Daily Archives: Monday, May 2, 2016

  • Louder Than Bombs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joachim Trier (2015)

    Isabelle Joubert Reed (Isabelle Huppert) was an internationally renowned photojournalist, acclaimed for her images of the human suffering resulting from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.  She got used to fielding questions from interviewers about the dangers of her work and how these conflicted with being a wife and the mother of two sons.  Her reply was that she would know when it was time to stop.  That time came in 2011; not long afterwards, Isabelle died in a car crash near her family’s New York home.  The media noted the irony of her death occurring so soon after her life had become safer.  Two years on, her fellow photographer and close friend Richard Weissman (David Strathairn) is writing a piece about Isabelle for the New York Times.  He tells her widower Gene (Gabriel Byrne) that he’s going to reveal in this piece what both men already know:  that Isabelle’s death was suicide.

    This conversation between Richard and Gene is one of two starting points in Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs, which the director wrote with his fellow Norwegian Eskil Vogt.  The other starting point, which supplies the film’s opening sequences, is the birth of what would have been Isabelle’s first grandchild.  In a hospital room, her elder son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) touches the fingers of his newborn son and smiles uncertainly.  His wife Amy (Megan Ketch) asks Jonah to get her some food:  she’s starving.  It seems surprising that the hospital doesn’t feed patients and it doesn’t seem to be late at night but Jonah has to search far and wide in the hospital for provisions.  He eventually returns with a meagre offering from a vending machine but his tour of the building hasn’t been entirely wasted.  While he’s wandering round the cancer care department, he runs into his former girlfriend Erin (Rachel Brosnahan), who is visiting her terminally ill mother.   After the tearful Erin has composed herself, she asks how Jonah’s academic career is going and he tells her it’s going well, that he’s now a professor.  Erin then asks what Jonah’s doing at the hospital.  ‘My wife Amy …,’ he begins – and then pauses, long enough for Erin to misunderstand.  She infers that Amy too is dying.  When Erin expresses her sorrow at the news, Jonah doesn’t put her right.

    Jonah also knows the truth about Isabelle’s car crash but his younger brother Conrad (Devin Druid), who was only twelve when she died, doesn’t.  The drama of Louder Than Bombs pivots on Conrad’s ignorance and the impact that Richard’s piece may have on him – especially since Conrad already seems mired in isolation and desolation, seems not to have come to terms with the loss of his mother.  For most of the film, Conrad speaks voluntarily to no one but Jonah, when the latter returns to the family home to sort out (belatedly) photographic material that Isabelle left behind.  Whenever Gene starts a conversation with him, Conrad angrily insults his understandably concerned father and then clams up.  Gene is a former actor turned teacher – he’s now working at the same school where his younger son is a student and he’s having an affair with Conrad’s class teacher, Hannah Brennan (Amy Ryan).  Conrad is in the dark about that too and this pale, lanky boy looks deprived of physical as well as intellectual light.  He spends a lot of his time alone in his room, on his computer.

    This set-up gets the viewer asking questions and gives a foretaste of what’s to follow in the determinedly gloomy, variously incredible Louder Than Bombs.  Did Isabelle leave suicide notes for both Gene and Richard (with whom, it’s later revealed, she’d been having an on-off affair)?  If not, how do they know she meant to kill herself?  Is it just because they’re aware she was depressed after giving up her work – or did the lorry driver involved tell the police that Isabelle appeared to intend a head-on collision?  If the latter, why and how has this been kept quiet?   When Erin asks what brings Jonah to the hospital, does he falter because he’s embarrassed to tell his ex how far his life with her successor has progressed?  But since he’s already told her that he’s married, why would he then be reticent about telling Erin he’s a father?   This would be something very natural to brag about and Jonah is very evidently competitive.  It’s hard to think either that he’s so uncertain about fatherhood that he wants to keep quiet about it or that he’s considerate enough not to want to impart happy news when Erin’s just given him the bad news about her mother.  Is Jonah’s claim that he’s a professor a deception too?  The viewer shares Erin’s evident surprise at the news (‘That was quick!’) but it doesn’t seem impossible:  Jesse Eisenberg, with his hair cut shorter than usual, looks more boyishly brainy than ever.  Later on, though, in a flashback to Gene’s first meeting with Hannah, he tells her that his elder son is expecting his first child and just completing his doctoral thesis in sociology.  If Jonah made professor while still a research postgraduate that was more than quick.

