Monthly Archives: May 2017

  • Mildred Pierce

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Curtiz (1945)

    It starts with a bang – several bangs.  Gunshots ring out and a man falls to the ground, murmuring ‘Mildred …’ before he dies.  This introduction and the shadowy lighting immediately establish Mildred Pierce’s credentials as a film noir – reinforced by the information in the opening credits that the source material is a James M Cain novel.  The cinematographer Ernest Haller sustains the edgy chiaroscuro throughout; the investigation of the first-scene murder supplies the movie’s basic narrative structure.  Yet the core of Mildred Pierce film isn’t crime drama:  Michael Curtiz’s film is, rather, a peculiarly stylish and sour variation on the 1930s weepers about self-made women who are also self-sacrificing mothers (Imitation of Life, Stella Dallas).  Any such mother needs a spoilt ingrate of a daughter, and Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) has one in Veda (Ann Blyth), her elder child.  (It has to be a daughter rather than a son – the better to emphasise the offspring’s trivial materialism, and in order that she can become her mother’s sexual rival too.)  This set-up ensures that Mildred Pierce is only technically a whodunit.  Once Veda has appeared on the scene, it’s obvious that she’s not only a selfishly nasty piece of work but also the murderer of her stepfather Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott).

    Joan Crawford earns full marks for suffering.  Mildred starts to tell her story to a police detective (Moroni Olsen); Crawford is agonised even in the first flashback sequence, when Mildred is still a homebody, though baking and selling cakes and pies to keep the family going because her first husband Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) is out of work.  Bert nevertheless resents what he sees as Mildred’s preoccupation with the couple’s two daughters, the teenage Veda and ten-year-old Kay (Jo Anne Marlow).  He worries that his wife is encouraging Veda’s precocious social-climbing tendencies.  The Pierces separate.  To Veda’s ashamed horror, the best job her mother can find is waitressing but Mildred’s hard work and strength of ambition for her daughter to live the good life ensure rapid progress.  Mildred is soon running her own restaurant then the owner of a chain, ably assisted by her friend Ida (Eve Arden).  Buzzing around the restaurant, Joan Crawford is dynamic, to put it mildly.  (She’d put many a diner off a return visit.)  For the most part, though, she’s primed to react to Veda’s serial treacheries, which come thick and fast.   Crawford’s tortured mask is magnetic but not much emerges from behind it – or in her inflexible, often toneless voice.

    The doom-laden set of Crawford’s face calls to mind the heroine’s expression in numerous Hollywood tales of unrequited love. Mildred Pierce belongs to this genre but with the object of adoration the protagonist’s child rather than a man.   As Veda, toothy, moon-faced Ann Blyth is remarkably unappealing (and monotonous) but, after Crawford, she’s the film’s least ignorable presence.  Mildred Pierce is at its best when at its most floridly melodramatic.   In a home-truths-telling showdown between mother and daughter, Ann Blyth says such hateful things that you’re waiting for – to be honest, willing – Joan Crawford to slap her face.  It doesn’t happen and Blyth walks off in the direction of the staircase.  ‘Veda!’ yells Crawford and here at least her voice is extraordinary – resounding yet strangled. The set-to continues on the stairs until, in a shock climax, the face slap arrives and it’s Mildred on the receiving end.  There is a good daughter to compensate for Veda but not for long.  The signs aren’t promising when Bert takes the two girls away for a weekend and Kay coughs twice shortly before departure.  Sure enough, she’s dead from pneumonia a day or so later.

    The face of Zachary Scott, as the impecunious aristocrat-playboy Monte Beragon, suggests an only somewhat animated version of one of those old cigarette cards of Hollywood stars.  In a marriage of convenience (social for her, financial for him), Monte becomes Mildred’s second husband, and Veda’s secret lover.  Scott and Ann Blyth are both, in their different ways, so weird that the idea of this liaison really is queasy.  The screenplay by Ranald MacDougall contains an odd mixture of standard corny dialogue and arch, cynical quips, the latter tossed off by the likes of Monte and the straight-talking, unillusioned Ida.  Although she’s given too many of these wisecracks, Eve Arden delivers them expertly and entertainingly.  Jack Carson is good as Wally Fay, an unscrupulous business partner (first of boring Bert, then of Mildred).  One of the most likeable contributions is an uncredited cameo from Garry Owen, as a wry policeman who dissuades Mildred from jumping off a bridge.   Butterfly McQueen is the maid Lottie.  What McQueen is asked to do is infuriating – and more starkly racist because she’s the only African-American character in the film. Yet a fair number of people in NFT3 found this routine chuckle-worthy.

    8 May 2017

  • The Promise

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terry George (2016)

    The Promise is an old-fashioned love-in-wartime drama in several ways.  The principals are all top of their class – Mikael Boghosian (Oscar Isaac) is a brilliant medical student, Ana Khesarian (Charlotte Le Bon) a gifted dance teacher, Chris Myers (Christian Bale) a world-renowned journalist.  The plotting is sometimes highly improbable but consistent in the criterion applied to decide whether a character survives:  the star status of the actor concerned.   Both Mikael and Chris are in love with Ana; she has feelings for both of them (though she prefers Mikael).  How will the eternal triangle be resolved – to put it another way, how does the film choose between Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale?  The solution:  Charlotte Le Bon, who isn’t as a big a name as either of them, must eventually drown, leaving the two heroes with an increased respect for each other, as well as further ennobled by their shared loss.  All three main actors are good (as are others in the cast) and The Promise’s approach is fine for an audience  that prefers a love story to a war movie (an audience that includes me).  It’s nonetheless impossible to ignore Terry George’s celebrity-partiality – and how uneasily this sits with the film’s serious political pretensions.

