Monthly Archives: August 2017

  • The Ghoul

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gareth Tunley (2016)

    To most people, Geoff McGivern is an actor whose face will be more familiar than his name:  he’s often on television, usually in small roles (sometimes as Geoff, sometimes as Geoffrey).  It was a different matter in December 1971, when Archbishop Holgate’s Grammar School (AHGS) in York mounted a production of A Man for All Seasons.  McGivern, in his last term at the school, starred as Thomas More and starred was the word.  Anyone who’s ever been vexed by Robert Bolt’s unremitting reverence for his protagonist needs to know it’s as nothing compared to the Geoff McGivern fandom at AHGS, among the staff anyway.  He was exceptional, an all-round highflyer:  head boy; rugby first fifteen; in the same term that he was rehearsing A Man for All Seasons, he was also preparing for Oxbridge entrance and got a Cambridge exhibition.  To his schoolfellows in my year at AHGS (we were three years younger than him), McGivern was maybe most remarkable for his precocious hirsuteness.  But it was the maturity of his acting – to put it another way, the skill of his Paul Scofield impression – that dazzled the teachers most of all.  The Geoffolatry was a bit much, especially if, like me, you were a junior member of the Man for All Seasons cast.  It left a lasting impression.  It would be an overstatement to say I’ve kept a keen eye on McGivern’s professional acting career but I’ve never lost interest in him – even if nowadays this usually amounts to nothing more than calling out to Sally ‘It’s Geoff McGivern!’,  whenever he pops up on television.  Now in his mid-sixties, he’s worked very regularly – on stage and radio (the voice of Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is still his best-known role) as well as on screen (132 credits on IMDB since 1979).  He hasn’t been Paul Scofield, however, and the advertisement for The Ghoul in Sight & Sound came as a surprise.  I don’t remember ever seeing Geoff McGivern’s name on a film poster before and this is the reason why I went to see the writer-director Gareth Tunley’s first feature.  (Otherwise, Tunley’s associations with Ben Wheatley would likely have been enough to put me off.)

    In this psychological thriller, Chris (Tom Meeten) drives to London from northern England to assist a former colleague, Jim (Dan Renton Skinner), in investigating a double homicide.  Chris seems to be a kind of resting detective and the murder case is also unusual:  according to Jim, both victims, even though they’d been shot in the head and the chest, kept moving forward for some distance before they eventually collapsed.  The chief suspect, a man named Coulson (Rufus Jones), is currently receiving psychotherapy and Chris goes undercover, posing as a patient and visiting Helen Fisher (Niamh Cusack), Coulson’s therapist, in the hope of finding clues to the crime (by looking in a filing cabinet while she’s briefly out of the office).  Helen falls ill and refers Chris to a senior therapist, Alexander Morland (it’s Geoff McGivern!)   As The Ghoul proceeds, the boundary between the identities of Chris the detective and Chris the patient becomes blurred:  Jim, for example, has an alter ego as the partner of Chris’s ex-girlfriend Kathleen (Alice Lowe).  The direction the film takes is made virtually explicit in a brief conversation between Chris and another man at a party.  When Chris explains his mental state and that he experiences fantasies of being a detective, the other man replies, ‘How do you know it’s not the detective work that’s real?’   It’s no surprise that, at the end of The Ghoul, this question is unresolved.  By now it seems (although you can’t be sure:  the assailant wears a mask) that Chris murdered Helen Fisher and Alexander Morland, who are revealed to have been life partners as well as colleagues.  Chris escapes to drive back north but not for long.  Something happens on the motorway and he’s soon heading for London again.  The action ends as it began – Dead of Night-style – at the start of what may (or may not) be a recurring nightmare.

    The film’s title, the victims’ physically impossible movement after the fatal shots and Morland’s partiality for occult paraphernalia notwithstanding, The Ghoul is a psychological conundrum rather than a supernatural horror story.   Morland encourages Chris to give his depression an identity in order to try and get a handle on it:  Chris calls his malaise ‘the ghoul’.  The artefacts on the shelves of Morland’s cluttered study include a Klein bottle, which attracts Chris’s attention and which the therapist describes as an example of ‘a non-orientable surface’, an object whose inside and outside are indistinguishable.  Morland goes on to compare the bottle with a Möbius strip, which he demonstrates to Chris, with the ouroboros (the ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail) and with the theory of eternal recurrence.  All of these are clearly germane to Gareth Tunley’s themes.  The Ghoul, only eighty-five minutes long and made on a ‘micro-budget’ (whatever that is), holds your attention but the supposedly confounding clash of fantasy and reality isn’t much of a contest.  Chris’s detective identity is sketchily realised compared with his depressive one, in Tunley’s script and in the lead performance:  the hangdog pallor of long-faced Tom Meeten eclipses any suggestion of a life – or job – outside the bleak stasis in which the hero is mired.  The detective work required of the viewer is, in terms of guessing what’s going to happen, pretty basic:  once Chris has been referred by Fisher to Morland and goes for psychotherapy at the latter’s home, we recognise the hallway and staircase as the crime scene that Chris was shown round at the start.

