ house for dinner for the first time and puts on an ingratiating act for the benefit of Linda’s parents, it makes for an amusing scene but this is partly because Chuck is so evidently disreputable.  It’s incredible that Linda’s mother is taken in by someone as transparently louche as Sarsgaard’s Chuck.  He’s one of those men who, when he makes a rare attempt to look neat and tidy, comes over as even more shifty and clammy.

    2 September 2013

  • Love Me or Leave Me

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charles Vidor (1955)

    I knew nothing about the singer Ruth Etting (1897-1978) but it’s hard to believe Doris Day wasn’t wrong for the role.  A cursory glance at Etting’s Wikipedia entry suggests that the screenwriters Daniel Fuchs and Isabel Lennart (the former won an Oscar for ‘Best Story’ for this picture) simplified and sanitised Etting’s biography for the screen.  Nevertheless, the film begins in Chicago in the 1920s and is located throughout at an intersection of the worlds of show business and organised crime, a place where the congenitally well-behaved Doris Day does not belong.  Marty Snyder (James Cagney) – the owner of the club in which the film audience first encounters Ruth Etting and the man who becomes her manager and husband – was a Chicago gang boss.   Etting is desperate to break into the big time and is prepared to use Snyder, who becomes besotted with her, in order to do so.  At the start, she’s performing on stage as one of a group of dancers.  That she can’t dance is meant to be painfully evident but her clumsy moves, as expressed by Doris Day, come across as perfectly executed mistakes.

    Immediately self-assured and a fully realised vocal talent as soon as she opens her mouth to sing, Day doesn’t remotely suggest someone so desperately hungry for success that she’ll sell her soul.  Later in the film, when Ruth Etting has become a star, Day performs ‘Ten Cents a Dance’.  She makes a few, perfunctory raunchy movements but remains invincibly wholesome – as far away as one can imagine from the persona of the tawdry, weary taxi dancer who’s meant to be delivering the Lorenz Hart lyrics.  Doris Day is clearly trying hard not to be her usual perky self but she doesn’t go much deeper than withholding her brilliant-white smile.  She’s ill-served too by her costumes (by Helen Rose) and hairdo (by Sydney Guilaroff):  thanks to these accoutrements, Ruth Etting is perfectly groomed from the start, which reinforces the lack of development in Day’s characterisation.  Worse, her appearance (at this distance in time, anyway) suggests the 1950s rather than two or three decades earlier.  That goes for the look of the film more generally (the DoP was Arthur E Arling and Cedric Gibbons headed the team of art directors).  Every location seems spacious and spotless, whether it’s a supposedly poky dressing room, a gloomy police station or a swanky New York or Hollywood apartment.

    As Marty Snyder, James Cagney dominates Love Me or Leave Me.   The naturally dynamic rhythm of his walk, emphasised by Snyder’s gammy leg, gives ‘Moe the Gimp’, as he’s also known, the look of a creature of vaudeville as much as of gangland but it brings to life every scene in which Cagney appears.  In the first half of the film, the emphasis on Snyder’s infatuation with Ruth limits Cagney’s opportunities to dramatise the predicament of a man who is used to being in charge but who now finds himself in a more complicated power struggle.  But Cagney is compelling in the later stages of the story, as Marty Snyder becomes more violently tyrannical.  You feel the discrepancy between this display of apparent power and his increasing insecurity about his marriage to Ruth.  Although the two stars don’t exactly strike sparks off each other, Cagney and Doris Day do make you feel how grimly impacted Etting and Snyder’s relationship is:  he feels he can’t control her yet she feels trapped.  The film also features creditable performances from Cameron Mitchell, as the pianist and musical arranger who loves Ruth (and who became her second husband), and Robert Keith, as a principled agent.   The use of music as dramatic accompaniment, as distinct from the musical numbers, is unusually sparing for a product of mid-1950s Hollywood.  The last shot of the final sequence, in which Doris Day sings the title song, is oddly striking too:  Charles Vidor, rather than closing in on his leading lady, pulls the camera back from the diminishing figure on the stage.

    5 December 2014

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