Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 1, 2016

  • Love & Friendship

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Whit Stillman (2016)

    According to Wikipedia, there have so far been twenty English-language television adaptations of Jane Austen’s six novels.  (This total includes both one-off TV movies and serialisations.)  Pride and Prejudice tops the table with five; Emma and Persuasion are next with four; Sense and Sensibility has been done three times; Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey twice each.  Adaptations for cinema are relatively (and surprisingly) few.  Only two of the novels have been done more than once – there are three Pride and Prejudices and two Emmas, no feature films of either Northanger Abbey or Persuasion.   The use of Austen scenarios as the basis for stories transposed to different times, places or genres has, however, become a movie sub-industry in the last twenty years or so.  Examples include Clueless (1995), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Bride and Prejudice (2004), Material Girls (2006) and, earlier this year, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  In 2007, Becoming Jane tried to turn Austen’s own life into an Austen novel-on-screen.  When this film appeared, you could almost hear the barrel being scraped – sense the movie world’s frustration that Jane Austen failed to write more screenplays-to-be in the course of her rather short life.

    But there are more.  Although she died, aged forty-one, before completing Sanditon[1], Austen left behind juvenilia that include the story Love and Freindship [sic] and the novella Lady Susan.  These are both epistolary in form.  Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is, in spite of its title, an adaptation of the latter; he makes some use of the letters that comprise the original Lady Susan to enrich his screenplay.  The Wikipedia entry on ‘Jane Austen in popular culture’ from which I’ve taken most of the information above[2] also includes, under the heading ‘Looser adaptations’, Stillman’s first feature film, Metropolitan (1990).  The suggestion that this is derived from Mansfield Park isn’t substantiated, however (nor is it mentioned in the separate Wikipedia page on Metropolitan).  Even so, the overwhelmingly favourable reviews of Love & Friendship reveal broad critical consensus that Whit Stillman is unusually well equipped to make a Jane Austen movie.  I’d previously seen only one of his films but I can’t disagree on the basis of the light, crisp touch he showed in Damsels in Distress – set in a somewhat rarefied world with its own moral and social code, and dominated by verbal exchanges between quick-witted young women.   In his interview in the June 2016 Sight & Sound, Stillman expresses an enthusiasm for Austen which he convinces you is genuine and strong.

    When I first saw the trailer for Love & Friendship, I assumed – because of the prevailing performing style and I didn’t know the source material existed – that it was a Jane Austen spoof.  Even after seeing the whole film, I haven’t quite got the idea out of my mind.  (The satirical register of the opening legends on the screen, which summarise each of the dramatis personae in a single phrase, perhaps contributed to this.)  The cast’s dry, understated delivery is a welcome and an effective means of avoiding faux-Regency archness but also gives the line readings a distinctly modern sound.  In Bright Star, Jane Campion’s actors also sounded like twenty-first century people but this made their early nineteenth-century characters more immediately engaging and expressive.  The effect is different in a comedic film like Love & Friendship – not least because of our familiarity with cinema and television comedy period pieces whose humour depends largely on a disjuncture between the historical sets and costumes and the modernised characterisations.   But though the playing in Love & Friendship doesn’t, I think, bring the characters in the story closer to being people we actually recognise, it does succeed in making them more really believable within their own time and conventions.

    The style of delivery that I’m trying to describe is especially pronounced in the performance of Kate Beckinsale, in the lead role of the unscrupulous adventuress Lady Susan Vernon.  She has so many lines there are times you feel Beckinsale needs more vocal colouring but her level acidity is a good counterpoint to Lady Susan’s amusingly intimidating costumes (by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh) and she’s undeniably the heartless heart of the piece.  Among the supporting parts, Tom Bennett’s interpretation of the brainless but appealingly wealthy Sir James Martin has been reasonably singled out for praise:  Bennett is very witty – it’s the icing on the cake that he makes Sir James not only ridiculous but genuinely likeable.   Another fine contribution, in a much smaller role but thanks to a similar fusion of comic skill and empathy with the character, comes from Conor McNeill, as an eager, scripturally erudite young curate.   Morfydd Clark is excellent as Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica.  Other particular assets in the cast include Emma Greenwell, Justin Edwards and Lochlann O’Mearáin.

    Chloë Sevigny, although I found it relatively hard to make out what she was saying, has strong presence as Lady Susan’s American friend, Alicia.  Even Stephen Fry is bearable, as Alicia’s husband.  Fry’s acting is more conventional screen-Austen; the same is true, at a much more skilful level, of James Fleet’s and Jemma Redgrave’s – and this makes you aware of how well Stillman has orchestrated the performances.  The choice of familiar classical music on the soundtrack seems designed both to give us our bearings and to throw into relief the film’s distinctiveness.  I admire its stylistic wit and coherence more than I enjoyed watching Love & Friendship but Whit Stillman’s achievement in making a Jane Austen movie that stops short of being subversive yet feels fresh should not be underestimated.

    27 May 2016

    [1] Sanditon nevertheless spawned the 2013 TV series Welcome to Sanditon, set in a fictional Californian town.

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen_in_popular_culture

  • Sixty Six

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Weiland (2006)

    The story is a great idea so it’s all the more frustrating the film’s so poor – and probably ruins the chances of anyone else doing better with the subject in the foreseeable future.  Whatever your feelings about football now, it’s pretty unarguable that 30 July 1966 is the greatest date in English sporting history.  I’ve often been struck by how few films there are set on or around the day England won the World Cup.  There’s the documentary Goal! (1967) of course and the cinema spinoff of Till Death Us Do Part (1969) but I don’t know of anything else.  Sixty Six is about a North London boy whose Bar Mitzvah clashes with the World Cup Final but the divided loyalties scenario goes almost entirely to waste.   The opening credits archly explain that the film is ‘based on a true-ish story’; Wikipedia explains that it’s inspired by the Bar Mitzvah experience of the director Paul Weiland, born in 1953.  Perhaps that’s part of the problem.  Perhaps Weiland, knowing the heart of the material to be true, can’t see what an unconvincing screenplay Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor have made of his experience.

