Monthly Archives: January 2017

  • Lion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Garth Davis (2016)

    Lion is based on the autobiography of Saroo Brierley, born in 1981 in the Ganesh Talai neighbourhood of Khandwa, Mahya Pradesh, in central India.   As the movie tells it, Saroo is separated from his family at the age of five.   Searching at a railway station for his elder brother Guddu, Saroo boards a train, falls asleep and, two days later, finds himself lost in Calcutta.  He’s unable to understand the Bengali spoken there or to make himself understood (his native tongue is a Hindi dialect).  After spending time with street kids and wandering around the city, he’s taken in by a seemingly well-meaning woman but begins to suspect her ulterior motives and runs away.  He spends three months in a Calcutta orphanage before being flown out to Tasmania, to be adopted by a childless Australian couple, Sue and John Brierley.  These events make up the first half of Garth Davis’s film (which has a screenplay by Luke Davies, adapted from A Long Way Home, the memoir that Saroo Brierley wrote with Larry Buttrose).  A ‘twenty years later’ indicator then whizzes the narrative forward to the start of Saroo’s higher education in Melbourne; his adult relationships, with his adoptive parents and brother, and a fellow-student girlfriend;  and his persistent attempts, through Google Earth, to trace his Indian home and renew contact with his family there.

    It’s refreshing to see a non-Asian film-maker give India a look different from the cornucopia-of-colour familiar from Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  The cinematographer Greig Fraser uses predominantly earth tones, in which the occasional patches of vivid colour are striking.  The landscape around Ganesh Talai looks intractably parched; it’s here that Saroo’s mother (Priyanka Bose), abandoned by her husband and with four children to raise, labours on building sites each day in the hot sun, carrying rocks on her head.  The child Saroo (Sunny Pawar) insists on accompanying Guddu (Abishek Bharate) to the city of Khandwa, where the elder brother looks for work.  The pair are separated when Guddu leaves the little boy to rest on a seat in the railway station.  The station is pretty deserted:  even this is different – from the standard hubbub you’ve come to expect from Indian urban locations on screen.  But the opening forty-five or so minutes of Lion are strong chiefly because of Sunny Pawar.  We see from an early stage that Saroo is intrepid and resourceful.  He goes through so much during his months in Calcutta that it’s easy to believe that he takes his first plane journey, to another continent, in his stride.  As well as being sparky and funny, Sunny Pawar suggests, with very few words, the onset of Saroo’s worry and sadness that he can’t get home to Ganesh Talai (he doesn’t know how the place name is spelt and pronounces it ‘Ganestalay’).  Anxiety (almost necessarily unspoken given the language problem) seems to settle on Saroo – after a while, to become part of him.  Pawar has a documentary purity (although he’s much less camera-conscious than people in documentaries often are).  At the same time, he individuates Saroo and Garth Davis does a fine job of helping him to achieve this.  The second half of Lion never quite recovers from the disappearance of Sunny Pawar as the focus of attention.

    Dramatising the story of the adult Saroo (Dev Patel) is a more complicated matter than describing the events in Khandwa and Calcutta.  Lion doesn’t really meet the challenge, although the story is always engaging.  The film is sketchy in various ways but chiefly in omitting any sense of what Saroo felt about his past life in India as he was growing up with his adoptive parents (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham):  that twenty-year jump forward has a lot to answer for.  In a crucial scene late on, Sue Brierley says miserably to Saroo that he doesn’t talk to her anymore.  It’s true that he’s keeping secret from Sue and John his Google Earth research but the remark draws attention to the lack of evidence that Saroo ever did talk to Sue about infant experiences which he must remember and have been affected by.  It comes as a surprise when Saroo tells his American girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara) that not a day goes by without his thinking about his birth mother and knowing that she’s still looking for him.  If this were true, it would make it all the more incredible his homesickness hadn’t been an issue in his formative years but the film otherwise gives the impression that Saroo hasn’t felt strongly about this until some other students in Melbourne ask about his background and tell him about Google Earth.  The Brierleys adopt a second Indian boy a year after Saroo’s arrival in Tasmania.   It’s immediately obvious that the child Mantosh (Keshav Jadhav) is emotionally disturbed; he stays that way as an adult (Divian Ladwa) but we don’t learn much more than that about him.  Rooney Mara does what she can with Lucy but it’s a perfunctory role.  When Saroo tells her he’s finally located Ganesh Talai on Google Earth, he begs Lucy to ‘wait for me’ as he sets off for India; she is never mentioned or seen again.

