Daily Archives: Thursday, July 28, 2016

  • The Grifters

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (1990)

    Stephen Frears’ best film to date is set in and around Los Angeles.  It’s about three swindlers:  Lilly (Anjelica Huston), her estranged son Roy (John Cusack), born to Lilly when she was only fourteen, and his lover Myra (Annette Bening).  Based on a Jim Thompson novel adapted for the screen by Donald E Westlake, The Grifters is well constructed and entertaining:  your awareness that it’s no more than that helps you to enjoy even more what the director and actors make of it.  Familiar film noir character types and lighting give us our bearings but Frears’ treatment adds blackish humour and emotional depth that take the material out of the ordinary.  In a skilful balancing act, he combines details so stylised that they’re funny (like the competitive strutting of Lilly and Myra) with scenes in which the danger inherent in the world the characters inhabit is expressed as startlingly real violence.  There’s extraordinary suspense in a sequence in which Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle), Lilly’s boss, terrifies her with violence which is at first threatened, then explodes, then – almost more powerfully – goes back under the surface.

    Occasionally the storytelling isn’t as clear as it might be but Frears handles his cast impeccably.  The age gap between Lilly and Myra – rather less than ten years – keeps changing before your eyes.  At first, the unfazeable, effervescent Myra seems generations younger but, once we learn that the golden age of her criminal career is some time past, we watch Myra’s discontent shading into desperation – not just in her actions but also in her face, where there are crows-feet and tensions we hadn’t noticed before.  Annette Bening shapes her performance superbly:  the more sexily daring, funny and charming Myra becomes, the more dangerous we realise she is – the development of this character has a relentless double charge.  When Myra’s laughing insouciance disappears, her impregnability goes with it.  Frears keeps shifting the balance of power between her and Lilly – and our perceptions of these two femmes fatales – so that we become less sure who’s who.  While Myra uses her sexuality as a weapon, Lilly uses hers as armour.  It’s Anjelica Huston’s (brilliant) achievement that, when Lilly means to look her hardest, we can see (and hear, in her nervy inflections) how brittle her edgy self-assurance is.  It’s when she lets us see her raw emotional attachment to Roy that Lilly’s neurotic power becomes intimidating.  Huston’s first, marvellously expressive appearance, walking up a small flight of stairs at a racecourse, tells us that Lilly is threatened and tough.  The film describes how, the more threatened she is, the more threatening she becomes.  (The climax of The Grifters demonstrates spectacularly the old adage that when the going gets tough the tough get going.)

    Roy can’t cope with these two dominating women but John Cusack isn’t overawed by the force of the two star female performances.  His less immediately exciting acting gives the film a pleasing balance and his more familiar human weakness keeps the director – and the viewer – from maintaining a smug distance from the story.  Lilly tells Roy that he’s too good for grifting (and for Myra); then she says he just hasn’t the stomach to be even a very small time con artist.  The intelligence and apprehension in Roy’s eyes tell us that Lilly is right on both counts.   Cusack subtly uses his somehow amorphous body (compared with the two women’s bodies, anyway) and funny, dry line readings to suggest Roy’s displaced insecurity.  He seems sure of himself only when he’s verbally laying into Lilly – when attack is the best means of defence for Roy (although Lilly still seems stronger).  Roy has chosen a criminal career to follow in his mother’s footsteps but he fights shy of partnership with either her or Myra.  Stephen Frears manipulates the predictable Oedipal theme wittily.  Sex as a means to the end of money is another unsurprising motif that’s ingeniously patterned and brought by Anjelica Huston to a memorably avid, ambivalent climax.  There are vivid performances in smaller roles from Gailard Sartain and J T Walsh (as, respectively, Roy’s and Myra’s mentors in crime) and, especially, from Pat Hingle as the psychopathic, bulldog-like Bobo.  Even the smallest parts are carefully cast (the racecourse tote clerks have exactly the right look of shopsoiled suspiciousness).  Everyone seems to be working in harmony:  Donald E Westlake has the knack of juxtaposing a clichéd line of dialogue (‘You didn’t have to do that’) with a more surprising rejoinder (‘I thought I did’); and the humorous, ominous score by Elmer Bernstein always serves the story well.  Photography by Oliver Stapleton.  Produced by Martin Scorsese.

