Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Reaching for the Moon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Flores raras

    Bruno Barreto (2013)

    In the opening scene of Reaching for the Moon, an account of Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop sits on a bench in Central Park with Robert Lowell and reads to him the first six lines of ‘One Art’.  Lowell is surprised there’s no more to the poem, which he criticises as a series of ‘observations, divided into lines’.  He tells Bishop she’s ended it just at the point at which it should take off.  ‘One Art’ is perhaps Elizabeth Bishop’s best-known poem; any viewer who has a nodding acquaintance with her work knows immediately that this movie will end with her reading Lowell the final version of the poem – which the searing, searching experience of her life with Lota has enabled Elizabeth to complete.   And so it does.  As the titles came up, there were snuffles then applause from the rows behind in NFT1.  (Reaching for the Moon was showing at the LGBT festival, renamed this year as ‘Flare’.)   The combination was apt:  Bruno Barreta’s film seems designed to move its audience to tears and to make us feel culturally pleased with ourselves.

    If Elizabeth Bishop had been a pop singer the conventionality of the plotting and the choice of scenes through which Barreto tells his story would be not only plain to see but probably derided.  I think these shortcomings will be submerged for many people by the cultural cachet of the protagonist.  This is A Late Quartet syndrome:  although his movie is less bad than Yaron Zilberman’s, Barreto gives himself away even in the legends on the screen that precede the closing credits.  The first two are quotes:  Lowell’s sexist judgment that ‘Few women write major poetry. . . . Only four stand with our best men:  Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath’; and Bishop’s tart response in a letter to him:  ‘I’d rather be called “the 16th poet” with no reference to my sex, than one of four women—even if the other three are pretty good’.  Barreto detracts from this witty rejoinder with a bald, pompous, unattributed statement that Bishop is ‘now recognised as one of the most important poets in the English language’.  Even so, Bishop’s poems, or snatches of lines from them, are voiced in the narrative in the way that greatest hits are likely to be in a biopic of a singing star – apposite to the dramatic moment.  And she’s presented as a stereotypical screen writer – she chain smokes, sitting at her typewriter or pacing raptly up and down, trying to think of the next phrase.  When the words come they appear on screen as determined dark incursions on the blank sheet of paper.

    Although the last decade has seen at least one good picture (Bright Star) and another structurally imaginative one (Howl) about poets, they’re not the easiest group of artists to bring to life on film – perhaps because poetry isn’t essentially either a visual or a performing art (although it’s obviously performable).  If a film-maker approaches a poet subject with cautious reverence, the results can be disastrous – as in Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia (2003):  Sylvia Plath’s biography might seem tailor-made for melodrama but Jeffs diluted the ‘blood jet’ of Plath’s life and death into something improbably watery (yet still clichéd).  That, at least, isn’t what happens in Reaching for the Moon.  Barreto’s approach is carefully admiring but at least there’s a contrast between his treatment and the somewhat trashy screenplay.  According to the credits, this is a reworking by Matthew Chapman and Julie Sayres of a script by Carolina Kotscho, based on a novel by Carmen L Oliveira called Flores raras e banalíssimas.

    Just as Elizabeth Bishop’s stature as a writer is assumed to confer depth on the material so her sexuality is meant to make the film’s tragic love story ‘different’ but the trajectory of her affair with the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares is, in a biopic context, anything but unusual:  the pair (a) don’t get on at first then (b) fall madly in love until (c) professional success and preoccupations cause tensions and physical separation and eventual tragedy.   The characters are by no means fully developed.  Bishop is a strait-laced alcoholic, Macedo Soares a straight-talking bohemian.  The former has come to Brazil to stay (and, she hopes, cure her writer’s block) at the Samambaia estate near Petropolis – where Mary Morse, a friend from Bishop’s Vassar days, shares her home and life with Lota.  Elizabeth, watching through the window as Lota and Mary horse about outside, impulsively bites into a piece of fruit from the bowl on the breakfast table.  A food allergy lands her in hospital and extends her visit.  Barreto and the screenwriters don’t really explain, though, what makes Elizabeth loosen up a bit and become less of a pain in the neck, indeed irresistible to Lota.  (The Bishop described in the early stages would more likely have felt that the food poisoning was a warning not to let herself go.)  The mutual infatuation doesn’t come over as meant to be, so much as required by movie formula.

    The Australian actress Miranda Otto, with her neat features and porcelain complexion, doesn’t much resemble Elizabeth Bishop (not the older Bishop anyway).  What seems important to Bruno Barreto, perhaps because of the shallowness of the characters as written, is a strong physical contrast between Elizabeth and Lota.  He certainly achieves that with Otto and Glória Pires, a star of Brazilian telenovelas.  Miranda Otto’s acting is intelligent but too obviously thought out and Bishop is presented throughout as a chilly, unpleasant woman.  Glória Pires’s Lota is not only more likeable but also more emotionally convincing – Pires makes the gradual dimming of Lota’s self-confidence affecting (this occurs in spite of her success as the chief creative designer of the Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro).  While the doomed love story is structurally familiar, the Samambaia ménage, once Lota begins her affair with Elizabeth, is unusual:  Mary Morse stays there and adopts the child she longs for.  Although Tracy Middendorf, who plays Mary, is only three years Miranda Otto’s junior, she looks a generation younger; and although the film spans the years 1951 to 1967, Mary never seems to age.  (Thanks to a facial resemblance, the character’s name and the fact that she spends much of the time looking tearful and aggrieved, Tracy Middendorf rather unfortunately recalls Mary Decker at the Los Angeles Olympics.)  Robert Lowell may have been a chauvinist but Treat Williams insultingly turns him into a figure who is not just paternalist but complacent.  The best things in Reaching for the Moon are the lushly appealing score by Marcelo Zarvos and the cinematography by Mauro Pinheiro Jr, whose images of the Brazilian landscape are expressive enough to suggest a poet’s eye and interpretation of its shapes and colours.