    The answers, such as they are, to the above questions, fall into two categories.  The circumstances of Isabelle’s death are an example of the first of these – what might be called the flatly unconvincing.  Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt can’t suggest how it can be known that she meant to die:  they’ve just stuck this idea into the script in order further to ‘darken’ the material.  The climax to the conversation on the cancer ward is an example of the second category – the fancily unconvincing, which combines pretentious metaphor and negativist cheap shot.  Jonah lets Erin think his wife is dying to make us see that he’s screwed up with unease that his marriage is dying.  Later on, Jonah calls on Erin and goes to bed with her.  During their post-coital chat, she asks if Amy’s hair has fallen out; for a few seconds, he doesn’t know what Erin’s talking about.  As I watched Louder Than Bombs in Edinburgh’s Cameo Cinema, feeling bored and irritated, I didn’t expect to write much about it but it seems in retrospect a particularly flagrant example of what I so often find vexing on the screen.  Here’s another film that depends fundamentally on the audience accepting its world as a real world, that we’re watching credible people and events.  There’s no pretext for making the people and events implausible yet considerations of realism are ignored whenever they might get in the way.  The director, in spite of jettisoning in cavalier fashion what’s believable, still expects the viewer to accept that the film is revealing truths about the human condition.

    Conrad keeps imagining in his head exactly how his mother died.  He downloads from the internet disturbing, sometimes morbid, video clips and images from which Joachim Trier creates a startling, stylish montage.  Conrad never reads anything online, however – even though we soon find out that he’s interested in words and in writing.  On the day that Richard Weissman’s piece appears in the New York Times, it’s well into the evening when Conrad catches sight of the front page of the morning paper, on a drugstore newsstand, and starts reading.  He’s in the drugstore with another boy from school with whom he’s en route to a party.  This boy behaves as if he knows Conrad well, even though the latter hasn’t until now exchanged a word with any of his classmates.  He hasn’t done so because this would complicate the way the film presents him.  He doesn’t read the Weissman piece until late in the day so that he can go to the party feeling even more sad and vulnerable than he already was.  He returns from it with a girl called Melanie (Ruby Jerins) whom he fancies but hasn’t dared speak to until now, so that Trier can compose one of the most arresting and silly visual details in the film.  The inebriated Melanie relieves herself behind a car while Conrad, standing on the other side of the vehicle, averts his gaze.  Her urine trickles along the ground and under one of Conrad’s shoes.  The camera moves up to his face.  A complementary lacrimal trickle runs down it.

    Louder Than Bombs features a sub-American Beauty score by Ola Fløttum and shares its title with that of a Smiths album.  The title indicates that Isabelle’s demise in the New York suburbs has had greater impact than her years in war zones although the auditory flavour of the phrase isn’t particularly apt:  Joachim Trier is more concerned with the crater of bereavement than the explosion of death.  It isn’t clear in any case how much Isabelle’s death has changed things.  Flashbacks to her in conversation with her husband and her elder son suggest that both Isabelle and Jonah always despised Gene, as Jonah still does; and no real connection is made between Jonah’s marital difficulties and his grieving for his mother.  As for Conrad, it’s simply hard to believe that Shane Ryan, who plays him as a younger child, turned into Devin Druid:  their physical differences undermine the deep spiritual changes which Trier presumably mean to convey.  It’s fortunate for him that Isabelle Huppert is by some way the most charismatic performer here:  the viewer is aware of how relatively little is seen of her – and, to that extent, partakes of the male characters’ missing her.

    There’s an unfortunate and presumably unintended correspondence, though, between the Reed sons’ attitudes towards their father and Gabriel Byrne’s playing of Gene.   In his first scene with David Strathairn (who, like Amy Ryan, is wasted), Byrne’s facial movement seems excessive but he soon settles into a set expression of troubled kindliness:  you can see why Gene gets on Jonah’s and Conrad’s nerves.  At the end of the film, Gene tells Jonah, ‘It’s time for you to go back to Amy.’   The viewer accepts that he’s right but only because it’s time for the movie to end, not because anything’s been resolved.  Jonah is the worse for drink so Gene drives him home and Conrad comes too.  Jonah sleeps in the front passenger seat and Conrad at the back, still dreaming about car ‘accidents’.  Gene glances at his dormant sons and smiles fondly.  Is this moment meant to be as depressing as it is?   The unignorable implication is that the father gets on just fine with his boys for as long as they’re unconscious.

