Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Norwegian Wood

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noruwei no Mori

    Tran Anh Hung (2010)

    In Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood, the young protagonist Toru Watanabe is caught up in relationships with two girls, Naoko and Midori.  He knew Naoko from adolescence; when their mutual friend Kizuki committed suicide, Naoko had a breakdown from which she’s never recovered.  Watanabe has to get away; he starts university in Tokyo but without achieving any emotional distance from Naoko.  Midori is also a student at the university.  Her mother is already dead and it transpires that her father is terminally ill but Midori is determinedly undaunted and eccentrically vivacious.  Watanabe’s choice is, in essence, between death and life and Murakami perhaps uses the story to reflect his own snagged feelings about the Japanese psyche – his anger and impatience with its tradition of thanatos getting the better of eros (reflected in the art and the life of a writer like Mishima).   You wouldn’t guess from this description how richly entertaining the book is – and the entertainment is fundamental to Murakami’s thesis:  it’s a realisation of his life-affirming point of view.  The story takes place in the late 1960s and early 1970s and this too is crucial.  Watanabe (Murakami’s contemporary) is a student in Tokyo in the years shortly after the city hosted the 1964 Olympics, when Western pop music and clothes and fast food were increasingly influential, and anti-establishment protests were in vogue too.  I’m not sure how highly Murakami rates any of these but they add to the texture of the lives of Watanabe’s generation.  The novel is full of references to what people are eating and wearing and what they’re hearing on radios and turntables.  (This aspect of the book reminded me of the abundance of cultural detail in The Group.)

    Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation is remarkably lacking in these things (and the student protests are perfunctory background).  Because I love the vibrancy and variety of Murakami’s narrative, I found the film, from a screenplay by the director, infuriatingly monotonous and gloomy – the antithesis of what the novel was about.  (I wasn’t hopeful once I’d seen the trailer.)  Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) is no longer the central consciousness; the events seem to be taking place in the bereft, penumbral, death-bound mind of Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi).  There are some very compelling landscapes in the hills outside Kyoto but their beauty – regardless of the season – is bleakly intimidating.  The hills loom above the asylum where Naoko lives and is befriended and cared for by another patient, an older woman called Reiko (Reika Kirishima).   When Naoko eventually commits suicide and Watanabe is grieving and haunted by dreams of her, he’s lying among and dwarfed by rocks above a crashing sea.  Tran Anh Hung doesn’t juxtapose, let alone balance, this crushing expressionism with existential images of life and movement in Tokyo.  There are hardly any outdoor scenes in the city and the interiors are often as dark-toned as the rooms of Naoko’s morbid habitat.   There are British and American rock and pop songs but this part of the soundtrack feels merely imposed on the material; it has no connection with what we see on the screen.   The real theme music is the elaborately mournful score by Jonny Greenwood.  The only sequences with any tonal variety are the sex scenes, which are composed thoughtfully but are at the same time sensually strong and expressive.

    A week after the Japan earthquake and tsunami, when you catch the front pages of newspapers with features inside about how the Japanese have learned to live with disaster and pessimism is an integral part of the national character, it’s difficult at one level to see the thoroughgoing grimness of the film of Norwegian Wood as false – but it definitely falsifies the source material.  The fact that Watanabe, even when he’s temporarily immersed in metropolitan life and relationships, can’t get Naoko out of his head gives the novel a sustained and intrinsic tension.   In the film this obsession is no longer underlying – it’s never obscured.  In the book, you’ve no doubt that Watanabe enjoys Midori (Kiko Mizuhara)’s company infinitely more than his gruelling visits to Naoko in the asylum, even though she gets in the way of the relationship with Midori going deeper.  Here Naoko is such a dominant influence that her shadow hangs over nearly every moment that Watanabe spends with Midori.  In both book and film, she has to wait for Watanabe to start loving her – wait until Naoko, who can almost never go through with sex with Watanabe (or Kizuki before him), has consummated her relationship with death.  Yet I had the sense reading Norwegian Wood that part of Watanabe was resistant to Naoko’s importance to him – that it was more a case that his world revolved around her than that she was his first and only love.  Tran Anh Hung doesn’t get anything of this complexity.  For what it is, the film is well acted by the four principals but three of these roles have been considerably reduced from the book.  It’s Naoko’s show.