    [1990s]

  • The Doors

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Oliver Stone (1991)

    This predictably bombastic film about the life and death wish of Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) is shot (by Robert Richardson) to give the audience the simulated, strobe-lit feel of a Doors concert and/or from the point of view of someone on a drugs trip (usually a bad one).  Yet the script by Oliver Stone and J Randall Johnson is a pitifully conventional musical biopic story, including obligatory bits like the moment the first hit was created (it’s always created in a moment) and a look-how-we’ve-sold-out-on-our-ideals routine.  Sometimes the collision of ‘unusual’ characters and these old chestnuts is quite funny:  one of Jim’s women, Patricia Kennealy (Kathleen Quinlan), is a photographer with a sideline in witchcraft and she and Jim go through some kind of bonding ceremony, presided over by coven dignitaries.  When Patricia gets pregnant, Jim wants her to have an abortion.  Her angry response is, ‘Those vows we made in front of the white priestess were for ever!’

    The Doors is monotonous but the monotone is distinctive:  it’s one of smug hysteria.  As Stone grinds on with descriptions of Jim Morrison’s outrageous behaviour in private and, in increasingly protracted sequences, his sensational onstage antics, your mind starts to wander in the murky supernatural ambience of the picture.  Is it the operation of karma that’s condemned Meg Ryan, after her irritating performance in When Harry Met Sally, to her present incarnation as Jim’s dopey (in every way) girlfriend Pam?  (Ryan is an annoying actress but no one deserves to come back in this low a form of screen life.)  When you return from this kind of speculation, you’ll likely find that Kyle MacLachlan (as Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboards player) has sprouted an unconvincing wig even longer than the one he had on when you last noticed.  MacLachlan seems sensibly to be trying to hide from view (although it’s some consolation that not even Oliver Stone can completely disguise this actor’s talent).  The biggest question posed by The Doors is:  does it have as many bad hairpieces as thankless roles?  Val Kilmer works hard as Jim but his performance is largely a feat of endurance.  The actor’s approach to the part contradicts the director’s:  Kilmer tries to play the man while Stone grandiosely wants Jim to embody the 1960s zeitgeist.  You end up with the worst of both worlds:  Kilmer’s interpretation leaves the icon shorn of mystique; Stone deprives his leading man of the means to humanise Jim Morrison.  (Kilmer is also on the receiving end of a particularly rotten bit of continuity.  As he travels to a concert, Jim’s fattening belly is exposed to the camera; by the time he’s on stage, he’s as trim as he was four years earlier.  Five screen minutes later, in the row over the witch-photographer’s unwanted pregnancy, Jim’s stomach is so distended that he looks to be expecting.)

    It’s just not possible to take this crass movie seriously if you also want to keep your temper.  It’s not unreasonable for Oliver Stone to present Jim Morrison as part exemplar, part victim and part transcendent observer of sixties American mores – if that’s how Stone thinks Morrison saw himself (though it’s hard to believe Morrison was as humourless in his pretensions as he seems here).  What’s intolerable in Stone’s point of view is its confusion of jejune hero worship, excited voyeurism and reactionary censoriousness.  He invites giggling appreciation of Jim’s extravagant, obscene rebelliousness by showing its effects on a series of establishment clods; then describes the glum aftermath – the price Jim pays for his behaviour (although Stone doesn’t appear to be interested in the price anyone else paid).  Stone shakes his head sadly as if to say, ‘Seriously, though, he did go too far – that was the trouble with the sixties’.  The logistics of recreating the Doors’ concerts are formidable: you’re staggered by the vast waste of effort that’s gone into presenting Jim Morrison as a boring performer and the era that he represents as one of relentless self-aggrandisement and pathological self-indulgence.  In spite of his Vietnam track record, Stone doesn’t relate the events on screen to a wider context – except in the obvious montage of sixties shockers:  the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (Stone is saving the pièce de résistance, the assassination of John F Kennedy, as the subject for his next modest little picture); the notorious footage of the napalmed South Vietnamese child; Charles Manson.  Jim watches this then sheds a tear, remarking, ‘I think I’m having a nervous breakdown’.  The line sounds ironic although the tear seems not to be:  this simple moment feels like Stone’s confirmation that Morrison, by now enervated, is really a compassionate soul, trapped on the 1960s wheel.  The consistent features of the direction are Stone’s determination to work the audience up (he has an undeniable knack for this) and evidence of his penchant for making himself feel superior to the people on the screen (spuriously so).  If this was the decade of the ‘me’ generation, Oliver Stone in The Doors proves himself a true child of the sixties.