    Gene and Jonah do have one thing in common.  Just as the son was far from euphoric about the birth of his and Amy’s baby, so the father is remarkably uninterested in his grandson.   When Jonah arrives at Gene’s, the latter is surprised but never regretful that he’s unaccompanied.  Even when he offers to drive Jonah back, Gene doesn’t perk up at the prospect of seeing the baby.   I doubt this uninterest means anything much.  It’s more likely another instance of lazy writing and direction – rather like the film’s erratic use of internal monologues, deployed only when they’re a convenient way of making the next point.  In one early sequence, Gene, from a distance, watches Conrad in a cemetery, as the boy prostrates himself before a headstone.  We assume it’s Isabelle’s and that the kid is grief-stricken but Conrad tells Jonah later that he couldn’t find her grave so just picked one at random, knowing that his father was anxiously spying on him and what Gene would infer.  Conrad’s assumption requires that Gene doesn’t know the location of Isabelle’s grave either but Joachim Trier wouldn’t be interested in that sort of relevant detail.  What matters to him more is that the headstone chosen by Conrad belongs to a Carlos Valdez.  It’s a(nother) nod to Vertigo.  For those who go to movies to spot references to other movies, this may make the experience of Louder Than Bombs worthwhile.

    26 April 2016

  • Murder on a Sunday Morning

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (2001)

    On Sunday 7 May 2000 James and Mary Ann Stephens, a couple in their sixties from Georgia, had breakfast in the Ramada Inn in Jacksonville, Florida, where they were staying.  On their way back to their room they were accosted by a gunman, who demanded Mrs Stephens’ bag.  Before she could hand it over, the man shot her in the face, killing her instantly.  The murderer was a young African-American and, within a few hours, a black teenager called Brenton Butler, on his way to submit a job application to a Blockbuster Video store, had been picked up on the street by the Jacksonville police and identified by Mr Stephens as the man who shot his wife.   By the end of the same day, the police had a statement from Butler, confessing to the murder.  According to Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s film, there was no other incriminating evidence:  the gun wasn’t found; there was no forensic evidence to implicate Butler (or anyone else, since the police chose to ignore the discovery of Mrs Stephens’ purse several miles away); no other witnesses saw fifteen-year-old Butler around the Ramada Inn at 7.30am that day and his parents insisted he was around at home then; the boy had no history of violence, shown no signs of any propensity to violence.  Through photographs of Butler’s bruised face and chest, his legal team was able to substantiate their claim that the defendant, who’d insisted he was innocent when first taken into custody, was physically assaulted by a homicide detective in order to extract an admission of guilt.  The case went to trial later in 2000 and the verdict was returned a couple of days before Thanksgiving.  It took the jury only forty-five minutes to find Brenton Butler not guilty.

    Murder on a Sunday Morning is a remarkable piece of film-making.  Because it’s largely on videotape I was surprised it technically qualified as cinema and that it won Jean-Xavier de Lestrade the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2002 but it’s good that he did.   Lestrade follows Patrick McGuinness and Ann Finney, two attorneys from the public defender’s office, as they construct their defence of Brenton Butler.  I wish I knew how this project got off the ground but it provides footage which is really extraordinary:  parts of a crime investigation which normally have to be reconstruction are the real thing here.  There is, for example, an early case meeting – of the defence lawyers, the prosecutor from the state attorney’s office, and one of the policemen who picked up Butler.  (The meeting is designed to clarify the circumstances of his arrest and identification by James Stephens.)  Then there are the scenes of Butler’s parents visiting him in his cell – enough in themselves to expose the falsity of the police claim that, when Butler first saw Detective Michael Glover, the black detective who later assaulted him, the teenager exclaimed, ‘Am I glad to see you!’ and hugged Glover.  Even in these deeply emotional meetings with his parents, Butler doesn’t show his feelings in that kind of way.  The actual court proceedings are fascinating to a degree I’ve never found in the excerpts we see on the news of American TV coverage of high profile trials like those of O J Simpson and, in recent weeks, Michael Jackson’s doctor.   Lestrade’s calm, skilful organisation of the material suggests objectivity; in fact, he’s highly and unambiguously partisan.  The tension between the two approaches is compelling – or was for this viewer anyway:  I didn’t know the outcome of the trial.

