Daily Archives: Sunday, March 5, 2017

  • Fat City

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Huston (1972)

    Leonard Gardner, author of the 1969 novel Fat City on which John Huston’s film is based (and for which Gardner wrote the screenplay), explained the title as ‘Negro [sic] slang.  When you say you want to go to Fat City, it means you want the good life’.  As might be expected, the title is ironic.  Huston and the cinematographer Conrad Hall convey this, economically and decisively, in an opening montage of shots:  shabby buildings, a rubbish dump, a gaggle of rundown men hanging around in the streets of Stockton, California – the title location.  These shots lead up to the introduction of the protagonist Billy Tully (Stacy Keach), lying on the bed of his gloomy rented room.  A bin next to the bed is chock-full of drink cans.  This prologue is accompanied by an instrumental of Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ (first featured on an album released in 1970).  As Billy half-heartedly gets up and gets ready to go out into the world, the tune is reprised, this time with Kristofferson’s vocals.  Fat City is Palookaville; we get the picture – so clearly that we wonder what else John Huston has to show us in the ninety-odd minutes to follow.

    The answer is not the unexpected.  Tully, whose wife left him, is an ex-boxer with a drink problem.  He can’t hold down a regular job.  His attempts at a comeback in the ring repeatedly founder.  At the gym, he meets Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), an eager young eighteen-year-old.  Ernie looks a promising fighter but he loses his first two bouts and has to marry his girlfriend Faye (Candy Clark), when he gets her pregnant.  Tully also gets to know Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a world-weary barfly.  When her boyfriend Earl (Curtis Cokes) goes to prison, moves in with Oma but their relationship is soon in trouble.  Tully blames his former manager Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto) for screwing up his earlier boxing career.  When he eventually gets back in the ring and wins a fight, he earns just $100 after Ruben has taken expenses and the money he’s owed.  Angry and disappointed, Tully goes round to Oma’s apartment, only to find that Earl is back in residence after his time in jail.  We last meet Tully some time later; he runs into Ernie, who’s on his way home from his latest fight.  Tully is already plastered; Ernie, now a father, declines an invitation to go to a bar with him but agrees to have a coffee.  The film ends on a shot of them sitting side by side in a diner – in silence until Kris Kristofferson plays them out.

    John Huston had had a string of box-office failures immediately before he made Fat City.  The movie did well commercially and very well critically – it was hailed as a welcome return to form for Huston and a tough, touching and truthful American Dream demolition job.  I’m glad to have got round to seeing the film at last though its description of the lives of ‘losers’ seems, at this long distance in time, dated.  The production designer was the great Richard Sylbert and the whole texture of Stockton and its environs that John Huston creates is highly convincing:  the skid row streets, the bars, the music on jukeboxes.  There’s eloquent social comment too in scenes in the surrounding countryside, where Tully and Ernie, to get badly needed cash, join migrant workers in seasonal work picking fruit and vegetables.  It’s the exceptionally believable physical context of the story that’s partly responsible, I think, for making the drama looked forced in comparison.

    Some of the casting and acting is also responsible.  As Tully, Stacy Keach doesn’t suggest a boxer past or present; neither his body nor his movement is that of an athlete past his prime and struggling desperately to regain it.  When Tully eventually gets in the ring, the very credible look of his ageing, ailing opponent Lucero (Sixto Rodriguez) draws attention to how physically unconvincing Keach is in comparison.  (His disproportionately large head also seems a particular disadvantage for a boxer, presenting as it does a bigger target for brain-damaging punches.)  I guess that the Tully of the novel was an older man because Huston wanted Marlon Brando, who was then approaching fifty, for the role.  Keach was only thirty at the time although his face looks nearer forty.  (It’s therefore puzzling that Huston and Leonard Gardner go to the trouble of having Tully say at one point that he’ll be thirty in a few days’ time.)  Outside the gym and the ring, Stacy Keach gives a performance that’s conscientious but which I found monotonous:  it keeps reminding us how miserable Tully’s existence is without illuminating his feelings.