    19 March 2011

  • None But the Lonely Heart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clifford Odets (1944)

    Cary Grant is Ernie Mott, a Cockney lad, a charmer but a ne’er-do-well, who returns to his home in the East End and, when he learns that his mother is terminally ill, decides to be the son to her that he’s never been but that she’s always deserved.  Cary Grant is a charmer but he is otherwise dead wrong for the part.  The fact that he started life in Bristol, in poor circumstances, as Archie Leach, probably made matters worse – Grant may have thought he could bring to the role something within himself but his efforts are counterproductive.  His accent is an extraordinary concoction:  it’s as if he’s trying to reach back, from the voice that he constructed in America, to his English roots – with Hollywood Cockney then overlaid.  The problem isn’t so much that Grant – and most of the others in the cast – can’t do the accent.  It’s rather that they try hard to do it and the effort makes them often lose the sense of the lines (and sometimes intelligibility).  Barry Fitzgerald – as Ernie’s friend and counsellor, Henry Twite, who’s full of streetwise philosophy – sensibly sticks to Irish, even though I missed any other indication in the script that Henry actually was Irish.  As a result, Fitzgerald’s voice and characterisation at least are clear and coherent.  The children in the cast, who either can’t or don’t attempt to conceal American accents, also come off relatively well.

    The movie’s conscientiousness makes it worse than it might have been if approached less seriously.  Clifford Odets wrote the script and this is one of only two Hollywood features that he also directed (the other is a 1959 movie called The Story on Page One) but the source is not one of his own plays but Richard Llewellyn’s second novel, the successor to How Green Was My Valley.  None But the Lonely Heart is a mishmash of social conscience and antique melodrama – the former is mixed up with implications of fighting for a better world through World War II although without any explanation of how defeating the Axis powers will remove the poverty and gangsterism, and their toxic interaction, which are main features of the lives being shown on the screen.    The characters – Ernie especially – are prone to portentous rhetorical questions such as ‘When’s the world coming out of its midnight? When does the human soul get off its knees?’  The timeframe and Ernie’s age in particular are baffling.  His middle name is Verdun, which suggests that he was born after the Great War in which his father fought yet at one point Ernie seems to say he’s thirty-five.   (Cary Grant was forty when the film was made.)  I also didn’t get what eventually happened to Ernie’s bull terrier Nipper:  the dog looks as if he may have some symbolic importance but Odets seems then to forget about him.

    The crime sequences are among the most convincing – a physical assault of two Jewish characters, a car chase and crash.  The look of the movie is certainly distinctive although self-consciously so.  There are some good bits in the more casual moments such as the echoes of Ernie and Henry’s drunken voices in a tunnel.  Several of the actors are remarkable – June Duprez, as a gangster’s ex, has an exhausted prettiness:  her face and voice suggest someone who’s terminally ill, as Ernie’s mother is.  In the latter role Ethel Barrymore’s presence dominates the picture.  The noble mother is a cliché and Barrymore may be a little too grand for a working-class version of it but she’s absorbed the character, she does convey the temper of an East End matriarch, and her watchfulness, taking in everything and letting the audience do so as well, is impressive.  So too are her emotional intimacy with Ernie, once he’s trying to be a good lad, and her cry of shame just before Ma dies in a prison hospital.  Barrymore’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was not undeserved but Cary Grant’s Best Actor nomination was an example of the Academy’s persistent belief that when someone is doing something different from what made them a star it must be better than usual.  Apart from being much worse than usual, Grant is not different enough.   In working clothes and a cap he looks like Cary Grant in disguise; when Ma buys him a suit he looks like Cary Grant.  The title is that of a piece of Tchaikowksy music, played on the cello by the respectable girl (Jane Wyatt) who holds a torch for Ernie and on whose door he knocks the ‘hopeful’ end of the film.

    6 May 2013

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