Daily Archives: Saturday, June 11, 2016

  • The Comedian

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom Shkolnik (2012)

    Tom Shkolnik, whose first feature this is, says in Sight & Sound that he wanted:

    ‘… to make a film about a London that I could recognise … about people who were poor but not starving, living on estates but not in council housing, who were foreign but not asylum seekers, black but not gang members, gay but not camp.’

    He succeeds – or convinced me that he succeeds.  I’ve never been on a night bus or in a London club late at night but I believed the scenes in The Comedian that take place in these locations – thanks to Shkolnik’s skilful staging and direction of his actors, especially Edward Hogg as the title character, Ed, through whose eyes the viewer experiences much of what’s on screen.  The S&S reviewer, Ben Walters, compares The Comedian with, as well as movies about screwed-up comedians (or would-be comedians), ‘recent films taking a broadly naturalistic perspective on the emotional and psychological challenges of alienated late-capitalist identity’.  I’m less convinced by this.  Of course there are aspects of the Hogg character that reflect the time and place in which the story is happening:  how Ed expresses his sexuality, for example, would have been different in the London of twenty years ago and might be different even today in Ed’s home city of Sheffield, to which he briefly returns to visit his family.  If the economic weather was finer, thirty-two-year-old Ed might do better than working in a call centre, selling, or usually failing to sell, cancer insurance to women.  But The Comedian is essentially a single-character study and Ed, who’s unable to get things to work out in either his private or his public life, seems more humanly credible than a product of his environment.  He doesn’t have a personality disorder but it’s unhappily clear that his deep-seated selfishness and dissatisfaction make him sometimes petulant, sometimes incapable of rousing himself to feel any emotion at all.  Ed’s failures, and their causes, are not unusual yet Shkolnik and Hogg make him individual.

    Although Ed wants to break through on the stand-up comedy circuit, the film’s title is somewhat misleading.   Not only is Ed not much of a comedian; there’s not even much of him trying to be one – just a couple of short routines:  the first doesn’t go down a storm, the second is worse.   Ed’s problem is that he’s not funny.  His material isn’t bad but his shouty, aggressive performing style is rigid and alienating enough to exclude the possibility of laughter.   (Although he does get a few titters:  famous comedians of a different era talk on chat shows about the traumatising hostility of audiences, particularly on the Northern club circuit, but what Shkolnik shows here – it’s a real audience in a real comedy club – is closer to my experience of sitting in a theatre audience with people overeager to sound as if they’re enjoying themselves and, to put it more kindly, to encourage the performer.)  Whether Ed’s style is attack-as-the-best-means-of-defence or an expression of underlying anger (or both) isn’t made clear, and it’s the more interesting for that.

    It’s also particularly difficult here to separate the character from the actor.   According to Ben Walters, Edward Hogg devised the material.  It seems that his routine was inserted into the club line-up as if Hogg was a real stand-up – so that, according to Charles Gant’s piece in S&S about the film’s development, when Ed sits in the gents immediately after his routine and hears it rubbished by the club emcee, it was crushing for Hogg too.  This experience, and what happens in Ed’s personal life immediately afterwards, are sufficient to put an end to the stand-up for the rest of the film but perhaps Ed will resume it (as with all good characters, you believe he has a life beyond the closing credits).  In Sheffield, his family ask him to do a bit of comedy and he tells one dim, old joke which raises loyal chuckles.  There are other opportunities, though, for the audience to see how amusing Ed can be offstage – most noticeably in the first sequence on a night bus where Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a young(er) man who was in the comedy club audience and recognises Ed, starts talking to him.  This is the start of a sexual relationship between Ed and Nathan (who paints) which produces the most dynamic scenes in The Comedian, including a second one on the upper deck of a bus.  Some girls in seats nearby start up what seems at first a jokey conversation but then builds to a homophobic rant.   The exchange focuses increasingly on two black characters, Nathan and his female adversary (Azara Meghie) and is a good example of Shkolnik’s success in showing people doing things that ring true but which, in terms of what you expect to see on screen, are fresh and surprising.

