Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • Leviathan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Leviafan

    Andrey Zvyagintsev  (2014)

    The first chapter of the Book of Job presents the protagonist as extraordinary in terms of both his material wealth and his moral stature:

    ‘1 There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil, …

    3 His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east. …

    8 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

    9 Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?

    10 Hast thou not made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

    11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.’

    When, later in the story, he rails against the misfortunes which God has visited on him (or, to be precise, which God has permitted Satan to inflict), Job complains not only about these particular, and particularly undeserved, calamities.  He also laments his mortality.  In other words, the author of the Book of Job seems to have been at pains to characterise Job both as especially privileged and righteous and as Everyman.  A twenty-first century artist looking to reinterpret the story in a modern setting needs to decide not only how to balance the unusualness and the ubiquity of the ordeals suffered by their Job figure but also whether he will be a religious man.  The original audience for the story would easily have identified with Job’s God-fearing nature; a latterday Job with strong religious beliefs is liable to be seen as an anachronism.  Yet Job’s devoutness is so essential that an adaptation of his experiences with an irreligious man on the receiving end can’t, I think, be meaningfully described as a retelling of the Old Testament story.

    Leviathan has been called by several reviewers a ‘modern reworking’ of the Book of Job but Andrey Zvyagintsev, who co-wrote the screenplay with Oleg Negin, is more cautious about the connection.  According to Variety, Zvyagintsev says that the story of his protagonist Nikolai (Kolia) is no more than loosely based on that of Job.  Kolia lives in a small town in Northern Russia; the house he has built there looks out onto the Barents Sea; his car repair business is situated next to the house.  He lives with his younger wife, Lilya, and Roma, his early teenage son from an earlier marriage, who strongly dislikes Lilya.  (I missed how Kolia’s marriage to Roma’s mother ended.)  Kolia makes a decent living as a car mechanic and his house is enviable but he’s not wealthy.  He believes in God although he’s not, as far as one can tell, a churchgoer:  his religion may amount to little more than superstition (a miniature icon hangs in his car).  He’s a decent, hard-working man who’s also quick-tempered, a heavy drinker and a chain smoker.  There’s no suggestion that he’s morally exemplary in the way that Job is.  The beach beyond Kolia’s house is dominated by huge, dark rocks and by the skeleton of some enormous creature that’s washed up there.  The latter clearly points to the sea monster described in Chapter 41 of the Book of Job:

    ‘1  Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

    2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn?’

    Later in the story, when Kolia is mired in misfortune, a priest whom he encounters quotes these verses to him.   But Zvyagintsev also has another Leviathan in mind – the forcefully authoritarian government conceived in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 treatise (Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil) and which is represented in the film by the twenty-first century Russian state.   Vadim Sergeyich, the mayor of Kolia’s town and a Putin apparatchik, wants to get hold of Kolia’s land.  When Kolia refuses to sell it, Vadim adopts more aggressive tactics in order to get what he wants.  Leviathan begins with the arrival at the town train station of Kolia’s friend and ex-army colleague, Dmitri (Dima).  Kolia has asked Dima, now a successful lawyer in Moscow, to help him try and legally prevent Vadim from destroying his home and business.

    Throughout the first hour or so of Leviathan, Zvyagintsev develops a gradually intensifying balance between the tensions and betrayals that dominate the private lives of Kolia, his family and best friend Dima, and the public corruption and criminality against which they vainly struggle.  Kolia, about to leave his house, tells Lilya, ‘I love you’.  Her face and her words in reply – ‘I know’ – make clear the feeling is not fully reciprocated.  On the first night of Dima’s stay, a good deal of vodka is consumed (as it is throughout the film).  Lilya observes, stony-faced, the easy physical affection between Kolia and his old army pal that develops as the men get drunk.  Next morning, one can read in their tones of voice and body language a connection between her and Dima too.  Later that morning, when Kolia and Dima go to the police to complain about Vadim Sergeyich’s threatening behaviour, the hotheaded Kolia finds himself arrested by the police for the same.   After Dima has made representations direct to the mayor, Kolia is released from the cells.  He arrives home later, while Dima and Lilya are together in Dima’s hotel room.  The revelation of their affair to Kolia and others occurs during a shooting and drinking expedition to celebrate the birthday of another of Kolia’s acquaintances.  This is a masterly episode.  The atmosphere among the party is highly charged:  there’s so much going on between the characters – thanks both to what one already knows about them and their relationships, and to the actors’ being able to suggest that these relationships are about to take a new turn.  The sense of foreboding is strong yet it’s a shock that what is revealed – yet not seen on camera at this point – is Lilya and Dima’s betrayal of Kolia.  The lovers return to Dima’s hotel, from where, next day, he’s summoned for a meeting by Vadim.  Kolia, in discovering Dima’s treachery, has given his friend a bloody nose and a black eye but these are nothing compared with the beating that Dima receives from the mayor’s heavies.  He escapes with his life and back to Moscow.

