Daily Archives: Monday, May 2, 2016

  • Munich

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2005)

    The speed and brilliance of Michael Kahn’s editing make Munich very exciting to watch even on television:  in the cinema its visceral power must have been irresistible.   Steven Spielberg – working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, based on a book by George Jonas – tells the story of how a group of assassins, on behalf of the Israeli government, hunted down the Black September terrorists responsible for the deaths of eleven members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.  The storytelling is highly accomplished yet the longer Munich goes on – and it runs 163 minutes – the less impressive it is.  I think there are two main and linked reasons for this.  The first is structural; the second is to do with Spielberg’s particular skills as a film-maker.

    The succession of assassinations, in spite of there being nothing remotely comic about them, calls to mind Kind Hearts and Coronets and Spielberg’s bravura staging of each killing makes you inclined to admire them as political action thriller highlights – to start comparing and even ranking them.  ‘Operation Wrath of God’ takes the avengers all over the world to find the wanted men and you start to think of the assassinations as the Rome one, the Paris one, and so on.  In Rome, the Arab assassinee buys milk shortly before he’s ambushed and it comes as no surprise that the white liquid spills and merges with the victim’s blood cinematically:  this sequence, although it’s gripping, goes on a bit too long.  The next episode in Paris, however, is hard to fault, with its suspenseful complication involving the Black September man’s young daughter, who you fear is going to be blown up.   The circumstances of the killings reflect actual events whereas the assassins are fictional characters.  At one point they seem to be getting killed off as quickly as their quarry.  This too tempts you into unseemly thoughts about which squad will have the last man standing.

    The upside of all this, though, is that because the action sequences dominate and command respect (as action sequences) you can also find yourself thinking the whole story is being handled in an admirably serious-minded way.  Kushner and Roth have certainly written plenty of crisp, intelligent dialogue, with less crude political point-making than might be expected.  But because Spielberg is absorbed in the technical challenges his shift in tone and emphasis in the last part of the film – to ask the question:  what did the Israelis’ revenge achieve? – is clumsy and anti-climactic, when it needs to be quietly devastating.   How you receive Munich as a moral essay is likely to depend on your political prejudices.  (Sally and I watched the film together. One of us was inclined to root for the Israelis; the other was readier to partake of the futility-of-vengeance theme.)  John Williams’s score, complete with its Schindler’s List echoes of Jewish lament, isn’t greatly helpful to Spielberg on this occasion.

    The principal character is Eric Bana’s Amer Kaufman, a Mossad agent of German-Jewish descent, chosen by Golda Meir (whose bodyguard he once was) to lead the assassination squad.  Amer, who leaves his post in Mossad to take up the assignment, is the only member of the team whose personal life is described in any detail.  When the squad starts work, his wife (Ayelet Zurer) is pregnant with their first child.  The development as characters of the other members of the team – played by Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz and Hanns Zischler – is limited, and we see them largely from Amer’s point of view.  The contrast between Eric Bana’s musclebound physique and sensitive face is effective, and he gives a good, conscientious performance – although you get the sense he feels under pressure.  Perhaps Bana hasn’t quite the variety needed to bear the weight of this major role.   He’s well enough supported by the others even though Ciarán Hinds is, as usual, a strong but overemphatic presence.  As Amer’s handler, Geoffrey Rush brings a welcome vividness to the proceedings but he too isn’t quite right – he’s a bit too theatrically vivid.   The two best performances, by some way, come from Mathieu Amalric as Louis, a French informant to Amer’s team, and Michael Lonsdale, as Louis’s father.   The character of Louis, with his Alsatian dog and tendency to speak in gnomic epigrams, seems to belong in a more light-hearted political thriller but Amalric is very true.   His accented English is so odd that it sounds believable and his sense of humiliation in the presence of his father comes through convincingly.   In the latter role, Lonsdale is so quietly magnetic and incisive that he steals the show.