    Susan Tyrrell overdoes Oma’s brittle lush wretchedness although there’s no denying she compels attention.  Nicholas Colasanto (later famous as the bartender Coach in Cheers) delivers Ruben’s lines in a superficially naturalistic way yet doesn’t seem inside the character; the same goes for Candy Clark as Faye.  The best work in the smaller roles is from Curtis Cokes as Earl – the first and (according to IMDB) only acting role of, ironically enough, a real-life former World Welterweight Champion.  Jeff Bridges made Fat City just after The Last Picture Show, when he was in his early twenties; as in Peter Bogdanovich’s film, he’s fully persuasive as a teenager.  His natural, expressive movement and readings put Bridges in a different league from the rest of the cast – and I don’t think this is simply the effect of seeing him in the light of the enduring screen career that followed.

    In the final sequence in the diner, Ernie and Tully watch a dilapidated waiter of indeterminate age.  Ernie asks, ‘Think he was ever young once?’ and Tully replies, ‘No’.  The closing image of Tully’s and Ernie’s faces seems meant to suggest that they’re essentially interchangeable – that the older man was youthful and hopeful once, while the younger one will become no less curdled and hopeless in the fullness of time.  That isn’t what comes across, though.  Stacy Keach, like the waiter, was never young – in other words, he never hints at what Billy Tully used to be before his life went wrong.  Jeff Bridges’s Ernie Munger doesn’t seem bound to turn out like everyone else in the story.  That’s a relief, even if it’s not what John Huston intended.

    1 March 2017

  • It’s Only the End of the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Juste la fin du monde

    Xavier Dolan (2016)

    Xavier Dolan’s latest has its admirers and its detractors, as the end of last year’s Cannes festival made clear:  there were plenty of boos, along with applause, at the announcement that It’s Only the End of the World had won the Grand Prix.  Dolan raises hackles more because he’s so young (twenty-seven) and prolific (this is his sixth feature in seven years) – but this isn’t an easy film to like even if you’re as impartial about him as (I think) I am.  It’s Only the End of the World is unusual, though, in at least one important way.  This adaptation of a stage play is – unlike Fences, to cite an obvious recent example – a distinctive, coherent piece of cinema.

    Jean-Luc Lagarce’s theatre piece Juste la fin du monde is about a playwright, a gay man in his early thirties, who visits his family to tell them he’s terminally ill.  Lagarce wrote the play in 1990, when he was thirty-three and had been diagnosed with AIDS, from which he died five years later.  In Dolan’s film, the central character Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) tells us in voiceover at the start that there are ‘motivations … that force you to leave without looking back’ and ‘just as many motivations that force you to return’.  Louis takes a plane, then a taxi from the airport, to the family he’s not seen for twelve years:  his mother Martine (Nathalie Baye); his younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux); his elder brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel); and the latter’s wife Catherine (Marion Cotillard).  Except for a few flashbacks to these characters’ younger selves (and the people who briefly feature in Louis’s opening journey), this is the entire cast of It’s Only the End of the World.  All four of Louis’s relatives are, in different registers, talkative.  Catherine, whom Louis hasn’t met before, rattles on nervously about her and Antoine’s (unseen) children.  Her husband is aggressive from the start, with a tendency to deride the others’ turns of phrase. The most astonishing statement in the movie is Antoine’s claim that he keeps silent not in order to listen but in order to be left alone. This strategy is bound to fail since he never shuts up.

    Xavier Dolan has said that, in adapting the play for the screen, he ‘tried to keep the idiosyncrasies and the singularity of Lagarce’s vernacular’.  The abundant words are the film’s foreground, an effect reinforced by the delivery of most of them in tight close-ups.  The supercharged talking heads take a lot of getting used to, especially the more familiar faces among them.  The dithery eagerness-to-please of Marion Cotillard’s Catherine is particularly difficult:  we know that, in a less stylised piece, Cotillard would be expressive in a subtler way.  The same is true, to almost the same extent, of Léa Seydoux.  Even in the case of Vincent Cassel, whose habitually forceful acting might be thought better suited to Dolan’s treatment, the effect of face and voicebox working flat out together is too much.  I found Nathalie Baye easier to take only because I remember her less well from other films (though she’s been in the front rank of French actresses for decades).  Gaspard Ulliel, whom I’d not seen before, is a different matter anyway:  the central character’s role in It’s Only the End of the World is, increasingly, to observe and listen rather than speak.