    29 March 2014

  • The Messenger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Oren Moverman (2009)

    The film has taken a long time to make it across the Atlantic:  it opened in London more than eighteen months after its commercial release in the US in November 2009.  Co-written by Oren Moverman (whose first feature this is) and Alessandro Camon, The Messenger tells the story of Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a US Army staff sergeant who, on his return home from Iraq, is assigned to the Army’s Casualty Notification service.  This means he has to break bad news to the next of kin of soldiers killed in action.  Will is partnered in this grim work by the older, unhappily experienced Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson).  Both of them live isolated lives outside their work.  Stone keeps himself going with prostitutes.  Will, as we learn early on, had a close relationship with a girl (Jena Malone) but they broke off their engagement.  He now lives alone, drinks plenty.  There are strong hints that a particular experience in Iraq has traumatised him.  (The revelation of the experience is delayed until late on in The Messenger.)  One of the essential rules of the messengers’ line of work is not to let personal feelings get in the way, let alone become involved with the people they visit.   It’s no less an imperative in screen fictions that rules of this kind are there to be broken for dramatic purposes.  Will, following an unusual solo visit to break the news of her husband’s death to a young woman called Olivia Pitterson (Samantha Morton), finds himself falling in love with her.

    As that implies, the script for The Messenger is basically conventional – and it is in other ways too.  Each home visit by Will and Stone has an obvious complicating variation.  On Will’s first assignment with Stone, a dead soldier’s mother isn’t at home; in her absence, protocol doesn’t allow them to reveal their bad news to his girlfriend.  The next visit, there’s no answer when they ring the doorbell and they’re about to leave as the casualty’s father appears from the garden.  Another boy’s parents are out – Will and Stone bump into them accidentally in a local store and tell them there.  A bereaved wife is having an affair, and in the middle of a row with her lover, when the messengers arrive.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach (and each of these scenes is well staged and acted), except that Moverman and Camon’s need to ‘dramatise’ the episodes seems to betray an anxiety that the visits wouldn’t be interesting enough without embellishment.  It’s an unnecessary anxiety because the line of work is inherently dramatic; the regulations the two men have to stick by in making their announcements only increases that.   In the closing stages, the tidy-minded writers are similarly anxious to get loose ends tied up; and there’s occasional overwriting in what the characters have to say when they’re speaking their mind.  It’s a miscalculation when Will and Stone turn up, very much the worse for wear, at the wedding reception of Will’s ex-fiancee (he was invited to the reception but had said no).  This public demonstration of the pair’s bitter isolation is crudely melodramatic – and out of character.

    Yet Moverman and Camon’s screenplay is serviceable, the dialogue is mostly good, and the actors, well directed by Moverman, are able to take The Messenger to a higher level.  Although you feel the relationship between Will and Olivia is a dramatic requirement, you want it to happen – and to succeed – because the characters matter.  And the sequence in which Will eventually tells Stone what happened to him in Iraq is extremely well done.   It’s hard to say which is more affecting:  Woody Harrelson’s despairing gulp to try to control his emotions (he seems to swallow a yell) or Ben Foster’s gesture of discretion when he sees that Stone’s crying and Will leaves the room to let him weep in private.  (It’s very good that the man who learns what happened is more upset than the one who confesses what happened.)  When Olivia tells Will her feelings about her late husband, Samantha Morton makes those feelings intensely believable.  Olivia was increasingly unhappy in the marriage; when Will arrived at her home she was hanging out washing, including her husband’s shirts, as if cleaning him out of her life. ‘Then you came’, she says to Will.  His arrival doesn’t just mean to Olivia a new man in her life; it means that, now he’s dead, she can love her husband again.  This makes complete sense of the way Samantha Morton plays Olivia’s first meeting with Will:  as usual, she creates rhythms which feel surprising but true.

    I’d not seen Ben Foster before and I liked him a lot.   His blend of ordinariness and emotional power, his ability to suggest a specific intelligence at work – these qualities raise hopes that Foster may be able to play all sorts of roles.  He and Woody Harrelson are a very effective partnership:  Will and Stone, for all their differences, are kindred spirits in the sense that they’re both deeply screwed up but have worked out ways to soldier on.  Stone has a borderline-psycho look and a practised verbal aggression but Harrelson isn’t overacting here.  He uses these externals to suggest armour; he has an inner intensity that occasionally fractures the armour.  Steve Buscemi has a memorable cameo as the man whose gardening is irredeemably interrupted by the message Will and Stone have come to deliver.

    22 June 2011

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