Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 1, 2016

  • Sister Kenny

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dudley Nichols (1946)

    Elizabeth Kenny (1880-1952) was an Australian nurse whose methods of treating polio, in the days before mass vaccination, brought her into decades of conflict with the orthopaedic surgery establishments of Australia and, subsequently, America.  (According to Wikipedia, Kenny’s methods of muscle rehabilitation formed the basis of modern physiotherapy.)  In this biopic – made during her lifetime (and presumably while she was still working) – Sister Kenny is incarnated by Rosalind Russell, whose performance is fascinating and eventually impressive.  Russell has natural authority and expresses it economically.   She also occasionally uses her comic skills to unusual effect here – rattling off a long sentence of medical polysyllables with a straight face.  When we first see the heroine at work as a bush nurse in the early years of the twentieth century (the passage of time is confusing in these early stages, and the story tends to lurch forward throughout), Russell easily gets across Liz Kenny’s benignant bossiness.   Russell is too keen, though, to display her acting powers in the emotionally fraught sequences of Kenny’s treating infantile paralysis.  Her voice communicates the anxiety she’s feeling so emphatically that it would surely have frightened the little girl who lies in bed unable to move her limbs.

    Kenny’s passionate commitment to her work matters to her more than either being liked or personal happiness with her patient beau, Kevin Connors.    The scenes between these two are consistently good (even their clumsily conceived brief reunion in London during the Munich crisis of 1938).  Dean Jagger’s Connors is a fine blend of tenderness and exasperation; when she’s with him, Russell gives us a sense of Liz Kenny’s conflicted feelings.  Elsewhere, she’s too unvaryingly harsh.  We can see that Sister Kenny’s uncompromising manner gets up the nose of a medical establishment (represented by an eminent orthopaedic surgeon played by Philip Merivale) scandalised by the idea that a woman – a nurse without a degree – could have anything to teach them.  It’s harder to see why her loyal supporters (epitomised by a Queensland GP played by Alexander Knox) don’t experience greater resistance towards her.

    The real surprise and achievement of the movie is Rosalind Russell’s playing of the older Kenny.  (The ageing make-up for her, Jagger and Knox is exceptionally good.).  Instead of acting elderly, Russell retains her upright carriage and forthright walk but she tones down her earlier stridency.  She’s much more natural and comfortable playing a woman twenty years or more older than she herself was when she made the film.  No one attempts an Australian accent (Liz Kenny is of Celtic  stock and it would have been better if some of the older members of the cast hadn’t attempted Scottish or Irish accents).  In Russell’s case it’s a real positive – an expression of Sister Kenny’s proud non-conformism – although there were times (especially when he’s in military uniform) that I found myself forgetting that Dean Jagger was meant not to be an American.  The script by Dudley Nichols, Alexander Knox and Mary McCarthy (a different one), based on the memoir And They Shall Walk which Kenny wrote with Martha Ostenso, is full of the clichés of the genre but Nichols treats the material with likeable earnestness.  He spends a good deal of screen time showing the actual medical treatments.  Perhaps audiences got frustrated by this and by Sister Kenny’s singleness:  Wikipedia says the film lost RKO $660,000.

    25 January 2013

  • The Crying Game

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Neil Jordan (1992)

    Neil Jordan deservedly won an Oscar (and several other awards) for the screenplay of The Crying Game.  He tells an unusual and compelling story with interesting themes.  The script is cleverly structured and the dialogue is excellent, fluently naturalistic but imaginative and pointed when it needs to be.   Seeing it again for the first time in more than twenty years, I had no difficulty understanding why the film was a commercial as well as a critical success on its original release.  Yet there are aspects of The Crying Game that make it hard to watch now as if for the first time, even after such a long interval.  First, the story pivots on a memorable surprise revelation – a visual and psychological shock.  Second, the film was made during the Irish troubles:  the key event in the plot is the kidnap of a British soldier by Irish Republicans, who hold him hostage.  Even though Jordan uses the political context as context – for the interactions between characters whose motivations are sometimes more complex than their membership of the British army or the IRA might imply – there must still have been, for audiences in 1992, a dangerous edge to the political setting, an edge which the intervening years has done something to wear away.  This still powerful and in many ways impressive movie is unusual in another way too.  Neil Jordan must have known how he wanted to realise the script he’d written.  I wonder, though, if The Crying Game might have been even better with a different director.

