Monthly Archives: July 2017

  • Wag the Dog

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Barry Levinson (1997)

    The President of the United States – seeking re-election and well ahead in the polls with less than two weeks to Election Day – is caught making advances to an underage girl in a room behind the Oval Office.  While the President is on a trade visit to China, his team brings in spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) to divert attention from the scandal.  Brean’s solution is a pretend war with Albania.  He recruits a Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), to construct the illusion – fake news footage, a theme song, the works.   The outrageous ruse is succeeding splendidly until the CIA gets wind of it.  After an announcement that the war has ended, the abuse scandal edges back towards centre stage so Motss invents a subplot in the form of an American soldier left behind enemy lines.  A military hero’s homecoming is arranged but Schumann (Woody Harrelson), the soldier supplied by the Pentagon for the role, is actually a criminally insane army convict serving time for rape.  He’s shot dead while attempting another sexual assault.  No matter: Motss, who repeatedly assures Brean and the others that he’s had to solve much bigger problems in the course of his Hollywood career, turns the homecoming into a military funeral.  As Election Day draws nigh, however, Motss loses patience.  This is a man who’s produced the Academy Awards show but has never himself won an Oscar; it’s intolerable to him that his latest production is hush-hush while plaudits head the way of the team behind the unimaginative ‘don’t change horses in midstream’ ads for the President’s campaign.  He threatens to blow the gaff on the Albanian war in order to get recognition for his much more creative work.  Brean promptly has Motss killed although the official cause of death is a heart attack.  The President is re-elected.

    The impact of Barry Levinson’s satirical black comedy Wag the Dog was increased by the timing of its original release.  The film, written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet  and loosely based on Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel American Hero, opened in America in late 1997, just a few weeks before the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted (and a few months before the Clinton administration’s bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, which some saw as diversionary action).  Fake news may never have been bigger news than it is twenty years on from 1997 and the audience reaction to Wag the Dog in NFT2 (where it was showing as part of BFI’s Dustin Hoffman retrospective) was, from the very start, audibly strong and audibly knowing.  That soundtrack hardened my resistance to the film.  Its main themes – the distorting effects of television on the political process, war as a form of popular entertainment and of satisfying public appetites – are compelling but Wag the Dog has made its points in less than ten minutes:  the success of the remaining ninety depends on inventive plotting, smart lines and effective acting.   Although it has plenty of all three (even if Stanley Motss’s eleventh-hour decision to spill the beans is weakly contrived), the movie also has a blanketing smugness.  It seems fuelled not by anger or even concern at the political chicanery and show-business egocentrism it’s lampooning but by a desire to be admired for its cynical cleverness.  I found the filmmakers’ calculation at its most hateful when it was explained that Schumann was doing time for ‘raping a nun’.  This got a good laugh in NFT2 though it clearly wouldn’t have if nun had been girl or woman.

    There are compensations.  Robert De Niro wears a silly ‘characterful’ hat throughout but it’s good to hear him handling so expertly dialogue that’s thoroughly witty and whose profusion isn’t the result of improvisational padding.  Dustin Hoffman’s line readings are, of course, expert too – though the only time he made me smile was when he made a sound rather than speaking words:  the President’s aide asks if Schumann has much of his prison sentence left to serve and Motss replies, in a tone of suppressed hysteria, ‘Hmmm’.  Anne Heche works hard as the aide (the third biggest role):  you’re always conscious of the effort.  Woody Harrelson is alarmingly unhinged as Schumann.  It’s interesting to see a fifteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst:  she plays a young actress posing as a fetching Albanian peasant in Motss’s faux footage and frustrated to learn that the job is top secret and can’t go on her CV.  William H Macy is good as a CIA agent though his character is too easily squished by Brean’s verbal onslaught.  The President’s face remains unseen throughout.  Willie Nelson is agreeable as the increasingly puzzled songwriter brought onto the team.  The resulting songs are enjoyable too but I was more grateful for Mark Knopfler’s instrumental score.  Its wistful quality supplies a rare and welcome suggestion that the abuses ridiculed in Wag the Dog might give rise to regret rather than self-satisfied contempt.