    While violence is hardly in short supply, Spielberg deserves credit for the mayhem in Munich usually being startling because it means something (the arty images of shed blood in the Rome killing are uncharacteristic).  One of the toughest scenes in the film involves the murder by Amer and his remaining colleagues of a Dutch woman (Marie-Josée Croze).  They’ve discovered she’s a contract killer and responsible for the murder of the team member played by Ciarán Hinds.  They track this woman down in the Netherlands and shoot her.  She’s wearing only a bathrobe and it flaps open as she lies dying:  one of the men covers her up, another tells him to leave the robe open.  It’s a shocking moment but it makes good sense later on when the man who wanted the woman’s nakedness exposed expresses his regret for that (but not for her killing).   The scene also chimes disconcertingly with the moment we first met this woman, when she propositioned Amer in the bar of a London hotel.   The events of Munich in 1972 are well handled at the beginning – a splicing of live action and news footage.  But the later flashbacks to the Olympic village and Munich airport in Amer’s imagination are among the worst bits in Munich – especially an improbably realistic nightmare and a sequence in which Amer’s fevered imaginings are crosscut with him making aggressive love to his wife.

    23 June 2012

  • Mrs Silly (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    James Cellan Jones (1983)

    This television film, part of ITV’s All For Love series and based on a William Trevor short story, has a sad and terrible subject:  how children become (or at any rate used to become) embarrassed by their parents in public, especially by the mothers who are our first world.  The difference between these two planes of existence is thrown into relief in Mrs Silly by the fact that Michael’s parents are divorced and his thrusting executive father John has set up home with a new, younger wife, Gillian.  They have twin daughters, large dogs, a big house, a car which impresses Michael’s contemporaries at the prep school to which his father has insisted on sending him (John went to the same school).  That’s a wrench not just for Michael himself but for his mother Florence, with whom he lives in a poky flat.  Florence – who calls herself Mrs Silly because she keeps getting things wrong – is hard up after her divorce.  She has a part-time office job for a small local business.  When Michael, back from school for the Christmas holidays, is alone at home with his mother he loves it and her.  (He doesn’t look forward to spending time with his father and John’s new family.)  But when his mother visits him at school and Michael shows her round and she keeps saying the wrong thing too loudly and rattles on to the headmaster about people in her life back home whom the head doesn’t know from Adam.  Michael is mortified.

    His shame is burningly intensified at the climax to the story.  Florence, John and Gillian all turn out for the confirmation of Michael and some other boys in the school chapel.  At the reception that follows in the Great Hall, his mother slips on the parquet floor – thanks to some sticky remnant of the afternoon tea that’s lubricated the sole of her shoe.  She falls flat on her back in front of the many assembled guests – the bishop who’s conducted the confirmation service, the headmaster and other staff, Michael’s school friends and their families.  Afterwards, his father and Gillian take Michael to dinner at a posh local hotel.  His mother has returned to the bleakly inexpensive bed and breakfast she always stays at when she visits (cruelly named ‘Sans Souci’).   John asks his son if he wants to pop in and say goodbye to Florence.  Michael, who can’t bear to face (or be faced by) his mother, replies that he’s already said goodbye.   That night in the dorm, he sobs.  When his friend in the bed next to him asks if he’s crying, Michael says no – that he’s got a cold.  (We saw him making desperate attempts to convince matron the night before that he had a temperature and wasn’t well enough to attend the church service.)    The other boy reflects on what a splendid day it’s been and how funny it was when that old woman fell over – was she related to Michael?   ‘Some kind of aunt, I think,’ he answers.  Although it’s hours still to cockcrow, he’s already denied her twice.

