Monthly Archives: November 2016

  • Weiner

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg (2016)

    This is the latest high-profile documentary of recent years to end up with a story dramatically different from what the film-makers expected when shooting began.  (The Queen of Versailles and The Armstrong Lie are others in the series.)  Anthony Weiner was elected for seven consecutive terms as a Democrat Congressman in New York before his resignation in 2011, in the light of a sex scandal that involved his sending lewd photos of himself from his public Twitter account to women he’d met online.  Weiner launched a comeback by running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York in 2013; Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg started making a fly-on-the-wall documentary about his mayoral campaign.  Weiner is riding high in the polls until the emergence of evidence of his online sexual activity after his resignation from Congress.  His poll ratings plummet; he’s encouraged by some advisers to pull out of the race; but he keeps going to the bitter end.  (He finished fifth, with a measly 4.9% of the vote, in the primary election poll topped by Bill de Blasio.)  And Kriegman and Steinberg – except for just a couple of occasions when Weiner asks them to leave the room – keep the cameras rolling.  One of their questions prompts him to remark, with witty irritation, that he didn’t expect flies on the wall to be so talkative – but Kriegman and Steinberg seem as surprised by their continuing access to behind-the-scenes Weiner as most viewers of their film are likely to be.  Late on, we hear Kriegman’s voice ask, ‘Why have you let me film this?’  There’s no direct response to the question from the leading man.  Weiner, in effect, invites the audience to supply its own answers.

    Anthony Weiner is evidently a narcissist-masochist and foolish in ways that only a clever person can be.  He’s determined to win arguments and highly satisfied when he does so, without seeming aware of quite how Pyrrhic his victories are.  With the new sexting firestorm raging, he does a live television interview with the political journalist Lawrence O’Donnell and wipes the floor with him.  Back home, Weiner watches the interview on playback and delightedly analyses his triumph – although the whole context of the exchange with O’Donnell seems inevitably damaging and Weiner’s disputative relish makes matters worse.  On the campaign trail, he gets into an argument with a heckler in a Jewish deli.  Weiner overpowers this adversary only in terms of noisy invective:  he shocks the other man by the force of his anger but the latter, sticking quietly and doggedly to his conviction that someone who’s done what Weiner’s done shouldn’t be running for public office, is rather impressive.  We hear as a postscript to this showdown a claim on a news report that what started it was a sotto voce racist insult from the other man, who jeered at Weiner for being ‘married to an Arab’.   If that’s true, you think better of Weiner’s hot-headed reaction – as a rare instance of his trying, however cack-handedly, to do right by his wife, Huma Abedin.

    Abedin, born in Michigan to parents who emigrated to the US from India and Pakistan (so ‘Arab’ is pushing it), is the woman of whom her boss Hillary Clinton said that, if she’d had a second daughter, ‘Huma would be that daughter’.  Weiner, twelve years his wife’s senior, launches his mayoral campaign with Huma at his side:  she tells the media they’ve managed to get through a difficult time in their marriage and that she believes her husband is the best man to run New York.   Weiner expects Abedin to continue devoting herself to the role of loyal candidate spouse regardless – of the revelations that derail his campaign, of her own busy political job as Clinton’s right-hand woman.  (The year 2013 may have been an intermission between the end of Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State and the launch of her Presidential campaign but Abedin was still very active at the time, in work for the Clinton Foundation etc.)  Weiner’s determination to keep telling his wife what she ought to be doing gives added poignancy to Huma Abedin’s long-suffering, increasingly silent dignity. (The closing legends on the screen inform us that she and Weiner separated after further sexting revelations came to light around the time the film was completed.)

    Weiner remains similarly in charge in discussions with his shocked campaign staff.  He appears to see it as his leadership role not only to issue instructions but also to raise spirits, even though he’s the cause of demoralisation. He has a habit of raising a thorny subject then sliding away from it, as if articulating an issue is as good as wrestling with it personally.  He muses on whether people are drawn to political careers to compensate for an inability to sustain satisfying close relationships – to ‘make contact’ with people – in their private lives.  He suggests at one point that what drives him to engage in online sex is the same part of his make-up that enables him to weather the ensuing scandals.  He doesn’t say what this quality is although it’s hard to see it as anything other than pathological self-interest.  At the end of Weiner, in spite of everything, he’s still playing to the camera.