    Dima’s departure is a loss not only for Lilya, with whom Kolia tries unsuccessfully to reconcile, but for the film as a whole.  Dima’s professional connections have supplied him with evidence that he uses to try and blackmail Vadim into backing off from his plan to appropriate Kolia’s land; at the same time, Dima is deceiving his friend through his relationship with Lilya.  He is the hinge between the public and private worlds that Leviathan explores.  Vladimir Vdovichenkov, who plays Dima, subtly but powerfully suggests a troubled, conflicted man.  This is rarely expressed in words:  Dima is laconic, especially in response to tricky questions.  When Lilya, who finds him frustratingly difficult to fathom, asks Dima, as she does more than once, if he believes in God, he replies that he’s a lawyer, who deals only in facts.  In a conversation with her in his hotel room, Dima is only a little more expansive when he says:

    ‘We’re all guilty of our own faults … everything is everyone’s fault … so no confessions … even confession the law doesn’t regard as proof of guilt …’

    This is still cryptic, at least as far as Lilya is concerned, but Dima’s words gives a sense of his being oppressed both by his own behaviour and by the political system epitomised by Vadim.  As the mayor, the almost comically squat and pugnacious Roman Madyanov has a characteristically Russian appearance (although he also brings to mind Richard Castellano).  At first, Vadim’s buffoonish shape and features and his crude bullying make you wonder if this is too ridiculous a figure to embody, other than comically, the corruption of present-day Russia but the casting turns out to be very effective:  the discrepancy between this silly-looking man and the shocking things for which he’s responsible makes Vadim more appalling.  The acting in Leviathan is strong all round.  As Kolia’s situation worsens and other important characters in the story depart the scene, Aleksei Serebryakov is, in effect expected, to carry the film and succeeds.  Elena Lyadova is the solemnly beautiful Lilya.  As her stepson, Sergey Pokhodaev has a piercing emotionality – his voice hasn’t quite broken but is on the point of doing so:  this allows him to express Roma’s unhappiness in a very particular way.   Anna Ukolova and Alexey Rozin are both good as Kolia and Lilya’s friends Angela and Pacha; so is Sergey Bachurskiy as the man whose birthday celebration is the ill-fated shooting party.   I can’t find the name of the actress who plays a legal official but her lightning-fast reading of the court’s repeated judgments against Kolia cuttingly underlines the absurd injustice of the process that has led to her torrent of words.

    Leviathan is at its least impressive when its connections to the Book of Job are made more explicit – as in the priest’s quoting to the increasingly hopeless and alcoholic Kolia the verses from the start of Chapter 41.  Nevertheless, while Kolia and Job aren’t comparable in terms of their religious belief, the church’s unholy alliance with secular powers-that-be is essential to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s critique and he conveys this well.  When Vadim is considering Dima’s threat of blackmail, the mayor’s priest reminds him that all power comes from God – enough for Vadim to be fearlessly nasty in ignoring Dima and pursuing Kolia’s property.  The final sequences of Leviathan take place in and outside a church.  By now, Kolia has been framed and wrongfully imprisoned for the death of Lilya, who takes her own life; the mayor’s bulldozers have destroyed Kolia’s house; and the homeless and virtually fatherless Roma has been taken in by Angela and Pacha.  During the church service Vadim reminds his own son that ‘God sees everything’.

    The central images of the story, photographed by Mikhail Krichman, are unusually powerful and substantiate the connection between Leviathan as sea serpent and as authoritarian state:  while the skeleton on the shore is inert, the bulldozer that destroys Kolia’s house has the quality of a monster that’s implacably alive.  The scale of the seascape reinforces the sense of human concerns being dwarfed in the world that Zvyagintsev describes.  There is also more than one shot of religious art that’s been eroded by time.  While the tone of the film is predominantly bleak, there is, as well as the satirical humour of the court judgments and Vadim’s blustering megalomania, a good deal of lower-key, funny dialogue in the exchanges among Kolia, his family and his friends.  Zvyagintsev uses as the film’s score music from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten:  it is unmistakeably Glass but a low pulsing within it also evokes Andrey Dergachev’s score for Zvyagintsev’s The Return (2003).  In view of the subject and the views being expressed in Leviathan, it seems amazing that this production was financially supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, however, the film hasn’t received a screening permit in Russia as a result of the country’s ‘anti-swearing laws’.  The best things in Leviathan, and there are plenty, are the best things that I’ve seen in a new film this year.