    The character of Sue Brierley is a different problem.  Nicole Kidman plays her with remarkable emotional precision and the tension she gives Sue is a shot in the arm to more than one scene.  The impression of a woman determinedly cheerful and ingratiating but sad inside culminates in the moment when Sue, going through a bad patch with both her adopted sons but still putting a deceptive brave face on things, tells Lucy ‘I’ve been blessed’ – the words contradict everything else that Kidman is expressing.  That later scene in which Sue suggests that Saroo’s reticence is new in fact provides further evidence to the contrary.  Saroo says he’s sorry Sue couldn’t have a child of her own; Sue, astonished, tells him that there was no biological problem but that she and her husband decided it was more socially responsible, in an overpopulated world, to adopt two children in need of parents.  As soon as this was revealed, I felt that Nicole Kidman and Garth Davis had been deliberately encouraging the audience to make the same assumption that Saroo had made.  From this point onwards, I couldn’t make sense of the melancholy heft of Kidman’s impressive performance.

    This has landed her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and Harvey Weinstein has again proved his talents as an Academy Awards fixer by successfully pushing Dev Patel for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, even though Patel has the lion’s share of Lion.  It’s unkind but not wholly unfair to suggest that Weinstein’s task was made easier because Dev Patel remains an underwhelming presence – he doesn’t dominate proceedings.  He’s conscientious and likeable yet there is, as usual, a sense that Patel is doing what he’s been told to do.  The script’s thin characterisation of Saroo doesn’t help him much.  The adult Saroo first appears emerging from the sea in a wet suit – the first of several early hints that he’s become a proper Aussie.  In a group of freshers asked to summarise what they want to get out of their hotel management studies, Saroo says brashly that he means to make plenty of money owning hotels.   (Dev Patel’s screen past in this line of work makes his course choice rather comical.)   I liked it that in the conversation in which he first hears about Google Earth, it’s other Asian students who talk excitedly, and somewhat insensitively, about what the product can and can’t do.  But the Australianised parts of Saroo’s personality disappear once his search for ‘Ganestalay’ is underway and he’s purely a deracinated Indian:  there’s not enough conflict between his past and his present.  Still, it feels right that, when he eventually locates his birthplace on Google Earth, it’s Sunny Pawar whom Garth Davis shows running home in Saroo’s mind.  The online moment of discovery links the Google Earth images well to the overhead shots of the landscape at the start of the film.

    The impact of the infant Saroo, with his funny, idiosyncratic gait, dashing homewards makes the adult Saroo’s arrival at Ganesh Talai something of an anti-climax.  Garth Davis does well, however, at a crucial point of this episode, briefly to turn off Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka’s obvious (though often effective) music for Lion:  Saroo and his mother approach each other in silence.  You’d need a heart of stone not to respond to this meeting (his mother knows it’s Saroo from a childhood scar on his temple) – although what follows is mechanical.  Saroo learns that Guddu has died and is distraught; he perks up 100% when he’s introduced to the sister who was a babe in arms when he went missing.  The dramatised reunion is emotionally upstaged too by film shown immediately before the closing credits, of a subsequent trip that Saroo Brierley made to Ganesh Talai in 2013, with Sue:  the shared embrace with his two mothers is very moving.   This postscript also supplies the explanation of the film’s title:  Saroo had for years mispronounced his actual given name, Sheru, a diminutive of the Hindi word for lion.  This isn’t a great film but I enjoyed it – not least because I happened to see it following a return visit first to La La Land and then to Goodfellas, as well as several evenings on the trot watching a box set of True Detective.  It was a relief after these to spend time in the company of screen people who weren’t either swamped by film-making technique or sociopathic, or both.

