Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • What’s Love Got to Do with It

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brian Gibson (1993)

    In the first scene of this Tina Turner biopic, the infant Tina – or Anna Mae Bullock as she was in those days – is the smallest but vocally by far the most theatrical member of a gospel church choir.  In spite of reprimands and looks that kill from the stern choir mistress, Anna Mae can’t help herself from going over the top when she’s singing – eventually she’s ejected from the church.  Seven-year-old Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly, as the little girl Tina, has an abandon as a performer that isn’t seen again in this film until, in its last scene, Brian Gibson inserts footage of the real Tina Turner on stage.  Putting the genuine article before the audience in this way will always tend to detract from the impression made by the impersonator in a biopic.  Here it merely confirms what I felt all the way through.  Angela Bassett as the adult Tina earns full marks for effort but something is wrong – something that makes her whole performance – especially when she’s singing (or, at least, miming to) the Turner songs – unnatural and alienating.  Bassett’s eyes are certainly smaller than Tina Turner’s.  I’m not sure that her other features are but they seem smaller – she overworks the muscles in her face as she tries to capture Turner’s own facial movements.  Bassett is primed for the performance of her life (she’s almost alarmingly muscular – much more so than the woman she’s playing, or the fifty-year-old version of her at any rate).  You can see that she’s studied Tina Turner conscientiously – and the thought, as well as the physical energy, she’s putting into an imitation of her.  But the effect of all this effort is relentlessly artificial.   Even when Angela Bassett isn’t singing, her acting is tense and overdone:  she strains to make every moment brilliant.  There’s no core to or fluency in what she’s doing – it’s one highlight after another.

    Laurence Fishburne as Ike Turner has the advantage that he doesn’t need to match up in the audience’s mind (or mine anyway) with an image of the original.  But the rhythm and variety of Fishburne’s acting is marvellous, and his sympathetic portrait of a man with deep psychological problems transcends the demonisation of Ike in Kate Lanier’s script.  As the film goes on, Ike’s every appearance puts you on edge:  this is, to some extent, an apprehension of violence – that he’s going to mete out more physical (or sexual) punishment to Tina.  But there’s more to it than that:  Ike is frightening not just because you don’t know what he’s going to do next (though you fear it won’t be good) but because Fishburne convinces you that Ike doesn’t know either.  His performance increasingly throws the film (and the audience) off balance because he makes Ike, rather than Tina, the main subject of interest.  What’s Love Got to Do with It has an hysterical, masochistic, I-will-survive tone that may or may not derive from the source material – the autobiography I, Tina (which she co-wrote with the movie’s ‘consultant’ Kurt Loder).  It’s not as enjoyable as singing star biopics often are and its overwrought quality feels fake.  Laurence Fishburne’s portrait of Ike Turner doesn’t.

    7 February 2012

  • What Richard Did

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lenny Abrahamson (2012)

    My prejudices meant that I found the lifestyle of Richard and his friends depressing long before the event occurs that turns their world upside down.  It wasn’t fundamentally the affluence of these sexually and socially confident teenagers that I backed away from – although being well off adds to their apparent self-assurance, and so makes them worse.   Jack Reynor is physically well cast as Richard Karlsen.  With his sharp blue eyes and snout, Reynor exudes a sense of fleshy entitlement.  A good-looking star of the first fifteen at his Dublin school, Richard is clearly someone to be reckoned with when he gets aggressive – and this proves to be the case, with lethal results.  There are unambiguous foreshadowings at an early stage of What Richard Did:  Lenny Abrahamson punctuates the scenes of the kids enjoying each other’s company and messing around with the occasional hostile, avid glint in Richard’s eye as he watches his rugby teammate Conor (Sam Keeley) and his girlfriend Lara (Roisin Murphy) together.  Richard likes the look of Lara and therefore thinks he has a right to her.  I found Richard not only intimidating but, although it’s hard on the excellent Jack Reynor to say this, repellent.

    Although it’s plain to see what Richard did, it’s often harder to hear what he says.  His inaudibility is the downside of the fine naturalistic acting that Abrahamson gets, from Reynor especially and from nearly everyone else in the film:  Roisin Murphy and Patrick Gibson, as the rookie in the rugby team, are particularly good.  The playing of Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother), as Richard’s father Peter, is a little more theatrical.  Peter decides to cover up what his son did; his guilty sobs at a memorial service for the ill-fated Conor (a relatively melodramatic scene all round) are enough to draw unwanted attention to him.  Mikkelsen is strong, though, in the sequence in which Richard admits responsibility for Conor’s death.  He didn’t mean to kill him although he did mean to kick him in the head.

    His mother (Lorraine Pilkington) thinks Richard can do no wrong:  she’s never seen again in the film once her son confesses to his father.  This striking omission is probably intentional.  Given the way Peter is behaving, Abrahamson and the screenwriter Malcolm Campbell (who has written mainly for television) would need to show the mother’s not noticing something’s up with her husband or her reaction to what he tells (or doesn’t tell) her:  either would be an inconvenient complication.  Campbell’s screenplay is adapted from a 2008 novel Bad Day in Blackrock by Kevin Power.   This was inspired by a real-life crime, the killing of a boy called Brian Murphy, kicked to death by school friends outside a Dublin night club in 2000.  Murphy’s death occurred when the Irish economy was riding high.  It’s possible that What Richard Did is set in this recent past but, if so, I didn’t pick that up and assumed it to be describing the Dublin of today; as a consequence, the emphasis on the characters’ material wealth – it seems that Peter Karlsen works in the financial sector – is a little surprising.

    I’ve read a couple of reviews of What Richard Did, by Philip French and Hannah McGill, which suggest that it’s an allegory about the financial decline of Ireland.  It’s hard to believe that anyone watching the film, other than a fully-briefed critic, would receive it as such but McGill adduces as evidence the fact that Richard’s father, who helps conceal his son’s crime, is Danish and that ‘Denmark helped to bail Ireland out with a €400 million bilateral loan in 2010’!   I hope this isn’t what Lenny Abrahamson had in mind.  But even if it was, and although I didn’t like this film, I’ll look out for what Lenny does next.

    19 January 2013

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