    13 November 2014

  • High-Rise

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ben Wheatley (2015)

    ‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’

    This is the famous first line of J G Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise, which describes the breakdown of mod cons and the moral order in a newly-built high-rise block in London in the mid-1970s.  (The novel was published in 1975.)  Within a paragraph, Ballard has begun to relate these ‘unusual events’.  The prologue to Ben Wheatley’s film lasts only a few minutes but is significantly different.  The opening shots of the interior of the building suggest the aftermath of cataclysm; the canine limbs roasting on a spit are, rather than a bewildering starting point, the climax to the prologue and of a piece with the images that have preceded them.  High-Rise is Wheatley’s fifth feature.  I’ve not seen his first, Down Terrace; of the next three, Sightseers has the best script (it’s the only Wheatley film to date for which someone other than he or Amy Jump had the main writing credit).  Sightseers wasn’t as effective as it should have been, though, thanks to the director’s impatience to indulge his appetite for mayhem – a predilection that trumps storytelling:  it comes as no surprise that he plays more of his hand than J G Ballard does at the very start of High-Rise.  It’s no surprise either, therefore, that Wheatley and Amy Jump (who has the sole screenplay credit this time) prove to be less interested in the process of disintegration than in putting on a gruesomely spectacular show – a more expensively gruesome spectacular show than the budgets for Wheatley’s previous films allowed.  (None of them cost a seven-figure sum.  IMDB and Wikipedia don’t currently give the production costs of High-Rise but Nick Roddick’s interview with Wheatley in the Standard last September mentions ‘a budget north of $5m’.)

    The inhabitants of the high-rise reflect a British social hierarchy, though only part of the real thing.  The tower block’s architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), lives at the very top with his wife Ann (Keeley Hawes).  The roof of the building features a formal garden and a Marie Antoinette folly.  This was designed by Royal for his wife but she remains unsmiling – and indolent, except for hosting parties for the upper-class residents who live on the upper levels.  Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a medical academic, moves into an apartment on the twenty-fifth of forty floors.  (Ballard probably meant his protagonist’s name to evoke the psychiatrist R D Laing – just as the architect’s surname is right for the man at the top – but there doesn’t seem to be a deeper connection.)  Lower down the building are families – one of them including a documentary film-maker called Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), his pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss) and their young children.  The dwellers in the lower depths are the first to suffer from the power failures and other technical breakdowns; much of the violence becomes tribal; but nearly everyone in the building seems to be middle-class or upwards.  Among the few exceptions are the surly, antagonistic Nathan Steele (Reece Shearsmith) and the caretaker (Robert Way):  their underclass status is established mainly by their relatively unprepossessing looks.

    The voice of Margaret Thatcher, extolling laissez-faire capitalism, supplies a brief postscript to the film.  It’s hard to fathom why Wheatley decided to introduce this jarring, incongruous note of Political Irony – unless as intended compensation for neglecting the social structure details of the story during the preceding two hours.  He’s indifferent to detailing the class distinctions of the place other than by obvious visual means – nor does he dramatise the gradual but inexorable breakdown of life in the building.  Wheatley prefers to keep upping the lethal ante and the result is a film chock-full of super-gross images, which plenty of people will enjoy and plenty more will be nervous about not enjoying.  The latter can find relief in the occasional campy touches.  Edgy laughter in the Curzon at Wimbledon settled into easier titters when a costume party at the top of the building was scored to an arrangement of Abba’s ‘SOS’.  The number is reprised at greater length in a later sequence that’s closer to the plangent tone of the Abba original – but ‘SOS’ got a laugh here too.  (I felt grateful that this is an impregnably good pop song.)  In the foyer afterwards, a youngish woman was telling her companion that this ‘must be one of the best uses ever made of an Abba song’ in a film.  You could hear from her awkward, eager voice she thought this was the right thing to say.  The ominous original music for the film, by Clint Mansell, is mostly superfluous to the more-than-self-sufficient sights on the screen, photographed by Laurie Rose.