    The bus journey is the end of the road for Ed’s relationships both with Nathan, who wants more from him emotionally, and with Ed’s flatmate Elisa (Elisa Lasowski), who desires him physically in a way that’s not reciprocated.  Elisa is a French singer-songwriter who performs her material in pubs and has no better prospects than Ed has of making the big time.   There’s a sequence in which they’re in bed together.  Ed seems to find the affectionate proximity comforting but his sexual passion is reserved for Nathan.   (The bed scene with Elisa takes place after Ed’s vigorous first night of sex with Nathan at the latter’s studio.)  Ed swings both ways in an unusual way (again, unusual in terms of what you’re used to seeing at the cinema).  He’s not exactly bisexual but he needs a close relationship with a woman as well as with a man.   The detail of the personality that Edward Hogg creates is very persuasive.  Ed is also capable of comedy at the call centre, when his manager Jamie (Jamie Baughan) gets him and his colleague Steven to practise a telephone sales pitch.  The increasingly exasperated Jamie is infuriating to Ed largely because he’s not unreasonable – as when Ed angrily asks if he’s expected to look to be enjoying his boring job.  Jamie replies that he’s not – but it’s work:  does Ed expect to enjoy it?   Ed’s realisation that Jamie has got a point intensifies his frustration and brings out his childishness.  Jamie Baughan suggests that Jamie is aware of how boring he looks and sounds, and this adds to the complexity of the later call centre scenes.  Steven is played by Steven Robertson – in a minor part, although he also features in crucial scenes away from the office and is good, as he was in Neds.

    It will be obvious from the above that the characters are named for those playing them.   I’m never keen on this – the implication that the actors are themselves seems pointless, even insulting to their creativity.  All the cast in The Comedian are interesting to watch, even when something strikes you as wrong.   One of the few performers I remember seeing before, Gerard Murphy, is striking as Ed’s father in the scene at the family home in Sheffield.   Murphy’s hand movements as he reads to his son from a newspaper are oddly elaborate and distracting; all in all, this Independent reader seems not to go with the other members of Ed’s family.   Yet there’s an unspoken connection between him and his son and the father’s incongruousness in his own home makes his son’s misfit quality seem inherited.  In the film’s final sequence, as Ed takes a mini-cab ride home on his return from Sheffield to London, he chats with the driver (Nyasha Hatendi).  Edward Hogg shows you Ed’s relief at relating for a short while to someone who he’s never going to see again.  Then, as the conversation continues and gets deeper, Ed’s melancholy seeps back in and the driver’s words occasionally spark his hostility.  Perhaps this sequence goes on a bit too long – it’s ten minutes out of only seventy-nine in toto and the driver’s words become gradually more resonant in a somewhat too conclusive way – but it gives Hogg a climactic opportunity to express Ed’s shifting emotions, and he takes it.

    There’s hardly a moment when Ed doesn’t seem to have divided feelings.  When, for example, he and Nathan take a bath together Ed shows a mixture of physical tenderness and incipient disappointment.   Although the dialogue has been developed from extended improvisation (there was no script as such), this is a case where I can accept the actors’ searching for what to say next, and sometimes failing to say something that makes sense, because it chimes with the characters’ uncertainty.  In a rather similar way, the film has a street-cred that goes beyond the fact that it was made on a low budget and that Tom Shkolnik insisted on one-take-only throughout.   I especially liked his use of neon lights in darkness, whether inside in a club or outside in the London streets or, finally, in a virtual combination of the two, as Ed sits in the back of the minicab.    The warmth of the lights on the road ahead and the anonymity of the darkness are appealing but Ed, as he looks into them, can’t see where he’s going.

