Daily Archives: Friday, July 29, 2016

  • The Untouchables

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brian De Palma (1987)

    The long-running television series metamorphosed into a remarkably pared-down and well-paced two hours of cinema.  The writer, David Mamet, has squeezed the life out of sensational material before (The Postman Always Rings Twice):  perhaps he means to demonstrate here that Prohibition-era Chicago is no longer so much an historical time and place as a part of American film-going experience – that Al Capone and Eliot Ness have become pop culture artefacts rather than real people.  Reinterpretation of this kind isn’t much help to a film aimed at a mass audience but – after a tentative start in which the scenes lack momentum and don’t build cumulatively – Brian De Palma’s crowd-pleasing direction galvanises the screenplay; and the character types which Mamet has written are played with zest enough to individualise them.  Throughout the picture, De Palma shows more skill (and interest) in the bits of the story that present opportunities for bravura; happily for him and the audience, the second half of The Untouchables seems to consist almost entirely of these (the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence at the railway station is particularly exciting).

    The teamwork of the actors – most of them playing members of a team – gives the film heart.  Sean Connery memorably brings the aging, honourable Irish-American cop Jim Malone to life (and death).  Although the script presents Malone as just-an-ordinary-cop, Connery’s physical authority and broad, juicy characterisation turn him into an emotionally powerful figure.  The actor’s evident relish for the role and affection for Malone are infectious.  As the young Italian-American sharpshooter Joe Stone (real name Giuseppe Petri), Andy Garcia is well cast physically and has star magnetism.  (This is the film through which both Garcia and Kevin Costner broke into the big time.)  Garcia’s face and compact body are primed for action.  His dark eyes flash; he draws his gun equally quickly.  Garcia also suggests Stone’s private feelings behind his professional persona – he’s nervelessly efficient fighting crime but caught off guard by his growing attachment to the rest of Eliot Ness’s team and Malone especially.  (Even when the dialogue makes this explicit, Garcia is still touching.)

    At first, Costner’s Ness is a bit drab and too unsure of himself:  concentrating on making the hero a believable ordinary man, Costner makes him less than credible as a leader of other men.  He’s also unlucky in the domestic scenes in that Patricia Clarkson, as Ness’s perfectly supportive wife, is hardly a helpful acting partner.  Treating her husband with (bizarre) patient condescension, she’s one artificially gracious smile after another.  Once Ness has got Malone and Stone on his side, though, Costner’s less exciting presence provides a good balance to Connery’s and Garcia’s.  Costner is particularly effective in reacting quietly to the murder of the fourth member of the team, the timid, pasty-faced Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), an accountant who suddenly finds a gun instead of a ledger in his hand.  Robert De Niro’s Al Capone is a highly entertaining, expertly judged mixture of flamboyant hypocrite and psychopathic spoiled child.  This Capone knows everyone knows what he’s capable of and he keeps reminding them:  you sense this in the Chicago pressmen’s nervous laughter when Capone cracks a joke, in the anxiously acquiescent noises of a gathering of fellow hoods listening to his cant.  (Capone illustrates his moral philosophy here by clubbing the head of one of the hoods at the dinner table.)

    Ennio Morricone’s score is a beguiling if somewhat crazy mixture of themes.  When De Palma has familiar, inspirational, virtue-triumphant music playing during a gory gun battle, the purpose seems to be to reassure – as if subconsciously feeling that you’ve heard a scene before will make the violent visuals less troubling.  Perhaps De Palma deploys Mamet’s script in an analogous way – that is, he uses this anodyne as a sedative then administers his own dynamic medicine to wake you up and, in the end, get you high.  The cast also includes the excellent Jack Kehoe.

    [1990s]

  • The Silence of the Lambs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Demme (1991)

    Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs is about two serial killers.  One, known as Buffalo Bill, who flays the corpses of his female victims, is on the loose.  The other, Dr Hannibal (‘the Cannibal’) Lecter, has been incarcerated for his crimes.  The killer on the outside becomes increasingly pathetic.  The one inside is a more and more potent force.  Harris develops this theme both through the plotting of the story and in a double psychological sense.  It’s not just that Lecter can lead the police to their quarry (through a combination of intuition of the workings of a pathological mind and, even handier, personal acquaintance of the man who is Bill).  Harris leaves the reader with an inescapable sense that the unfathomable dark of the doctor’s psyche is more frightening than the grisly deeds of Buffalo Bill, which are expressions of personal weakness.  Bill is a somewhat garish variant on the modern public perception of the typical serial killer:  he’s an apparently unremarkable, violently frustrated blot on a grungy, anomic landscape and the victim of traumatising arrested development.  His misfit quality is made explicit in the fact that he is also a wannabe transsexual.  It’s all a bit much but Harris works Bill’s sexual peculiarity into the plot so ingeniously that it doesn’t seem a sensational flaw – not while you’re reading the book, anyway.

    Dr Lecter, in contrast, doesn’t at all conform to the anonymous, aberrant no-hoper image of the multiple murderer.  He’s an eminent psychiatrist, a classical music lover and a gourmet.  He wines and dines the members of a top orchestra twenty-four hours after eating one of their colleagues.  Lecter is a striking conception precisely because he’s not a desperate, emotionally deprived outsider:  he made a highly successful living within cultured affluent society – yet he went way beyond biting the hand that fed him.  Thomas Harris seems to want Hannibal Lecter to symbolise an evil that’s inherent in human beings, however otherwise civilised they become.  (Lecter doesn’t lose his cordon bleu values even when the meal is human flesh.)  The book contains a wealth of detailed description of police procedure.  Harris adopts a measured, melancholy narrative voice (it’s as if he feels compelled to tell the tale though it pains him to do so).  His portrait of the pivotal character of the young FBI trainee special agent Clarice Starling is incisive and sympathetic.  (On the hunt for Buffalo Bill, Clarice, when she interviews Lecter, is made to feel, through his spooky psychological insights, that she’s the hunted one.)  These elements combine to give The Silence of the Lambs such an absorbing and substantial context that Lecter is not a safely stylised evil genius:  he’s linked, alarmingly, to a believable world.

    The screen adaptation of Harris’s novel, although somewhat anomalous in Jonathan Demme’s filmography, is highly effective.  The skilful screenplay by Ted Tally is faithful to the book.  There are strong performances from Jodie Foster (as Clarice), Scott Glenn (as her FBI boss) and Ted Levine (as Buffalo Bill).  What’s most striking about the film, however, is that it has popularly established Hannibal Lecter as the scariest character to appear in a mainstream movie since Norman Bates, over thirty years ago.  This is remarkable largely because Lecter is much less disturbing on the screen than on the page.  There’s now an actor between the audience and the monster – a familiar and accomplished actor who, in this role, is having the entertaining time of his big-screen life.  Anthony Hopkins’s Lecter has insinuating charm all right but it’s less unnerving than the charm transmitted through the more elusive mediating sensibility of the novel’s narrative voice.  Hopkins is understandably grateful to the character for supplying him with a smash hit and a new level of prestige and celebrity.  By the time The Silence of the Lambs was released in Britain, we’d already seen him humorously impersonating Lecter on chat and awards shows – domesticating Hannibal the Cannibal.

    [1990s]

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