    For Wheatley’s purposes, Tom Hiddleston may be the ideal Laing.  I first saw Hiddleston on screen in Midnight in Paris, in a cameo as F Scott Fitzgerald, and The Deep Blue Sea, as Freddie Page.  With prior expectations of how those roles might be played, I found Hiddleston feeble in both (more damagingly so, of course, in the larger part) but he’s now a big name:  High-Rise was released in cinemas midway through the six-week run of the BBC dramatisation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager, in which Hiddleston played Jonathan Pine, the title role.  It’s not difficult to see why he’s getting these high-profile jobs.  He holds the camera:  he’s very good-looking and able to suggest in his face a sharp mind at work behind it.  But he shows you that his character’s thinking rather than what he’s thinking.  Both in The Night Manager (which I saw on and off) and in High-Rise, Hiddleston seems like an intelligent person who’s watched screen acting and decided to give it a try.  He does an able impression of an actor acting, except that there’s no characterisation.

    Shortly after Laing moves in, he goes to a drinks party and finds himself stuck with Nathan Steele.   According to Steele, Laing, inexperienced in the ways of the building, is responsible for blocking up the rubbish chute.  In response, Laing affably reassures him:  ‘I’m a quick learner’.  As he says this, Hiddleston rocks forward on his toes, looming towards Reece Shearsmith, then rocks back again.  This socially exuberant movement doesn’t connect with anything we’ve so far seen of Laing nor with anything we see subsequently – it’s rather what an actor does, so that you notice him.  Hiddleston’s meaningless charisma may not matter for as long as he’s playing a ‘chameleon’ (I gather this is what Jonathan Pine is meant to be) or animating a character as thinly-written as Laing is (at least in the Wheatley-Jump version of the story).  His approach works fine in High-Rise but when Laing has relatively little screen time, during part of the second half, you don’t miss him.  There’s no one to miss – only a series of sleek effects.   I’m looking forward to seeing Tom Hiddleston in I Saw the Light, the forthcoming Hank Williams biopic, in which he’ll need to add up to a personality. 

    Hiddleston is surrounded by a mixed bag of supporting turns that range from the creditable-all-things-considered (Sienna Miller) to the even-worse-than-it-was-bound-to-be (James Purefoy).   Miller plays Charlotte, who is some kind of assistant to Royal – who also fathered her son, Toby (Louis Suc) – and has a relationship with Laing.  Purefoy’s cartoon of one of the high-ups is quite remarkably clumsy.   As Richard Wilder, Luke Evans is a mixed bag all on his own but he gives the film’s most taking performance.   As usual, Evans’s speaking voice lacks colour but his shouting voice is a lot better, and he has plenty of opportunity to use it – as Wilder, relegated to one of the bottom floors, leads a rebellion against the status quo and tries to make a film documenting what’s going on in the high-rise.   Evans is amusingly vigorous leading a march into the building’s swimming pool, to evict a private function and allow the residents’ kids to use the facility.  He’s a cross between a big kid himself and a much duller version of McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (this isn’t only because the top-floor residents discuss lobotomising Wilder).   Later on, though, Evans is surprisingly witty – as he purposefully eats a tin of dog food (food for dogs rather than dogs for food) and especially when, at the height of the mayhem, Wilder is asked how things are going and replies, ‘Comme ci, comme ça’.  I think I also warmed to Evans because Wilder’s angry, thwarted fight chimed with my feelings of powerlessness against the onslaught of Ben Wheatley’s hideous film-making.

    Roz Dineen in the TLS is right enough when she describes the exterior of the high-rise as ‘stunningly rendered, back-lit by a flare-casting sunshine, surrounded by cars from the 1970s’.   Wheatley – with the help of his production designer Mark Tildesley and costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux – strikes a clever balance between a period setting (many cigarettes are smoked) and stretching this so as to imply an enduring relevance to the themes of Ballard’s story.   The building is such a dominant image that you’d be prepared to accept its residents and facilities, which include a large supermarket, as a detached, microcosmic world.  Ben Wheatley, however, isn’t sufficiently disciplined to push for this kind of suspension of disbelief.  If he were, he surely wouldn’t have opened things out to include sequences at Laing’s work place.  The most striking of these involves Laing’s demonstration to a group of student doctors of the functioning of the human skull and brain.  This scene shows the physiologist Laing to be just as much a head doctor as his real-life namesake – but only in order for Wheatley to show a man’s head being stripped of flesh and bloodily deconstructed with a saw.  The setting of High-Rise is de luxe brutalist.  The film luxuriates in brutality.

    24 March 2016

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