    With so much sensational material to feed on, Stone doesn’t bother to develop characters or relationships or explain plot points.  Apart from an early seashore scene, when Ray Manzarek first hears Jim’s lyrics and they’re both immediately carried away by a mixture of creative and commercial ambition and their own rhetoric (Kyle MacLachlan brings this off with panache and pulls Val Kilmer along with him), you’re given no idea of what motivates or unites the Doors.  The two other members of the quartet, played by Frank Whaley and Kevin Dillon, are amiably bland boys-next-door:  in spite of their countercultural accoutrements, they seem more shocked by Jim’s stage performance than anyone in the concert audience.  Having neglected to establish the Doors as a unit, Stone inevitably fails to generate any life in their tensions or threatened disintegration.  There’s no description of Jim’s (let alone the group’s) musical development.  He recites lyrics to Ray on the beach because, he says, he can’t sing; we hear no more of how or when Jim changed his mind about this (rather appealing) inhibition.

    At the start of a performance in Los Angeles in 1969, at which Jim’s priapic rabble-rousing results in a prison sentence, a journalist speaking into his tape-recorder implies that the rock press are already writing the group’s musical obituary.  Yet the music doesn’t sound any worse (or better) than it ever did; and neither Morrison’s incitative act nor the other Doors’ reaction to it seems much different from earlier in their career (it’s just that the whole thing has become more hyperbolic and extended – perhaps because there are more naked women for the camera to notice).  It’s not clear why Pam is such a glutton for punishment; if she’s meant to be a reasonably articulate psychobabbler (as her first scene suggests) or just a dim, desperate groupie; whether she’s in love with Jim or with his celebrity.  Are we being asked to believe (did Jim and does Stone believe?) that the Native American shaman who died in a road accident when Jim was a child has entered Morrison’s soul?  Is this entity a ghost or a spirit guide or what?  When he’s been given a jail sentence in the US and the case is going to appeal, how does Jim disappear to Paris so easily – without anyone remarking on it?  How long has he been in Paris when he dies?  This lack of information wouldn’t be so noticeable if the screen wasn’t so unnecessarily helpful at other times in giving us our bearings (‘San Francisco, 1967’, ‘Père Lachaise Cemetery’, and so on).

    On a recent chat show appearance, Oliver Stone said what he really liked to do was make ‘all kinds of different films’.  Perhaps only a man who’s won two Best Director Oscars in the space of four years can tell such a whopper without flinching:  Stone always makes the same film – he just uses different sledgehammers.  (In The Doors, since much of the purple prose he would normally write has already been supplied by Jim Morrison, Stone has to assault the audience visually instead.)  Jim and Ray Manzarek first meet as students on a film school course at UCLA.  We see their classmates watching and deriding a film that Jim has made – it’s a montage of what’s presented as the received idea of student cinema arty-fartiness of the time (arbitrary footage of Nazi rallies, etc).  In a nerveless piece of casting, the UCLA class teacher is played by Oliver Stone.  It should be said in defence of Jim Morrison’s film-within-the-film that while it may be, like Stone’s work, pretentious and ridiculous, it is over relatively quickly.  In The Doors, The End is 140 minutes coming.

    [1990s]

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