    1 June 2013

  • The Color Purple

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (1985)

    Anticipating the film’s release, Spielberg was quoted in The New York Times as feeling anxious about ‘doing a movie about people for the first time in my career’.   It seems unlikely that he really thought he hadn’t made a human-centred film before this one but The Color Purple, adapted by Menno Meyjes from the prize-winning novel by Alice Walker, was certainly a change of tack.  The director’s understandable apprehension turned out to be both unjustified and justified.   The Color Purple did very well commercially and received or was short-listed for many awards – although it won none of the eleven Oscars for which it was nominated.  The same thing had happened to The Turning Point only eight years previously but, more notoriously, Spielberg wasn’t even nominated for the Best Director Oscar in spite of winning the Screen Directors Guild award for the film.  (This was a first at the time.  Only Ron Howard for Apollo 13 (1995) and Ben Affleck for Argo this year have so far followed in Spielberg’s footsteps.  Argo is the only film to have won both the Best Picture Oscar and what’s now the Directors Guild of America award with no Oscar nomination for the director.)   The history of the Academy Awards is littered with decisions which are surprising at the time and ludicrous in retrospect but on this occasion the SDG look to be the ones who got it wrong.   The Color Purple is chaotic – much worse than I remembered (having seen it once before, probably around 1990) – and the uncharacteristically uncertain direction is the root cause.

    Spielberg’s need to prove to his audience that he is dealing with ‘grown-up’ themes makes the first twenty minutes or so of The Color Purple tough to watch.   The story, which is set mostly in rural Georgia, begins in 1909 (and ends in the 1940s).   The heroine Celie (played as a teenager by Desreta Jackson and as an adult by Whoopi Goldberg, in her first substantial screen role) gives birth to her second child.  Like her first, this one’s father is also her own father (although it eventually transpires that this man was Celie’s stepfather).   The baby daughter to whom she gives birth at the start of the film is taken away from Celie, as her baby son also was.   A young widower called Albert Johnson (Danny Glover), referred to mostly as ‘Mister’, wants to marry Celie’s prettier sister Nettie (Akosua Busia) but the girls’ father says that only Celie is on offer and  Albert accepts that offer.  From the start of their marriage he treats Celie more or less as a slave and as something to have sex with, and he often physically abuses her.  Nettie comes to live with the household to avoid the sexual depredations of her father but she soon has to contend with Albert instead and, when she refuses to have sex with him, he throws her out.  This prologue, which ends with the separation – for a second time – of the two sisters, is a catalogue of physical and sexual violence.  Although it’s gruelling – and although Spielberg is stressing too soon the resilient humanity of Celie and Nettie (with their melting smiles and tears and injections of Quincy Jones’s supposedly uplifting music) – the opening section of The Color Purple is at least coherent.

    Once Spielberg moves into the main narrative of Celie’s marriage and personal development, he begins to interleave slabs of racial drama with broad comedy sequences.  It’s hard to dismiss Albert easily after watching his violence towards Celie and Nettie but there are tired, unfunny displays of his domestic ineptitude:  trying to get himself dressed up to meet Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), the Honky Tonk singer Albert’s crazy for;  attempting to cook breakfast for Shug when she comes to stay.  I’ve not read the novel:  perhaps Spielberg and Menno Meyjes were trying to reproduce a world of teeming incident and rapidly shifting moods that Alice Walker creates on the page but, if so, the effect on screen is very clumsy.   I’m more inclined to think that, while conscientiously describing the trials and tribulations of Celie and the other women in this feminist story (most notably Albert’s dauntlessly feisty daughter-in-law Sofia (Oprah Winfrey)), Spielberg was also straining to find warmth and humour in the material.   The Color Purple is supposedly faithful to the original so perhaps the climax – even Albert plays his part in effecting Celie’s reunion with Nettie and the children she hasn’t seen since their birth – is not an invention on the part of the film-makers.   But because a happy ending – if possible, a happy family ending – is just what you’d expect Spielberg to be determined to deliver (at this stage of his career, anyway), it feels as if he’s engineered it.     The fields of flowers that are a recurrent image of beautiful hope in The Color Purple begin to reflect instead what seems to be Spielberg’s tendency to prettify.  This film was also a first for him in that it focused on African-American lives, and there’s an unfortunate convergence of his own childlike quality and the Hollywood tradition of presenting black characters as lovably simple.