    Louis has a series of extended one-to-one scenes with the other four, each of whom has the lion’s share of the lines.  Mutual awkwardness seems to be the explanation in his conversations with Catherine.  With Martine, Antoine and Suzanne, it’s a combination of their self-preoccupation and Louis’s reticence.  This is sometimes comically overstated.  When Martine asks ‘How old are you?’ Louis asks in reply ‘You mean me?’  As there’s no one else in sight, Martine’s sarcastic rejoinder, ‘No, the watering can …,’ is fair enough.  She then goes on talking about something else before – it seems long afterwards – getting back to the original question (the answer to it is thirty-four).  The balance of verbal power between Louis and his family soon makes it clear that the purpose of his visit will remain unfulfilled – that he’ll leave without telling them about his illness.  It’s definitely the blood ties that make him tongue-tied as well.  The one person who perceives what Louis has come to say is Catherine but her halting speech prevents her getting further than two words into her question – ‘How long …?’ – before she leaves it hanging in the air.  When Louis is about to leave, he looks at Catherine and swears her to secrecy by putting a finger to his lips.

    In a more realistic style of drama, based on conventional storytelling and character development, Louis’s failure to speak would likely come across as no more than tamely predictable.  Even those infuriated by Dolan’s weird, consistently exaggerated approach aren’t likely to describe It’s Only the End of the World in those terms.  As the others await Louis’s arrival, Martine presides over lunch preparations:  the ambience of the kitchen suggests that the fate of nations depends on the starter.  We’re told the weather is hot; with most of the film taking place indoors, the heat is conveyed chiefly by sweat on faces – as well it might be, given the energy the actors are expending.  Later on, ominous thunder turns up on the soundtrack:  as usual, this is a signal of gathering personal tensions as much as of a storm brewing outside.  This particular thunder remains a sonic cliché but fits perfectly into the peculiar atmosphere that’s been worked up.

    While stressing his respect for Jean-Luc Lagarce’s linguistic inventiveness, Xavier Dolan has made large structural changes to the original, which he explains as follows:

    ‘The second half of the play is almost entirely abstract.  Characters talk to everyone and no one, all on stage, yet in different places …  I had to recycle bits and pieces from earlier scenes, omitted scenes and scenes I invented from scratch in order to write a second half, and the end.’

    Yet the film too is increasingly abstract in its second half.  It’s in a rare outdoor sequence – or, at least, a sequence of Louis and Antoine driving in a car together – that this registers most strongly.  Dolan shoots the sequence from inside the vehicle, largely from a backseat point of view.  Antoine is driving furiously fast but there’s no risk of a collision since the road ahead is empty of other traffic.  This is immediately striking but then believable:  you accept the sealed-off world Dolan has created rather as, in the theatre, you can accept what’s on stage as the whole world for the duration of a play.  The words in It’s Only the End of the World are so torrential that they begin to lose force; through the intensity of the direction and the acting, images gain the upper hand.  Instead of the earlier tautology of looks and words telling us the same thing, you’re less conscious of what’s being said than of the expressive power of the faces on the screen.  For much of the film, Dolan’s extreme stylisation has a distancing effect:  you’re so aware of the technique that it’s hard to respond emotionally.  By the closing stages, however, the powerful acting is transmitting the characters’ feelings very directly.  Antoine’s tearful outburst, as he rages about being treated as the family freak, is unexpectedly touching.

    As well as rumbles of thunder, there’s a ticking clock in the house – a cuckoo clock withal.  Xavier Dolan pushes this cliché to the point of, almost literally, exploding it.  In the final scene, the clock chimes and a live bird bursts from it, beating its wings frantically in the confined space before falling to the ground.  When the bird flies out of the clock, Louis is alone in the room with it.  He then exits.  The film’s closing shot is of his exhausted avian avatar on the carpet, twitching slightly.  The symbolism is preposterous but it’s all of a piece with what’s gone before – even a fitting climax to it.

    28 February 2017