    George’s story, centred on the Ottoman government’s systematic extermination of the Armenian population in 1915 and subsequently, is set in the same ethnic and geographical territory as Fatih Akin’s The Cut (2014).  Mikael is an apothecary in the Armenian village of Sirun.  He dreams of becoming a doctor.   He promises himself to Maral (Angela Sarafyan), the daughter of a wealthy local man, in exchange for a dowry of four hundred gold coins, which will finance Mikael’s medical studes in Constantinople.  On arrival in the big city, he meets Ana, who teaches the young daughters of Mikael’s uncle (Igal Naor) and his wife (Alicia Borrachero).  Ana too is Armenian by birth but lived for some years in Paris, where her relationship with Chris Myers, an American reporter for Associated Press, began.  Mikael also strikes up a friendship with Emre (Marwan Kenzari), a fellow medical student and the son of a high-ranking Turkish official.  On the outbreak of World War I, Mikael, with Emre’s help, avoids conscription in the Ottoman army through a medical student exemption.  In April 1915, the Ottoman authorities round up Armenian community leaders and intellectuals, before deporting them from Constantinople.  Mikael, in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent his uncle’s imprisonment, is himself arrested and sent to a prison labour camp.

    By the time the film arrives in the camp, preferential treatment is already setting in.  Whereas the prisoners played by extras are emaciated, Oscar Isaac and Tom Hollander simply have impressive facial hair growth.  Hollander’s casting is curious though he supplies a taking cameo, as a prisoner who was a circus clown in peacetime.  It has to be a cameo:  Hollander, not an international star, must blow himself up in an explosion that helps Oscar Isaac escape from the camp and find his way back to Sirun.   I won’t go into the details of what happens next.  Suffice to say that Terry George gets Ana and Chris into the vicinity; the inconvenient Maral killed, along with nearly all the other inhabitants of Sirun, by Turkish troops; and himself into a position where he can concentrate on the big three in the story.

    I’m labouring the point but The Promise’s tactics are not only transparent but finally objectionable.  (They seem to be proving counterproductive too:  the film, a fortnight after its US opening, hasn’t recouped a tenth of its $90m budget.)  Mikael explains in voiceover that he emigrated to America and settled there with one of his uncle’s now orphaned daughters, whom Mikael adopted.  The film ends with her wedding reception, at Mikael’s Massachusetts home, in the early 1940s.  The guests include other Armenians who also escaped the Turkish genocide and to the States.  Terry George then puts up on screen the words of William Saroyan, one of the most famous of all Armenian Americans:

    ‘Go ahead, destroy Armenia.  See if you can do it.  Send them into the desert without bread or water.  Burn their homes and churches.  Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again.  For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.’

    After more than two hours of brazen winnowing of the cast, the implication that The Promise has been a serious account of the Armenian Holocaust is a bit much.

    The dialogue in Terry George and Robin Swicord’s screenplay is often creaky, especially when it tries to move the action forward, but better in some of the more intimate exchanges between characters, which George also directs with a surer touch than the warfare set pieces.  The film is handsome and occasional beautiful to look at, although Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography isn’t particularly dynamic.  Gabriel Yared’s score does a decent job of combining the romantic and epic strains of the story.

    Since he played that ethnic conundrum Llewyn Davis, Oscar Isaac has become the go-to man for exoticismo.  You can see why:  Bryan Singer, who directed Isaac in X-Men: Apocalypse last year, made an odd choice of words but wasn’t wrong when he told Rolling Stone that the actor’s ‘facial structure embodies a global human’.  Isaac can play clear-cut Americans too but he seems to use his air of foreignness to substantiate the shadow side of such men, as in Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.  Isaac’s performance in the latter is, I think, his best so far but he’s often very effective in The Promise.  He’s just right as the shy but determined newcomer to student and metropolitan life, and has a lovely tact and humour in Mikael’s early scenes with Ana.  Once the narrative switches into conventional survival drama, Isaac’s opportunities are more limited but I found myself rooting for his character here more than in his other starring roles to date.

    There’s a quiet but real chemistry between Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon.  I’d not seen this French-Canadian actress before but I liked her.  Mikael’s mother Marta (Shohreh Agdashloo), who knows her son fell in love in Constantinople and doesn’t want to jeopardise his marriage to Maral, lies to Ana that Mikael is dead.  Charlotte Le Bon absorbs and conceals the shock very well (Ana has to hide her true feelings from Chris Myers, who’s also present, as well as Marta).  She’s even better when Mikael turns up:  Ana looks at him as if he really has come back from the dead.  Christian Bale, as the volatile, fearless Myers, brings a welcome cussed edge to proceedings but he’s also surprisingly touching in expressing the man’s honourableness and vulnerability.  When they first meet in the lecture theatre and  Mikael declares that medicine is his passion, Emre replies that his is female anatomy:  this hedonistic Jack the Lad is there only because his father gave him a simple choice – either a medical or a military career.  But by the time Chris Myers is arrested by the Ottoman authorities for spying, it’s Emre who, with the US Ambassador (James Cromwell), saves the journalist’s skin – at the cost of his own:  the young man is executed by firing squad.  Marwan Kenzari, who’s Dutch-Tunisian, does an excellent job – in the unsubtle circumstances, a remarkably natural job – of delineating Emre’s discovery that life is no laughing matter.

    5 May 2017

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