    18 July 2017

  • The Beguiled

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sofia Coppola (2017)

    Nearly twenty years after The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola’s debut feature, she has made The Virgin Murderesses.  Hers is the second screen adaptation of Thomas P Cullinan’s 1966 novel The Beguiled (originally published as A Painted Devil), following the Don Siegel film of 1971 starring Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page (and which I’ve not seen).  During the American Civil War in 1864, a wounded Union corporal, John McBurney (Colin Farrell), finds uneasy refuge in a girls’ school in Virginia.  Because of the war going on, the personnel of the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies has been reduced to a mere five pupils and two staff – the principal, Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman), and another teacher, Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst).  All seven are in principle hostile to a Union soldier and in practice fascinated by the handsome stranger who, as he recovers from his serious leg injury, is their guest-cum-prisoner.  The ensuing sexual bouleversement among the girls and women triggers a series of increasingly intentional acts of revenge against McBurney, culminating in his death by poisoning.  Some of the story’s components suggest Southern Gothic but Sofia Coppola’s version of The Beguiled is leached of grotesque energy and mystery.  It also calls to mind Misery but without the dynamism or the humour – the intentional humour anyway.  The film is often beautiful but more often silly, thanks to the discrepancy between the lurid fox-in-the-henhouse plot and the tasteful art-movie lineaments Coppola has imposed on it.

    The opening scene, in woodland close to the school, is promising.  The play of light and shadow on water and trees, some of them extraordinarily shaped, really does beguile.  Amy (Oona Laurence), one of Martha Farnsworth’s pupils, is out picking mushrooms when she’s startled by McBurney, who lies injured on the ground.  Throughout the film, the relatively few outdoor sequences are finely composed and lit (by Philippe Le Sourd).  Inside the school, the prevailing half-light pays diminishing expressive returns but the coloration, when you can make it out, is remarkable – for example, in the graded tones of the dresses.   In Edwina’s elementary French conversation class, the first indoor sequence, the barely suppressed boredom of girls and teacher alike is palpable and ominous.  Sofia Coppola creates telling motifs.  The foraged mushrooms that bring McBurney into the life of the seminary eventually kill him.  Miss Martha sutures his wound; the girls do embroidery; at the end of the film, the whole Farnsworth community is at work stitching up McBurney’s shroud.

    Once the story gets underway, however, it’s ridiculous.  Coppola directs her cast as if they were giving only flickering hints of the sexual desires and tensions in play but these feelings are immediately easy to read.  This is particularly the case with Nicole Kidman, whose breathy, nervous manner not only makes things obvious but also detracts from the principal’s authority.  It’s no surprise at all when Miss Martha can hardly control herself as she bathes McBurney’s body: she’s been in an evident tizz from the moment she set gimlet eyes on him.  Elle Fanning is by now too accomplished an actress for the thin role of Alicia, the oldest of the five girls:  Fanning has a monotonous piqued flirtatiousness – piqued, that is, until the tomcat McBurney has recovered sufficiently to get his leg over.   For the most part in this film, the more experienced a performer is the more crudely histrionic her playing:  the younger girls – Emma Howard, Angourie Rice and Addison Riecke, as well as Oona Laurence – are relatively natural and opaque.  The honourable exception to this rule is Kirsten Dunst, nuanced and occasionally touching as Edwina, whose feelings for McBurney run deeper and seem more desperate.  Her shocked reaction to discovering him in bed with Alicia catalyses the second half of the story.  Edwina is the only member of the household who isn’t in on the poisoned mushrooms plot.

    Sofia Coppola seems to have wanted to render The Beguiled as an almost abstract male vs female confrontation.  She minimises the political and historical context.  There was a significant African-American character in the 1971 film but we learn early on in this one that ‘the slaves have left’ the seminary, thereby removing any racial element from the proceedings.  (It may be unfair to say so but you can’t help wondering if dark skin might have interfered with the palette Coppola was determined to have.)  The Civil War setting counts for little once it’s been made clear that McBurney is at the mercy of ‘the enemy’:  he’s a more general figure – an unexpected man among women.  Perhaps Coppola was aiming for a kind of feminist corrective to the Don-Siegel-Clint Eastwood version; if so, it’s hard to see how she succeeds in achieving this.  The motor of the revenge plot is supplied by the fervid competition of frustrated females rather than male chauvinism or abuse.   Even after McBurney has betrayed her, Edwina still wants (and gets) him.  It’s verging on risible that all the commotion in The Beguiled is on account of Colin Farrell.  He’s physically suitable to the extent of being credible as a randy Irish-immigrant soldier of fortune.  He’s also, as usual, vocally colourless and emotionally underpowered.  Farrell is not an imposing presence.  It’s much harder to take your eyes off Nicole Kidman overacting.

    14 July 2017

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