Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • My Best Friend’s Wedding

    Old YorkerFilm review

    P J Hogan (1997)

    We picked this up on television, about thirty minutes in.   I remember it as being a hit (and was amazed that was twelve years ago); anticipating a light romantic comedy, I found it less enjoyable but more conceptually compelling – and unusual – than I expected.  Julia Roberts is Julianne (a restaurant critic).  When she learns that her longtime friend and college contemporary Michael (Dermot Mulroney) is getting married to the years-younger Kimberly (Cameron Diaz), she realises that she’s always been in love with him.  (Michael is a sports journalist; Kimberly the student daughter of a billionaire who owns a baseball team.)  Julianne tries to stop the marriage – at which she’s also agreed to be maid of honour – by various means.  Some of these impromptu stratagems are inoffensively hopeless, like pretending to be engaged to her confidant George (Rupert Everett), who’s gay, in order to make Michael not only jealous but also realise that he’s as much in love with Julianne as she is with him.  Other tactics are pretty nasty, like composing an e-mail (even if it does get sent by accident) to make Michael doubt Kimberly.  In other words, My Best Friend’s Wedding, written by Ronald Bass, is based on and fuelled by two Hollywood romantic comedy imperatives which in this case are made irreconcilable:  we expect a character who’s harbouring an unrealised passion and is played by the star to get her man and an envious, devious bitch who threatens the happiness of others to get her comeuppance.

    Julia Roberts is given plenty of routines, physical and verbal, to (over)emphasise that she’s a ‘comical’ character but, to her credit, she doesn’t, behind the pratfalls and the double takes, soften Julianne’s increasingly desperate scheming.  Cameron Diaz has a ditsy vividness which is appealing – and funny in Kimberly’s occasional outbursts of freneticism.  It’s not the case that this bride-to-be is a pain in the neck who must be denied her prize in the way that the prospective bridegroom in The Philadelphia Story can’t possibly be the man that Katharine Hepburn eventually marries.   Michael and Kimberly eventually do get hitched and Julianne is left alone at the wedding dinner (until she ends up dancing with George).  You know this is the right ending but, because Julia Roberts has been thwarted, it leaves you feeling deflated and dissatisfied.  And because Dermot Mulroney, as Michael, has a real edge and connects with Roberts, the emotional situation gets to be surprisingly charged and complex.   Mulroney’s Michael doesn’t give too much away; his being hard to read and the sense that he’s keeping thoughts and feelings to himself create a tension – and give you a sense of Julianne’s frustration that she can’t reach him.  The film is best known for Rupert Everett’s performance.  Although what he does is fairly obvious, Everett is more assured and animated than usual but I can’t help thinking that audiences warmed to him because George is untroublingly entertaining.  Roberts (when she’s not mired in predictable comedy business), Mulroney and Diaz are all more interesting.  Philip Bosco is the bride’s father.

    25 April 2009

  • Murder, She Said

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Pollock (1961)

    Murder, She Said turns out to be an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 From Paddington.  I read it in my early teens and one of the interests of the film came from  realising that bits of the book have remained buried in my memory for forty years.  As soon as the local doctor appeared, I remembered he was the murderer; his unusual name, Quimper, has stayed with me too.   Arthur Kennedy is surprisingly cast as Quimper (this appearance is sandwiched between Elmer Gantry and Lawrence of Arabia in his filmography); he’s a fine actor but here a mostly uncertain one and not just because of his character’s guilty secrets.  As Quimper’s inamorata Emma, Muriel Pavlow, to look at, occasionally brings to mind Janet Leigh but Pavlow’s speech patterns – the lines punctuated with metronomic, breathy breaks to convey nervousness – are typical of British film actresses of her generation.  Emma is the daughter of an irascible invalid called Ackenthorpe, played by the abominable James Robertson Justice, indulging in his usual self-absorbed, showoff routine.  Thorley Waters is amusingly snide as one of Ackenthorpe’s sons and it’s nice seeing cameos from Peter Butterworth (as the ticket collector on Miss Marple’s train from Paddington) and Richard Briers (as a man who runs a domestic employment agency).   As often in Margaret Rutherford films, her real life husband Stringer Davis is in evidence (as a kind of all purpose helpmate to Miss Marple).  The partnership is endearing, for all that Davis is an incorrigibly coarse actor.

    Margaret Rutherford has a wonderful ability to harness innate eccentricity to naturalistic technique and discipline.  (Arthur Lowe, on the small screen anyway, displayed a similar combination of talents.)  Her Miss Marple may be nothing like Agatha Christie’s but Rutherford’s gawky gusto and comic invention in the role are unfailingly entertaining.   The high point of Murder, She Said – in retrospect – is the moment when Rutherford arrives at Ackenthorpe Hall (Miss Marple improbably goes under cover as a maid in the household) and Joan Hickson, who played Miss Marple so successfully on television a quarter-century later, opens the door to her.  (Hickson plays an enjoyably miserable housekeeper here with offhand flair.)   Without these two, Murder, She Said would be pretty undistinguished:  even with them, it’s pedestrian – unlike its source material.

    Although I can’t remember any of the detail of the book’s plot, I feel sure there was plenty of it.  You get the sense that the screenwriter David Osborn has pared too much away to showcase Margaret Rutherford:  even though she puts on a splendid show, the film still needs a stronger storyline.   By far the oddest presence is someone called Ronnie Raymond, as Emma Ackenthorpe’s gruesomely mischievous nephew Alexander.  Dressed in a collar and tie, with his hair slicked back, he looks like a rather effete miniature man.  The light-coloured voice that emerges makes him seem like a woman in drag.  Alexander’s lines come out over-elocuted too.  The whole effect is very odd.  A bizarre, unsubstantiated but plausible explanation can be found in the ‘Trivia’ section of Murder, She Said’s IMDB entry:  ‘The voice heard for actor Ronnie Raymond … has been dubbed’. The abundant and peculiar music is by Ron Goodwin:  it’s not very good but it seems ahead of its time to the extent that it evokes crummy British films trying to sound With It later in the decade.  (As Sally said, it also foreshadows bits of the superior theme music, by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, for the BBC Miss Marple.)

    30 April 2010

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