Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Once Upon a Time in the Midlands

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shane Meadows (2002)

    This feels like very early Shane Meadows – there are good things in it but the tone is uncertain.   The title nods to Sergio Leone and the film includes Western parody elements.  It could be summarised as the story of a good guy and a bad guy competing for the same girl.  There are repeated shots of a suburban street that give it a mildly ominous look – as if it’s shaping up as the venue for a shoot-out.  In fact not a shot is fired in Once Upon a Time in the Midlands although an inept robbery in the early stages is crucial to the plot.  (The small-time crooks who dominated Meadows’ shorts and first feature are very persistent in his work.)   John Lunn’s score is a skilful, amusing pastiche of Ennio Morricone but Meadow overuses it – and it’s so clearly pastiche that it tends to put the action in quotation marks.  Juxtaposing the lushly melodramatic music and what appears on screen has the effect of almost ridiculing the conflicts of the characters because of their mundane setting – which can’t have been what Meadows intended.  It came as a surprise, after I’d watched Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, to discover that it was made as recently as 2002 – three years after A Room for Romeo Brass.

    On a daytime TV show hosted by Vanessa Feltz (as herself), Dek, who works in a garage, proposes to his girlfriend Shirley:  she’s so genuinely overwhelmed that she turns him down.   This is only the start of Dek’s run of bad luck;  Shirley’s former boyfriend Jimmy, the father of her daughter Marlene, wakes up in his Glasgow flat to see the show.  He then goes out to join his three mates in the attempted robbery of a group of clowns (including Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, unrecognisable under painted faces and bald-curly wigs).  Jimmy finds himself alone with the cash proceeds of the theft and hitches a lift down to the Midlands to look out Shirley and reclaim her and Marlene.  The performances aren’t as well orchestrated as in later Meadows.   This was his first opportunity, thanks presumably to the success of Romeo Brass, to work with well-known actors from outside his usual line-up – the main roles are played by Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, Shirley Henderson, Kathy Burke and Ricky Tomlinson.  You might expect most of that group to work well with Meadows but not all of them do.  The way they speak is a superficial part of the problem.   The actors use more or less their own accents:  one gets so used to hearing the East Midlands in Shane Meadows’ films that the range of these accents is rather dislocating – with Glaswegian (Carlyle), Welsh (Ifans), London (Burke) and Lancashire (Tomlinson) so much in evidence, the place seems to have been invaded by aliens.   Because the invaders are actors not previously in the Meadows stable they seem all the more alien.

    There are more fundamental problems, though, with Robert Carlyle and Rhys Ifans.  Carlyle hasn’t the greatest sense of humour – his angry, swearing Jimmy isn’t likeable or even vividly dislikeable.  (In Carlyle’s best performance – on television, as the crazed Liverpool FC fan in Cracker in 1994 – his character stabbed the young police detective played by Christopher Eccleston, an actor who’s turned out to take himself even more seriously than Carlyle.  The murder was shocking at the time:  in retrospect, the collision of Carlyle and Eccleston seems, because of their shared miserablist tendencies, almost comical.)  Rhys Ifans tries but he’s too clumsy an actor to give Dek the complexity needed.  This is a role which you suspect Meadows and his co-writer Paul Fraser conceived with Paddy Considine in mind.  You miss Considine in sequences like those in which Dek pretends to be a tough guy and convinces no one, including himself.  I think Considine might have played these scenes so as to make you feel Dek believed that he was convincing others of his machismo.  Rhys Ifans just seems to be making fun of the character – the comical malapropisms and mispronunciations that Meadows has presumably encouraged make things worse.

    For much of Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, the pleasures are minor and incidental:  sharp exchanges between the two main female characters and a posse of other women in a bingo hall; the way that Meadows and his cinematographer Brian Tufano light the exterior of the hall – neon in twilight – so that it does fuse with the sensual music on the soundtrack.   Kathy Burke’s Carol – the daughter of parents who fostered Jimmy as a kid – is the most persuasive personality among the grown-ups.  With her thoroughgoing combination of humour and aggression, Carol really does belong in Meadows’ world, even if she is East End rather than East Midlands.  Carol lives apart from her C&W-mad Charlie husband (‘I am the Midlands Cowboy/I go from town to town … ‘).  The three other Glaswegians, in pursuit of Jimmy and the stolen money, break into Charlie’s home because Dek’s told them that’s where they’ll find Jimmy – but he’s out at the time.  The gang beat up Charlie and trash his C&W collection.  The staging of this violence is pretty crude but it leads into one of the film’s best sequences, when Carol gives Jimmy, once he’s come back to Charlie’s place, a piece of her mind.  Kathy Burke’s tirade is passionately, wittily sustained – a vintage Shane Meadows outburst.

