Sparkle
Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter (2007)
After we’d finished watching it, Sally mentioned that, according to Radio Times, Sparkle was worked up using a method of script-development-through-improvisation not dissimilar to Mike Leigh’s. Perhaps this is why the plotting is so poor. Sam Sparks is a young Scouser who wants to get out of Liverpool and into some kind of big time; the same goes for his mother Jill, still hoping for a late-blooming career as a singer. In the film’s opening scene, two London brothers, Vince and Bernie, and their aged father are eating in the bar-restaurant where Sam’s a waiter and Jill is about to perform. There seems no reason for the Londoners to be in Liverpool other than to get Sam and Jill on the motorway south and the story underway. In London, Vince gets Sam another waiting job: after an evening pouring fizz at a PR firm’s reception, he ends up in the bed of Sheila, the firm’s middle-aged boss. He becomes her PA as well as her lover. Then Sam meets a girl called Kate at another of Sheila’s events: unbeknown to him, Kate’s her daughter. Kate is politically engagé: given her verging-on-hostile feelings about her single mother and about Sheila’s self-serving, venal world, it’s surprising that Kate isn’t remotely suspicious as to how Sam has landed a job in her mother’s office. It’s necessary, though – so that in due course Kate can be devastated and break up with Sam. (This happens when she notices his familiarity with what lives where in Sheila’s kitchen.) The writer-directors Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter (neither of whom has any IMDB credits since Sparkle) appear to be aware that their wispy material is badly in need of shaping and pointing. They decide that chancer Sam needs to be taught a lesson and the last thirty minutes of Sparkle show him learning it. Since he has to find out for himself that Kate is Sheila’s daughter, I couldn’t see that Sam was as definitely and solely blameworthy as Hunsinger and Hunter wanted him to be.
During the first part of Sparkle I assumed that, once in London, Sam was going to get worked into a storyline involving more than personal relationships. I couldn’t believe this young man’s love life and the satellite relationships (between Jill and Vince, Sheila and Bernie – who turns out to be Kate’s father) were meant to be enough to sustain a feature film. By halfway through, I realised there wasn’t going to be anything substantially more and grew tired of the alternating slices of sitcom and soap used to move the story forward. Late on, though, I started to like the film more – partly because Hunsinger and Hunter refused to be fazed by the poverty of their material, partly because the cast is so thoroughly engaging. Shaun Evans is just about perfect as Sam. As well as showing a great deal of charm and wit, he also suggests Sam’s discomfort at finding that both his life and his feelings about other people are getting more complicated. Yet it’s Sam’s resilient desire that sees him through to a happy ending. Evans is an example of how difficult it is for a young British actor – even one who’s effective as both a romantic lead and a character player – to sustain a career in cinema, when that depends so heavily on making an impression in American movies. Evans is great in Endeavour and he was very good (he made watchable) the 2012 television adaptation of Blake Morrison’s bad novel The Last Weekend but his future now looks set to be on TV. (You can’t say ‘the small screen’ any more – their television is likely to be bigger than the screen on which many people watch films in the cinema.)
Although the conception of the role of Vince is condescending, there’s nothing of that quality in Bob Hoskins’s empathetic, amusing playing of this never-got-anywhere bachelor: it’s one of his best performances. As Jill (whom Vince adores from the moment he claps eyes on her in Liverpool), Lesley Manville, as usual, looks to be overdoing it but she stays in character so consistently (not to say insistently) that she seems true. Her singing is just right – it is good (and passionately felt) but you know it’s not good enough for Jill – ‘Sparkle’, as Vince eventually presents her on the flyers for her gig in Bethnal Green – to make it. Amanda Ryan is emotionally truthful as Kate and her unusual good looks match up well with Stockard Channing’s more eccentric attractiveness as Sheila. Channing is incisive and witty but, when Sheila and Sam are having their affair, you’re mainly conscious that Sheila is unhappy and capable of making others the same way: the relationship doesn’t have much life because it’s obvious that Sheila is a wicked queen and will have to be banished eventually to the periphery of the story. The dependably excellent Ellie Haddington plays Sheila’s wry, rueful office manager and John Shrapnel is Bernie. The characterisation of the gay couple with whom Kate lives – Anthony Head as her uncle Tony and Richard Cant as his boyfriend Adrian – is pretty desperate. Sparkle hits rock bottom during Adrian’s supposedly comical fit of hiccups.
9 October 2013