    Lestrade inserts into the chronological sequence of events interviews with Pat McGuinness and Ann Finney which were evidently shot after the trial (or, at least, after their questioning of particular witnesses at the trial).  McGuinness, in these bits, is quietly, eloquently angry and, since it seems increasingly incredible that Brenton Butler had anything to do with Mrs Stephens’ murder, I started to get a sinking feeling.  I began to suspect that – because a dramatic twist was needed to eclipse a predictable not guilty verdict – the jury (with roughly equal numbers of black and white jurors) was going to reach an outrageous conclusion.  In the event, the relief you feel when the verdict is read out is so strong that a sense of anti-climax is the furthest thing from your mind.  But there is a twist or, at least, a surprising development after Brenton Butler has gone home to his family, and it’s this that makes Murder on a Sunday Morning stand out from most other accounts of people falsely accused of serious crimes.  In his closing address to the jury, Pat McGuinness reminds them that, thanks to the deeply flawed police investigation, the real killer has still not been caught.  In the moment he says these words, you receive them as a shrewd, rhetorical manoeuvre but you realise after the trial that he’s really troubled by this.  (It’s a main reason – along with the appalling experience Butler and his family have been subjected to – why the triumphant McGuinness still exudes anger in that post-trial interview.)  And he does something about it.  As a result of McGuinness’s efforts, Juan Curtis was eventually convicted of the murder of Mary Ann Stephens[1].

    The focus on the defence attorney here naturally reminded me of the 2004 TV documentary mini-series Death on the Staircase, whose central character, David Rudolf, defended Michael Peterson, on trial for the murder of his wife.  It turns out that Lestrade made that film too; the combination of the somewhat familiar technique and the fact that Peterson was convicted must have contributed to my apprehension that Brenton Butler was also going to be found guilty.  From what I remember of Death on the Staircase, I was impressed by and rooting for Rudolf but unable to decide whether I thought Peterson was guilty or innocent.  The piece ran 360 minutes all told so this kind of uncertainty was pretty essential if you were going to be kept intrigued.  Murder on a Sunday Morning, which lasts a little under two hours, is quite different and part of me kept thinking:  this is gripping but it isn’t complex enough.  The policemen in the witness box are physically repulsive as well as scumbags (especially Detective Duane Darnell, the one who penned Butler’s confession).  The close-knit, deeply religious Butler family are heroic (and both the parents are good-looking).  Racist members of the audience may also be grumbling, mentally at least, ‘I bet they wouldn’t make a film about a white youth charged with shooting a black woman’.  But the post-trial events confound these kinds of reservation and prejudice.   Ann Finnell is a formidable, likeable presence throughout but McGuinness – burly, chain-smoking, competitive, acerbically witty – is the star.  (If they ever make a fictional version of the case, Philip Seymour Hoffman would have to play him.)   By the end of the film, because justice has been done twice, he’s an authentic hero.

    10 November 2011

    [1] The events subsequent to the Butler trial are summarised on Wikipedia as follows:  ‘After Butler’s acquittal, his attorneys tipped the Sheriff’s Office to two other suspects, Juan Curtis and Jermel Williams.  Williams pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified against his co-defendant at the trial; he was sentenced to ten years in prison.  Curtis’ fingerprints were found on the victim’s purse, which had been recovered after the crime but had never been tested.  The Butler case figured into the new trial; the judge allowed Curtis’ lawyers to discuss the eye-witness identification, but ruled that Florida’s evidence laws forbade them from using Butler’s confession.  Curtis was subsequently found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. However, in 2004 appeals court found that the exclusion of the confession denied Curtis’ constitutional right to a fair trial, and granted a retrial. At this second trial Curtis was found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.’

     

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