    The novel is not inordinately long (around 300 pages) and the film is lengthy (154 minutes) but you sometimes get the impression that it’s been rather desperately abbreviated:  Spielberg’s storytelling here is less fluent than in any other picture of his that I can bring to mind.   If he was anxious to de-emphasise the lesbian aspect this was a bad decision.  It’s unclear in the film that the growth in Celie’s self-confidence is closely connected to her sexual relationship with Shug Avery – Celie is painfully awkward and timorous for the best part of two hours then abruptly becomes articulate and self-possessed.   (Her wardrobe in the later stages suggests equally sudden wealth – after she’s escaped from Albert, Celie starts up a successful dressmaking business in Tennessee but, even allowing for that, the transition is instant.)   Sofia, who spends years in prison for striking a white man, sits at a Thanksgiving dinner table years later grey-haired, drowsy and confused – misery seems to have caused her to lose her mind.  She perks up as soon as Celie starts to speak hers and appears to be in fine health in all her subsequent scenes.

    There’s a good deal of hurried, heavy-handed exposition in the closing stages.  According to the plot synopsis of the novel on Wikipedia, Alice Walker gives much more coverage to Nettie’s life as a missionary in Africa (with Celie’s two children there too).  In the movie, there’s no news of Nettie until one of the letters she’s been regularly sending finds its way, thanks to Shug, into Celie’s hands instead of Albert’s.  Celie then discovers the stash of letters which he’s kept hidden from her.  (It seems unlikely that he would have kept these rather than destroying them immediately – perhaps the pretext is that he’s always had a grain of human kindness in him …)  Spielberg then begins to cross-cut between Nettie’s descriptions of life in Africa and Celie’s back in Georgia.  There’s a particularly lurid example of this in an episode featuring Celie’s children undergoing some kind of tribal initiation in Africa and Celie, who has to shave Albert every day, preparing to cut her husband’s throat (she’s prevented by Shug, who has a premonition and gets remarkably quickly from out in the fields to stay Celie’s hand on the razor).  This cross-cutting is unfortunately typical of Spielberg’s approach in parts of The Color Purple, creating crudely effective ‘filmic’ suspense but cheapening the material being used for that purpose.    I didn’t understand anyway why Celie gets increasingly murderous feelings towards Albert (she goes for him with the carving knife for the Thanksgiving turkey too) just at the point at which she’s discovered that Nettie is still alive and where her children are – and that she herself therefore has something to live and hope for.

    Both Desreta Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg interpret Celie’s cowering shyness and innocence too deliberately.  Although occasionally touching, they take an age to complete a gesture or expression:  perhaps in an attempt to keep Celie’s intelligence under wraps, they suggest instead that she can move her limbs and facial muscles only very slowly.   Whoopi Goldberg is much better once Celie begins to assert herself and the tempo of her behaviour is closer to Goldberg’s own quick-wittedness as a performer.   Her final scream of ‘Nettie!’ when she sees her sister again is affecting, even though the arrangement of the other women on Celie’s porch at the start of this sequence is bizarre (are nearly all the main characters living together by now?)   Margaret Avery makes a strong impression in her early scenes as Shug but there’s so little connection between these and most of her later appearances – where Shug (short for ‘Sugar’) is soignée and supportive in a rather bland way – that I really thought this was a different character at first.   Rae Dawn Chong barely registers as a younger, mixed-race woman, Squeak, who wants to be a singer like Shug.   Although the trajectory of Sofia’s recovery is baffling, Oprah Winfrey is consistently vivid:  she gives a lift to nearly every scene she’s in.  Sofia is let out of jail to work as a maid and car driver for the breathlessly neurotic Miss Millie, played by Dana Ivey as if to demonstrate that white women, as well as being insensitive racists, are bad actresses too.  Among the men, Danny Glover does his best in the thankless role of Albert, as does Willard Pugh as his son Harpo.  Albert’s father – ‘Old Mister’ – is played by Adolph Caesar, who died very shortly after the film was released.  In a smaller role, Laurence Fishburne is more or less wasted but magnetic nevertheless.

    26 October 2013

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