Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • I Saw the Light

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marc Abraham (2015)

    As Hank Williams in I Saw the Light, Tom Hiddleston is a very distinctive presence – rather as the title character in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial is distinctive.  It’s easy enough to accept that the world of Country & Western had never known anyone quite like Williams.  It’s impossible to believe in the polished, aseptic Tom Hiddleston as a good ol’ local boy made good – a hero of his people in Jefferson County, Alabama.  What’s more bizarre is Marc Abraham’s thoroughly unnecessary determination to make Hiddleston stand out.  He sings ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ over the opening titles, in a spotlight, with no one else in sight (the spotlight is golden yet somehow chilly).  This is a foretaste of the protagonist’s remoteness in what follows.  In the concert sequences of the film proper, Abraham has everyone else underplay, as if he’s after a semi-documentary effect, while Hiddleston performs in a different style, on a different wavelength.  Hank’s musicians are back-up to a visiting dignitary, a cultural alien.  Hiddleston’s singing is accomplished and he looks to be enjoying himself but he’s doing an impression of a C&W singer as a type:  he doesn’t remotely suggest the real Hank Williams.  The pleasure of watching and listening to Hiddleston comes largely from the amusing improbability of the whole enterprise, in view of his other screen roles to date.

    I Saw the Light, which Marc Abraham adapted from a biography by Colin Escott, George Merritt and William MacEwen, moves through the last eight or so years of Williams’s short life, from 1944 to his death, at the age of twenty-nine, on New Year’s Day 1953.   Abraham shows some signs of wanting to pull away from biopic clichés but the downbeat naturalistic style of acting that prevails can’t conceal that his script is a collection of standard set pieces – especially in the coverage of Williams’s personal life:  the drink-and-drugs addiction, a marriage disfigured by a combination of jealous possessiveness of his wife and unfaithfulness to her, and so on.  That these were facts of Hank Williams’s life – as they were of Miles Davis’s in Miles Ahead the other week – isn’t enough:  a writer-director needs to explore or describe these price-of-fame afflictions in ways that make them, if not surprising, somehow individual to the subject of the film.  Abraham uses black-and-white, faux-documentary interviews with music industry talking heads to frame the narrative – itself a familiar device by now.  When Hank says goodbye to his family on New Year’s Eve 1952 and gets into the car that will take him to the concert hall he’ll never reach, the accumulation of significant looks exchanged is enough to make this the most telegraphed biopic scene of its kind in some time.

    At least Tom Hiddleston’s incongruousness counteracts the film’s generic feel.  On stage at the Grand Ole Opry etc, he doesn’t suggest any connection with his band or with his enthusiastic audiences.  Off stage, he doesn’t connect much either with Elizabeth Olsen, as Hank’s first wife Audrey Sheppard, or with Cherry Jones, as his mother.  (Olsen copes well with the thankless task of playing a woman lacking charm both as a person and a performer.  Although the mother is only a small role, Jones registers in it.)  There are a couple of moments in which Hiddleston’s trademark detachment is particularly noticeable.  Hank Williams dashes into the hospital where Audrey has just given birth to their first child.  Meeting the doctor who’s delivered the baby boy, Hank is so excitedly grateful that he can’t stop shaking the doctor’s hand. You can see that Hiddleston is going through the motions – it looks as if the pressure of the handshake is coming more from the doctor (Vito Viscuso) than from Hank.  Later on, he storms out of a magazine interview in a New York hotel, still holding the glass he was drinking from.   He places the glass on the roof of a car in the street outside – the way that Hiddleston does this, places really is the word.   He carefully puts the glass in what looks like a prearranged spot.

    Yet a few things Tom Hiddleston does in this film made me think there could be something to him as an actor after all.  At a party at his house, a well-oiled Hank stands outside in the freezing cold, delighted and mesmerised by repeatedly pushing a button to open and close his garage door – the little laugh in Hiddleston’s throat is really good.  Hank and Audrey’s quiet duet of ‘I Saw the Light’ as a lullaby for their baby is nicely, naturally done.  The darkening of Hiddleston’s hair and eyebrows makes his skin look pallid and mostly reinforces his artificiality;  but when Williams sits on a sofa, trying out his new composition ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’, the pallor helps and Tom Hiddleston gives off a convincingly exhausted quality.  In these odd moments, he suggests a human being.  Mention of Hank Williams’s last famous song is a reminder that I Saw the Light isn’t the first movie version of his story.  Your Cheatin’ Heart, directed by Gene Nelson and starring George Hamilton as Williams, was made in 1964.  Although I didn’t go to the pictures much as a child, that’s where I saw Your Cheatin’ Heart, as a ten-year-old.  It was the supporting feature to One Spy Too Many (1966), in the Man from UNCLE series.

    11 May 2016

     

  • Rampart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Oren Moverman (2011)

    I didn’t like the look of Rampart from the trailer or the sound of it from what I’d read.  But I liked Oren Moverman’s previous movie The Messenger enough still to want to see Rampart, which Moverman co-wrote with James Ellroy.  Once I started watching, I was soon bored by the material and irritated by the style of the movie.  I couldn’t find a way into the story or hear much of what was being said.   Walking out of the cinema halfway through a film often feels like an admission of failure but in this case it was a relief too.   The ‘Rampart scandal’, according to Wikipedia, ‘refers to widespread corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Rampart Division in the late 1990s’.  Rampart is the story of an LAPD veteran called Dave Brown, played by Woody Harrelson, who is (again according to Wikipedia) ‘forced to face up to the consequences of his wayward career’.

    In The Messenger, Tony Stone, the hard-headed military man played by Harrelson, was a persuasive and moving character.  He was part of an involving story and, although a powerful presence, not an overpowering one.  He had less screen time than Ben Foster, who was strong in a different, complementary way.  (Harrelson was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.)    In Rampart, Dave Brown is something of a kindred spirit to Tony Stone but here the character is not only centre stage but mythicised.  If the script were not the work of James Ellroy, whose conservative and Christian views are well known, I might feel more sympathetic but you get the sense that Dave Brown’s cussedness and violence are meant to be expressions of a mysterious nobility – and this sense is compounded by Moverman’s admiring direction of Harrelson.  The actor’s work in Rampart has been much admired by critics too, and it is a performance of great commitment, but I found it overbearing – even though this may be the fault of Moverman, who seems anxious to give weight to every moment of the performance, as much as of Harrelson.

    Moverman does the same with Ned Beatty, as some old-timer who knew Dave’s father.   Although Beatty too is very good, the camera’s concentration on him seems to be insisting that he’s great – much of the film takes place in darkness, literal as well as metaphysical, so when the actors’ faces are lit it’s artificially conspicuous.  In a sequence involving Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver, however, the camera movement and editing are so attention-grabbing that they overpower three very good actors.  I thought Weaver was the best thing in the forty-five minutes I stayed for – not just because she’s clearly audible but because she brings an interesting quality of weariness to the professional woman she’s playing (though I never worked what the woman’s job was exactly).  James Ellroy is famous for the brevity of his prose but Dave Brown has the odd outburst of wordiness:  your initial reaction is surprise but then you realise Dave is making fun of people who use big words and/or jargon (which seem to be considered the same thing).   The cast also includes Ice Cube, Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon and Robin Wright.

    15 March 2012

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