    Asked to summarise the reasons for his downfall, Weiner replies, ‘I’ve a funny name, I lied, and they don’t do nuance’ – ‘they’ being the news media.  It’s not clear how press and TV ‘nuance’ would have helped in this case but he’s right about the other two things; and the bizarrely apt names in the story – names you’d never believe if this were fiction – don’t end with his own.  Weiner sexted in late 2012 and early 2013 under the alias Carlos Danger but the correspondent/co-respondent in the affair really is called Sydney Leathers.  Although she’s physically imposing (to put it mildly), you’re not convinced of her reality even after you’ve seen Leathers.  Her human reality, that is:  she’s irrefutable as a tabloid self-creation and self-publicist.  She may have the look of a cartoon dominatrix but Leathers presents herself as a wronged woman, though not in the traditional sense.  Her passion is for politics and Anthony Weiner was her political hero; her tragedy was the discovery that her hero’s anatomical features included ‘feet of clay’.   In fact, Leathers is hugely pleased with herself:  the film achieves a startling polarity between her grinning face and Huma Abedin’s stricken one.

    Kriegman and Steinberg open with a montage of archive film that speeds us through its subject’s political rise and fall up to 2011.  The exaggeratedly rapid editing and the music on the soundtrack suggest a madcap comedy to follow.  The film is sometimes grimly funny, especially in the climax, on the day of the Democratic mayoral primary.  Huma-less Weiner seems to spend much of the day wheeling their young son’s buggy round New York streets:  the child appears to symbolise the only conventionally endearing thing the candidate may still have going for him.  As night falls, Sydney Leathers attempts to confront Weiner in person, with a camera crew in tow.  His team gets wind of what’s afoot and farcically frenetic efforts to prevent the encounter happening eventually succeed.   The symbolic charge of this episode is stronger even than that of the child in the buggy:  Weiner’s nemesis arrives from cyberspace to run him to earth in the real world.

    Weiner made depressing viewing, largely as a result of when I saw it.  The film was screened in British cinemas this summer but I watched it in the BBC 4 Storyville slot, two days before the Presidential election.  The emails that sparked the renewed FBI investigation announced in late October were reportedly sent by Huma Abedin and obtained from a device belonging to Anthony Weiner.  (As it happened, the news that the FBI had finished trawling through these emails and found no reason to change its earlier conclusions about Hillary Clinton broke on the BBC website a matter of minutes before Weiner aired.)  Donald Trump makes only the briefest of cameo contributions, via a news clip (‘We don’t want perverts in New York!’), but I found him haunting the film – because anxiety about the Presidential election was uppermost in my mind, and because of resonances between Trump and Anthony Weiner.  Those resonances include similarities and differences between them.  Both are native New Yorkers with pejoratively suitable surnames.   Weiner’s political views, as summarised in this film at any rate, are as appealing as Trump’s are appalling.   Many Trump supporters felt the ‘You can do anything’ tape didn’t matter and it wasn’t long before he and his team were diluting the expressions of regret:  you wondered if they were worried contrition might actually be a vote-loser.  Kriegman and Steinberg show a few Weiner supporters angrily insisting that what the candidate does in his private life is irrelevant to his public one.  We watch other people looking as if they enjoy seeing him – and being seen with him – in the street:  now he’s so notorious, Weiner is a bigger celebrity.  This comparison shouldn’t be pushed too far, of course.  If only Donald Trump had received 4.9% of the vote on 8 November 2016.

    6 November 2016

  • Imitation of Life (1959)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Douglas Sirk (1959)

    According to the Wikipedia entry on Douglas Sirk, the critical reappraisal of his work that gathered momentum during the 1970s saw his Hollywood melodramas as ‘masterpieces of irony’ and ‘an oblique criticism of American society hidden beneath a banal facade of plotting conventional for the era’.  The theory has endured but I’ve always struggled with it – and never more so than in the case of Sirk’s final film, Imitation of Life.  The main racial theme of Fannie Hurst’s novel is hardly subtextual and it gets more attention in Sirk’s interpretation than it did in the 1934 film of the book.  (Point of interest:  Imitation of Life wasn’t the first 1950s movie by auteur Sirk to follow a 1930s version of the same material by journeyman director John M Stahl.  He also directed Magnificent Obsession, which Sirk remade in 1954.)

    In other respects, Sirk and his screenwriters, Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott, make various changes to Fannie Hurst’s novel and/or to its first adaptation for the screen.  The action is updated to the late 1940s and 1950s.  The setting is New York instead of Atlantic City.   Most of the main characters’ names have changed.  The protagonist, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), becomes a famous actress rather than a successful businesswoman, and is a largely absentee mother to her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee).  Her African-American housekeeper Annie (Juanita Moore) isn’t, unlike Delilah in the 1934 film, the secret of Lora’s professional success.  When Annie’s light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) tries to make it in white society, she does so not as a humble cashier but as a dancer in a New York dive and then (once Annie has discovered her there and Sarah Jane goes West to get away from her mother) as a showgirl in Los Angeles.  The white woman’s suitor (John Gavin) now takes photographs instead of studying fish although he’s still called Steve Archer.  The casting includes one especially striking and seemingly retrogressive difference from the earlier film.  Fredi Washington, the racially dissatisfied Peola in John M Stahl’s version, was African-American; Susan Kohner, who plays Sarah Jane, is white.