    This intolerable finale is emotionally powerful but there are fundamental errors in Bob Larbey’s adaptation and James Cellan Jones’s direction.  William Trevor’s story really does dramatise the trauma of a child-becoming-adolescent’s separation from the safe, interior world of his mother.  It’s a third-person narrative but Trevor tells the story through Michael’s consciousness:  although we realise how shaming the growing boy finds his mother in public, we can’t be sure how much his sensitivity and anxiety to protect her from the outside world she’s strayed into are colouring his view.  Larbey and Cellan Jones (the latter, now in his eightieth year, introduced the screening of Mrs Silly at BFI) don’t replicate this ambiguity.  We watch and listen to Florence’s gaffes and her interlocutors’ disdainful or squirming reactions and it leaves nothing to the imagination:  she is unarguably embarrassing.  As a result, what happens at the school reception isn’t the new and indelibly shocking realisation – validation – of Michael’s fears that it is in the short story.  (Surely there’s a pun in the fact that this happens on the day that the boy is confirmed.)  The film’s climax is both weaker than it should be and upsetting in the wrong way:  because Florence has been shown as so insistently ridiculous, visiting this culminating humiliation on her comes over as unkindly excessive.

    This heavy-handed approach is epitomised by the hat which Florence wears to the confirmation day events in the film.   In Trevor’s version, she’s hatless – to Michael she seems shamefully dowdy (and poor) in view of the headgear around her but she’s still, until the tea, publicly inconspicuous.  Cellan Jones has her in a bright red hat with a large red feather:  every other woman there is bare-headed so that Florence is a focal point even in the chapel.  It makes no sense at all:  this pathologically flustered woman, desperately lacking in self-confidence, wouldn’t be seen dead trying to make a spectacle of herself.  The hat could have worked only if she’d consciously decided to throw caution to the winds:  as it is, Cellan Jones keeps in a scene when Florence tries it on for her boss and the younger woman she works with and seeks their assurance that it looks all right.  It’s patently ridiculous but they don’t tell her that – even when she expresses her anxiety to do things right, not to be Mrs Silly on this very special occasion, on this day she wants to be perfect.  Thin-as-a-rail, highly-strung Maggie Smith is texturally very different from the plump, fluffy woman of the short story but in the early scenes her vital eccentricity is subdued:  knowing what was coming, I was fearful that she would be convincing and too upsetting.   But this doesn’t last long:  Maggie Smith isn’t ordinary – even without that wrong-headed hat she would be noticeable.  This came as a relief:  the histrionics made Florence’s tragedy less raw.  (There wouldn’t have been this distancing effect with, say, Judi Dench in the part.)  Smith plays Florence with great skill and sympathy – but sympathy is what it is:  she feels sorry for Mrs Silly.

    One of the strengths of the film, however, is that other characters do the same – and that Cellan Jones presents them sympathetically:  John and Gillian are much more interesting as a consequence.   In his opening scene with Maggie Smith, Michael Culver as John looks as if he might be shaping up for a predictable caricature but he resists the temptation and ends up giving a very good performance.  He’s physically convincing, especially in the way he wears his clothes (like a tailored, close-fitting overcoat as he chats confidently outside the chapel).   It’s not easy to see how the socially alert and ambitious John ever got together with the accident-prone Florence, a vicar’s daughter from out in the sticks.  (It would help if you could believe that she’d once been conventionally very pretty but you can’t.)  Even so, at home with Gillian (well played by Deborah Grant), Culver’s John is surprisingly affecting as he talks about how things have gone wrong for Florence.    The NFT2 audience lapped up James Villiers as the headmaster because, on the surface, he suggests a familiar type – but this character (we notice, for example, that the head recognises each boy in the school) and Villiers’s playing of it are more thoughtful than you might expect.  The same goes for Cyril Luckham as the bishop.  Best of all (and a triumph of sensitive direction) is the dark-haired, dark-toned Adrian Ross Magenty as Michael.  He beautifully expresses the torture of the boy’s confused loyalties and is able to seem both childish and spiritually older than either of his parents.   Michael’s final disowning of his mother is extremely moving because we can see how much he loves her.

    1 October 2010

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