    It’s clear from a very early stage this is a script in trouble.   The opening voiceover by the protagonist, twelve-year-old Bernie Rubens, goes on for ages and amounts to an admission of failure:  Weiland and the scenarists can’t set up the boy’s situation or describe the important people in his life in any better way.  I knew what the story was about but I expected Bernie to be caught up in the football and at odds with parents who saw his Bar Mitzvah as the priority.  That would have been an obvious approach, however, and it’s potentially more interesting that he’s committed to preparing for a lavish Bar Mitzvah with a cast of hundreds – that he hates the England team with a passion and is longing to see them knocked out of the World Cup.  The most basic failing of the screenplay is that it never explains why Bernie is so obsessed with the Bar Mitzvah preparations.   Why does he believe it’s the most important day of his life?   It’s true that his elder brother Alvie had a big, successful Bar Mitzvah party two or three years ago but Alvie’s hardly someone for Bernie to look up to in other respects, and he’s not the apple of their parents’ eye.

    There’s next to no indication of what Bernie’s disloyalty to England means to the other boys he knows, or any sense of people at school or in his family beginning to think England might win the tournament.  (The fact that the closing stages of the World Cup happened during the summer holidays isn’t really an excuse.)   It was an understandably big deal for many people that England’s opponents in the final at Wembley were West Germany, only twenty years after the end of the War.  Watching the film, it’s hard not to think this must have had a particular poignancy for Jews but this is never hinted at.   At the end of the film, Bernie tells us that, thanks to what happens on the day of the final, he came to accept and love his eccentrically anxious, pessimistic father – as if his inability to do so has been the motor of Sixty Six.  There’s been next to no indication of this: Bernie finds his father socially embarrassing and gets frustrated by his neurotic frugality, but there’s no real antipathy, or even sustained tension, between them.

    Sixty Six should be comical and touching but instead of producing these effects it asserts them:  the comedy is cack-handed, the pathos laid on with a trowel.  Of course, the only way out of the dead end the story get into is for Bernie to realise at the eleventh hour that he wants England to win after all.  One of the few decent jokes comes when his father, making an extra-time dash to Wembley with his son, is stopped for speeding by a Scottish policeman who can’t appreciate the patriotic enthusiasm impelling their excessively swift progress.  The film’s climax is emotionally powerful but this is nothing to do with Bernie:  it’s because of what happened in the football – for most English people who can remember the day its uplifting nostalgia is irresistible.  Paul Weiland doesn’t make the most even of this imperishable material:  he omits indelible images like Bobby Moore wiping the sweat off his hands before shaking hands with the Queen and receiving the Jules Rimet Trophy and doesn’t replace them with anything comparably striking (except perhaps for the shot of Jimmy Greaves’ stricken face as he goes through the motions of joining in the celebrations at the end of the final).

    The coverage of the football often lacks the remembered texture of the 1966 World Cup.  It’s evident the film-makers haven’t been allowed to use the original television commentaries and mention of England’s crucial quarter-final against Argentina on the Saturday before the final is mysteriously omitted.   In spite of this, the newsreel and television excerpts from the matches hugely overpower everything else.  The next most interesting film is footage of (presumably) Paul Weiland’s own Bar Mitzvah over the closing credits.  Even the mock home-movie recording of Alvie’s Bar Mitzvah has a reality that’s missing from Bernie’s story, which should be the guts of the film.

    Although he’d directed features before this, Paul Weiland made his name in television sketch comedy (Alas Smith and Jones, Mr Bean) and it shows:  he completely fails to orchestrate the actors.   He allows Catherine Tate, for example, as Bernie’s Aunt Lila, to do a hideously obvious Jewish caricature.  (Aunt Lila is an inept cook so she must do all the catering for the Bar Mitzvah.)   Richard Katz, as the blind rabbi who instructs Bernie in the Torah, is unbearable and Stephen Rea can’t do much with Dr Barrie, who treats Bernie for asthma:  the scriptwriters seem to forget who this character is between one scene and the next.  Gregg Sulkin, in the main part, is a rather opaque performer, although he makes Bernie’s increasing unhappiness strong enough to be infectious (and, if his voice isn’t being dubbed, he sings well and affectingly at the Bar Mitzvah service).

    Eddie Marsan is such an odd-looking man that, as the melancholic paterfamilias Manny, he doesn’t need to do much to be a picture of paranoid misery and he plays the part with integrity.   But with so many crude cartoons around him, the effect of Marsan’s truthfulness makes the character of Manny tonally incongruous (and there’s one moment in his performance which seems really wrong:  when the inveterately gloomy Manny decides to be light-hearted at Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah he settles into the rhythms of telling a joke too easily – so that when someone else interrupts with the punchline it doesn’t work).   What I did like, however, was that the unprepossessing, socially incompetent Manny had a beautiful wife, Esther.  Helena Bonham Carter plays the role intelligently.  With the possible exception of Peter Serafinowicz, as Manny’s more gregarious and presentable brother, Bonham Carter is the only performer nuanced enough to negotiate the script’s shortcomings.  She somehow makes you believe that Esther would have been drawn to, and stayed with, Manny because of his doomed obsessiveness.  It drives her mad but it’s a big part of what makes her keep loving him.

    30 September 2011

     

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