    Carol then takes a baseball bat to Dek’s car and this is, alas, just about the last we see of Burke:  Meadows excludes Carol and Charlie from the climax.   In the closing stages, the film begins to gain coherence and momentum – the strength of the characters’ feelings measures up to the music and Rhys Ifans, once he begins to tone down his efforts to be funny, is more likeable.  Yet the happy ending – with Shirley committing to Dek and Jimmy heading back up to Scotland an unreformed character – is achieved too quickly and mechanically.   It makes sense emotionally largely because Shirley’s reverting to a life with Jimmy would have made no sense.   Still, Shirley Henderson is gentle and fragilely touching as Shirley; and Finn Atkins, the teenager who plays Marlene, is terrific – she also had a small part in This is England but I’m surprised Meadows hasn’t used her more often since this fine debut.   Marlene isn’t that demonstrative but Finn Atkins shows how much she’s feeling inside.  The girl is devoted to Dek – how much she loves him more than her biological father is one of the most striking things in Once Upon a Time in the Midlands.   The cast also includes Andrew Shim and James Cosmo.

    5 April 2012

  • On the Road

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Walter Salles (2012)

    Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries is a good movie and, on the face of it, a good qualification for directing On the Road.  (Francis Ford Coppola bought the screen rights to the Jack Kerouac novel in 1979.  After several false starts, Coppola hired Salles after seeing The Motorcycle Diaries.)  But the film sits on the screen – emotionally remote and less visually kinetic than you’d expect.  I think there are two main reasons for this – the original’s extraordinary status and the actor playing Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise.  On the Road is regarded as a definitive expression of a particular cultural time and place.  What’s more, it’s taken an improbably long time to make it to the screen – the film arrives in cinemas fifty-five years after the book’s publication.  The approach taken by Salles (and Jose Rivera, who wrote the screenplay) seems not only to assume a familiarity with the original but to reflect a reverent, tentative approach to it – as if the filmmakers feared being accused of hijacking a classic, as if it were a piece of priceless china they might drop and break in the act of transporting it to the screen.  I haven’t read On the Road.  I’m assuming its immediate success depended in no small part on the book’s description of a very new kind of lifestyle – fascinating pr enraging those who didn’t know it, delighting those who did that someone had encapsulated their habits and values.  But what Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady) get up to no longer seems outré.  Walter Salles’ caution reinforces one’s awareness that the passage of time has robbed On the Road of its rebellious flavour and novelty value.

    The casting of Sam Riley as Sal is baffling.  Riley’s face is more expressive and he has more vocal substance than I’d expected from his work in Control and Brighton Rock but this is damning with faint praise.  You don’t connect to Sal at all or find yourself wanting to know what’s going to happen to him.  And not much does happen – one of the strengths of The Motorcycle Diaries was how it showed a middle-class young man called Ernesto Guevara emerging from his travels as the potential Che.  Walter Salles highlighted certain events that explained the birth of Guevara’s political thinking but without over-stressing them.  What Salles achieved working with Gael García Bernal in the earlier film doesn’t happen at all with Sam Riley – and, to be fair to Riley, it’s not really his fault.  Sal is often more an observer of the events in On the Road than a participant in them.  The rationed use of voiceover, although commendable in principle, further reduces Riley’s opportunities to convey a sense of excitement at being on the move (in more ways than one).  As Dean Moriarty, Garrett Hedlund has more vitality and is vocally strong but most of Dean’s behaviour makes him seem a prat rather than charismatic.  Salles has been quoted as saying he wanted ‘unknowns’ for the main roles in On the Road and it  seems he cast Riley, Hedlund and Kristen Stewart as Marylou (the teenage wife of Dean at the start of the film, Sal’s sexual partner later in the story) in 2007.  Stewart’s presence in the film seems doubly pointless:  she’s anything but unknown to large audiences after the Twilight series – the fact that she doesn’t register strongly here appears to be due merely to her limitations as an actress.

    Tom Sturridge does well as Carlo Marx (aka Allen Ginsberg) but Salles’ being in thrall to the book appears to have infected some of the well-known names in supporting roles.  There’s no real life to Viggo Mortensen’s cameo as Old Bull Lee (supposedly based on William Burroughs) and Steve Buscemi is surprisingly obvious as a pederastic salesman.  Amy Adams and Kirsten Dunst, however, shine.  Adams makes a remarkably strong impression in the small part of Old Bull Lee’s wife and Dunst, as Dean’s girlfriend Camille, is marvellous in the scene where the couple break up.  Camille tells Dean to get lost.  It hurts her to say it; the hurt makes her even angrier with him and what she’s said all the more irrevocable.

    23 October 2012

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