    These changes recast several of the central relationships and the dramatic scheme of Imitation of Life.  Instead of two essentially admirable mothers with differently problematic offspring, there’s one self-giving mother and one self-centred one – Lora’s career comes before her daughter.  As a result, Annie, although her own child abandons her, is something of a surrogate mother to Susie.  When Annie dies and the prodigal daughter Sarah Jane suddenly returns to weep and prostrate herself on the coffin, Lora experiences a cortege conversion of her own – to motherhood.  She embraces both Susie and Sarah Jane; Steve’s face registers, with relief, that Lora has learned the error of her ways.  There’s no sense of partnership between her and Annie as there was between their counterparts in 1934: Sirk’s pair are always mistress and maid.  (Annie’s duties are wide-ranging:  in one scene, we see her as Lora’s dresser for a Broadway play; in the next, she’s responsible for the catering at Lora’s at-home after-show party.)  Sirk’s Imitation of Life is conventionally censorious – and almost prudish – about the wrong-headedness of show business.  The film’s lampoon of the all-is-vanity theatre world – personified by the egomaniac, Pulitzer Prize-hungry playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy) – is crudely clichéd.  Lora can’t be a good mother as well as a great actress.  Sarah Jane’s refusal to accept who-she-really-is is emphasised by her making a spectacle of herself in the corrupt milieus of the seedy night club and the tawdry chorus line.

    The stage and screen star who loves herself too much to love anyone else was a very familiar figure by 1959 – too familiar to have much satiric charge, ‘ironic’ or otherwise; Lana Turner’s limitations as an actress have the effect of reinforcing Lora’s shallowness and of making one indifferent to her fate.  Juanita Hall plays Annie well but the relationship between her and Lora is thin, compared with the one between Louise Beavers’s Delilah and Claudette Colbert’s Bea in the first movie.  A few elements of Sirk’s changes to the Stahl set-up yield improvements.  Although Sarah Jane’s story is garishly overdone, Susan Kohner gets across a sense of the girl’s divided feelings and of the desperation in Sarah Jane’s determination to reject allegiance to her mother.  The character of Steve is feebly functional – although he’s meant to be a professionally successful photographer, he’s far from busy and always on hand to help out.  It’s unclear at the end where Steve has got to in his sedulous courtship of Lora.  At least, though, John Gavin is both handsome and young enough to persuade us that Lora continues to be attracted to Steve and that her teenage daughter is crazy for him.  It makes sense that Susie’s assertions of adulthood underline her childish needs:  Sandra Dee is alarmingly sparky in the role but her hyperactivity supplies an almost welcome contrast to Lana Turner’s waxen glamour.

    There was plenty of laughter in NFT1 at the corniest, most overwrought moments of this Imitation of Life and plenty of clapping at the end. This may have been applause for the film as the ‘trash masterpiece’ it’s often been described as.  It’s equally possible, however, that people in the audience had taken note of the excerpt from Sam Staggs’s Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life (2009), which was used for the BFI programme note (they had the right one available this time).  Staggs’s thesis is that Sirk’s film is ‘really two pictures conjoined as celluloid Siamese twins’.  There’s ‘the white movie’, which ‘labours under every false emotion concocted for screenland drama … Laughter permitted’.   Then there’s ‘the dark side’, which ‘resembles a work by Verdi or Puccini’.  The ‘blond side of the picture [serves] as the booster rocket to shoot the black side to transcendence’.  I simply don’t get this:  the ‘black’ story seems to me overblown in the same way as the ‘white’ one.  The climactic funeral in Sirk’s film is an even bigger deal than it was in the Stahl movie.  The solo that Mahalia Jackson sings as part of the church service for Annie does, for a few minutes, elevate proceedings to a genuinely tragic level but the subsequent histrionics in the hearse are rendered all the more banal as a consequence.  For me, the differing emotional effects of the two parts of the picture amounted to impatience with the lacquered mechanics of the ‘white’ story, anger that the socially urgent themes of the ‘black’ one get the same luxuriant melodramatic treatment.

    7 November 2016

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