    The black Londoner soldier Jody (Forest Whitaker), who’s had a bit too much to drink, meets a young woman at a funfair in Northern Ireland.  She lures him with the promise of sex to an apparently deserted spot close by.  As they nestle down in the grass, another man puts a gun to Jody’s head.   The man is Fergus (Stephen Rea), the bait is Jude (Miranda Richardson) and they’re members of an IRA cell.   They hold Jody captive, threatening to kill him in three days’ time if their demands for the release of IRA colleagues from prison aren’t met.   During these three days, Fergus and Jody develop some kind of mutual affection.  By the time the hour of execution arrives, and the cell leader Maguire (Adrian Dunbar) instructs Fergus to shoot Jody, Fergus is ambivalent, to say the least.  Sensing this uncertainty, Jody tries to escape:  he succeeds in getting away from Fergus but, dashing across a road, is knocked down and killed by a Saracen armoured personnel carrier, which is about to penetrate the IRA safe house.  (The irony that Jody’s death is caused by British soldiers rather than IRA captors is too pat but the sequence is well staged:  it’s one of the rare instances in the film where the direction is better than the script.)   Out in woodland where he took Jody to shoot him, Fergus watches the safe house being strafed.   When we next see him, he’s in London, having taken a job there as a labourer and a new name, Jim.   It’s not clear whether he assumed that the other cell members died in the safe house (Maguire and Jude at least survived) but Fergus is in no hurry to renew IRA connections.  He feels compelled to keep his promise to Jody, to find the soldier’s girlfriend Dil, whose photo Jody always carried with him.

    The heart of The Crying Game is in this opening half hour.  As you watch it, the episode sometimes feels too emphatic.  It’s very obvious that Jody is getting into Fergus’s head, making him aware of his mixed feelings.  I recalled from the first time I saw the film the impact of Forest Whitaker particularly.   He speaks his lines much less naturally than I’d remembered (and his London accent is a bit weird) but Whitaker’s presence is so strong that it resonates throughout the film.  (Jody is a keen cricketer:  Jordan doesn’t need subsequent dream sequences of him in cricket whites, running up to bowl, in order to keep Whitaker in your mind.)  As the story progresses, however, there are problems with the other main performances – a serious defect in a character-driven movie like this.  The lack of connection between Fergus/Jim and Dil (Jaye Davidson), who turns out to be transsexual (his genitals, as he strips for lovemaking with Fergus are the shock revelation), is a particular issue.    Stephen Rea gets across Fergus’s decency – the quality that Jody and, eventually, Dil both perceive in him – and his divided loyalties, although Rea’s sleepy, passive manner means that Fergus’s guilty conscience isn’t dramatised as fully as you might wish.  Jaye Davidson, seen in retrospect, raises questions similar to the ones Anthony Perkins raises in repeated viewings of Psycho:  were audiences who didn’t know how the character turned out really taken in?   I guess the answer is yes, in both cases – but the thickness of Davidson’s wrists and Dil’s mannerisms (he looks to be straining to be more feminine than a woman) are a bit of a clue.

    The similarity to Perkins ends when it comes to acting:  although Davidson is an extraordinary pictorial image, he’s weak in other respects.  He doesn’t give you any real sense of Dil’s feelings for Jody (who knew that Dil was male).  There’s no depth or variation in his reading of the lines.  Davidson is affecting once Dil’s hair is shorn; dressed in cricket whites, he has a weightless quality.  But themes of sexual ambiguity (and ambivalence) were already familiar from earlier Neil Jordan movies by the time The Crying Game was made and Davidson’s look, as a woman, too much recalls that of the lesbian played by Cathy Tyson in Mona Lisa   If Miranda Richardson could have lent Davidson a bit of her histrionic energy they would both be better.  As Jude, Richardson is too much – she’s like herself doing a hyperkinetic spoof of a femme fatale in a more conventional political thriller.  Adrian Dunbar does well as the IRA ringleader but Tony Slattery and Ralph Brown, in small but showy parts, are as bad as you’d expect.  The most complete and satisfying characterisation comes from Jim Broadbent, before he’d become a big-time actor, as the wry, shrewdly reserved barman at the Metro club, which is a key location in the London part of the film.

    The choice of songs is mostly excellent although the closing ‘Stand By Your Man’, when Dil visits Fergus in prison, isn’t quite right – it’s almost laughingly apt and the effect is cheapening. The song is meant to complement ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ over the opening titles but that first number is so strong and, given what happens in the course of the film, so ironically resonant that it’s still playing in your head at the end.  It makes ‘Stand By Your Man’ redundant.   The three versions of ‘The Crying Game’ – Dil performing it on the Metro stage, the Dave Berry original playing on a cassette recorder, Boy George singing beautifully, over the closing credits, a version produced by Pet Shop Boys and Anne Dudley – complement each other well.  Dudley’s original score fits with the sensuous heft of Neil Jordan’s direction yet both are almost unnecessary.  The story and the people in The Crying Game are so remarkable that Jordan doesn’t need to stress their extraordinariness in this way.

    8 March 2014

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