    26 January 2017

  • Goodfellas

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Scorsese (1990)

    [Different impressions of the film from two viewings, in the mid-1990s and 2017 … ]

    Take 1

    In the first scene of Goodfellas, the three main characters – Henry, Jimmy and Tommy – are irritated to find that what they thought was a corpse in the back of their car is still alive and kicking.  So Tommy (Joe Pesci) stabs it a few times and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) shoots it a few times, and that shuts it up; and Henry’s voiceover tells us that, ‘Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be a gangster’.  The nerveless violence is shocking but Martin Scorsese isn’t the kind of director who shows dispassionate killers and allows the viewer the security of as little emotional connection with them as the killers feel for the men they murder.  (The victims are nearly always men:  there’s one female fatality in the course of the film.)  Scorsese humanises Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his confrères.  We see that spilling blood is a part – albeit a sizeable part – of lives in which camaraderie, theft, jokes, family, narcotics, clothes, food, wine, women and pop music all count for something too.  Scorsese doesn’t present the non-criminal elements as a hypocritical facade; they co-exist with the sociopathic aspect.  (This is used to comic effect in Goodfellas‘  climactic sequence, as Henry narrates the hectic social and lawbreaking schedule of the day in 1980 when his brother came round for dinner and Henry was arrested for drug peddling.)  Nor does Scorsese make the obvious satirical point that being a gangster is just a job:  Henry’s work pervades and convulses his marriage to Karen (Lorraine Bracco) – more than that, he loves what he does.   A life of crime confers material benefits and social prestige in the Brooklyn community in which Henry grew up.  Becoming a ‘goodfella’ makes his wildest self-centred dreams come true.

    The adolescent Henry (he’s a young teenager in the mid-1950s) is played by Christopher Serrone, a tall, willowy boy with humorous eyes and a quicksilver smile.  You can see how he grows into Ray Liotta, who plays Henry from his mid-twenties onwards.  It’s not a simple matter of physical resemblance:  there’s a spiritual continuity from the younger Henry to the older one.  The young man’s brutification is reflected by Liotta’s darker eye colouring and a smile that gets tighter, more perfunctory.  Liotta’s too-loud laugh is just right:  it combines aggression and defensiveness in edgy equilibrium and there’s not a trace of light-heartedness in it.  Henry’s joyless braying not only signals that when a goodfella laughs out loud you can hear the violence inside him; it suggests too that Henry knows that, in his business, you need to take care of yourself even when you’re joking.  (There’s an astounding moment when Tommy gets Henry really laughing.  Henry cracks up and says what a ‘funny guy’ Tommy is.  It’s an unguarded remark and paranoid Tommy is onto it in a flash:  the interrogation of Henry that follows has terrific tension.)  All the main characters are impregnated with violence but they express it in various registers.  As Paulie Cicero, the local mob capo who takes Henry under his wing, Paul Sorvino no longer needs to be personally aggressive.  Paulie commands respect and authority enough to get others to do the business for him – he doesn’t lay a hand on anyone except to give them a reassuring pat on the shoulder.   The screenplay, by Nicholas Pileggi and Scorsese, is based on Pileggi’s 1986 non-fiction book, Wiseguy.  The cinematography is by Michael Ballhaus.  Scorsese’s choice of songs for the soundtrack is splendid:  the sequence in which Henry and Karen – in one prolonged rear-view shot – enter the Copacabana night club, accompanied by the Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’, is justly famous.

    [1990s]

    Take 2

    ‘Basically I was interested in what they do.  And, you know, they don’t think about it a lot.  They don’t sit around and ponder about ‘Gee, what are we doing here?’  The answer is to eat a lot and make a lot of money and do the least amount of work possible for it.  I was trying to make it as practical and primitive as possible.  Just straight ahead.  Want.  Take.  Simple.  I’m more concerned with showing a lifestyle and using Henry Hill as basically a guide through it [1]’ .

    This summary by Martin Scorsese of what he set out to do in Goodfellas seems honest and it’s certainly an accurate description of what he achieved.  The film tells the story of the New York gangster-turned-FBI-informant Henry Hill, over a twenty-five year (1955-80) period.  It does this through description of his behaviour – accompanied by a good deal of voiceover from Henry, which provides a limited explanation of what motivates him.  Scorsese is open too about his own feelings on this:  ‘The lifestyle is so rich – I have a love-hate thing with that lifestyle’ [2] . The love – as well as excitement – comes through in the sheer vibrancy of the film and in its gorgeous pop soundtrack, which echoes and expands the Mean Streets one (the expansion reflecting the broader timeframe).  It’s natural to assume that, as in the earlier film, the accompanying songs in Goodfellas are personal favourites of Scorsese (a famous pop enthusiast); but they’re also the pulse to the life of his virtual contemporary, Henry Hill.

    The film-making craft and élan in evidence here are exceptional.  The six-minute tracking shot of Henry and Karen’s arrival at the Copacabana is only the most obviously remarkable camera movement in several highly dynamic sequences that take place in bars and restaurants.  Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing pulls you right into the grimly funny helter-skelter of Henry’s exceptionally busy day in May 1980, which ends with his arrest by narcotics agents.  The interior set decoration, the clothes and the jewellery supply a vivid picture of what it means to make it in Henry’s world.  The story is sharpened by the implications of the characters’ ethnic differences:  Henry’s wife Karen is Jewish but his mistress Janice (Gina Mastrogiacomo) is Italian; with their mixed Italian-Irish ancestry, neither Henry nor Jimmy Conway can be a member of the club in the way of men whose family trees are firmly rooted in ‘the old country’.

    Yet the downside of Martin Scorsese’s observational style and ambivalence got in the way of my enjoying Goodfellas on this long-delayed return visit to the film.  The lethal psychopathology of the gangsters is expressed in differently impressive ways – in Joe Pesci’s dazzling, scary portrait of Tommy DeVito, in the contrast between the impassive face and the ardent aggression in the eyes of Paul Sorvino’s Paulie Cicero.  Tommy, Paulie, Henry and Jimmy aren’t glamorised exactly but the director’s cultural empathy makes him too generous towards the title characters, in spite of the irony of their name.  And Scorsese, for all his laissez-faire approach, keeps having to up the ante in delivering stylish executions (there’s no denying he succeeds in doing this).    Goodfellas, an exhilarating piece of film-making, is almost intentionally shallow.  Whereas Charlie, the protagonist of Mean Streets, ties himself in knots trying to serve two masters (God and the caporegime), Henry Hill always knows what he wants and how to get it.  (Ray Liotta gives Henry a convincingly inconstant quality:  we come to realise that his sneakiness is an important aid to his survival.  Born in 1943, Henry Hill died in 2012 of natural causes.)  The complex family ties that inform, and conflict with, Mafia business in the Godfather films are replaced here by something simpler – a shared love of Italian cooking.  This is a blood brotherhood of red meat and tomato sauce, of garlic sliced superfine with a razor blade.  The weapon of choice to finish the job of killing the man in the car boot at the start of the film is a kitchen knife that belongs to Tommy’s elderly mother (Catherine Scorsese).   All this is very witty but more worrying.  I struggle nowadays to accept a corpse-fest like Goodfellas as bravura shocking entertainment.

    24 January 2017

    [1]  Martin Scorsese interviewed by Gavin Smith, Film Comment, September-October 1990.

    [2]  As footnote 1.

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