    It will be clear from the above that Geoff McGivern merits his name on the poster – he has a key role and a lot to say.  His creepy bonhomie – from the word go:  Morland’s first line, opening the front door to Chris, is ‘Trousers down for half a crown!’ – brightens The Ghoul‘s prevailing existential gloom.  This is in spite of knowing, also from the word go, that Morland’s jokey-hearty manner is bound to mask something sinister and the fact that, after a while, you wonder if McGivern needs a little more vocal variety.  He is good, though – a credit to AHGS after all these years.  The former also applies to Niamh Cusack, Alice Lowe and Waen Shepherd’s music – at least in the more plangent passages Gareth Tunley uses at the beginning and end (the electro chords are too relentlessly ominous in between).  The Ghoul is, among other things, very negative publicity for London:  Tunley and his DP Benjamin Pritchard give the place a hellish look both in daylight (though the skies are always grey) and under cover of darkness.  There’s a welcoming warmth to the lights on the motorway only when Chris is travelling on the northbound side of the road.

    17 August 2017

  • England Is Mine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Gill (2017)

    England Is Mine ends with Steven Morrissey outside the front door of Johnny Marr’s house.  Although Morrissey and Marr are already acquainted, the writer-director Mark Gill seems to intend this last sequence to equate to the first meeting of Lennon and McCartney at the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete in July 1957.  The moment is momentous.  The doorbell rings; the rest is history.  Provided, of course, you know the history.  Gill’s Morrissey biopic, covering the period from 1976 to 1982 (from its subject’s late teens to his early twenties), depends for texture and resonance on familiarity with the music that Morrissey and The Smiths went on to make.   I don’t have this knowledge:  I can hear Morrissey’s singing voice in my head but not his songs in detail.  I didn’t even recognise the film’s title as a quote from The Smiths’ ‘Still Ill’ (‘England is mine, and it owes me a living’).

    I did know something of Morrissey’s reputation as a poetic urban miserablist and controversialist, even before I started reading his 2013 autobiography (entitled Autobiography).  Acutely aware of his public image, Morrissey imposes his flamboyant pessimism on his childhood memories:  the implication that this is what he felt and thought about these early experiences at the time they occurred rings false.  Mark Gill’s approach is different.  England Is Mine gets across Morrissey’s apartness but without the sense of predestination that infuses Autobiography.  This may be more truthful but it makes for a duller film than the book is a read.  The visual and emotional colouring is very different too.  In Autobiography, the schools that Morrissey attended and the neighbourhood he grew up in are hellish – from his point of view, dynamically antagonistic.  Gill uses a recurring image of dark swirling water but this isn’t miasmic and Manchester is otherwise grey.  The confrontation between the hero and his environment is less distinctive and dramatic on screen:  Morrissey’s story is just another attempt by a creative soul to break out of dun-coloured anonymity.  Discovering the New York Dolls in 1973 was an epiphany for Morrissey ‘on a planet that even I had felt certain was as flat-tire [sic][1] as fuck’.    Although the certificate for England Is Mine warns of strong language, the film feels like a case of expletives deleted – the flat tyre without the fuck.

    Mark Gill has said in interview that he ‘doesn’t want to upset’ Morrissey and it shows.  England Is Mine is cautious and limited.  Every so often, the picture seems about to catch fire but doesn’t – for example, the morning after Steven’s public debut as a vocalist, when he enters a lift with unusual exuberance.  Of course the lack of follow-through to this chimes with Steven’s back-to-earth experience but that’s not enough to explain the lack of dramatic excitement.  It’s as if Gill and William Thacker, who shares the screenplay credit with him, decided the protagonist was such a towering, multi-faceted figure that the most a film about his life could do was capture just one or two of his many aspects.   As a result, Jack Lowden’s Morrissey comes over as a largely innocuous misfit (at least until his hair is cut shorter in the later stages, which has something of a reverse Samson effect).  Lowden is quietly witty, though, and conveys convincingly his character’s sexually ambiguous nature.  Having seen him as a Spitfire pilot in Dunkirk only ten days previously, I had to be impressed by Lowden’s versatility (and change of appearance).

    What draws Steven Morrissey to those rare creatures who become his friends isn’t clear but the young actors playing them, and other characters, do well – Jessica Brown Findlay (as Linder Sterling), Adam Lawrence (Billy Duffy), Jodie Comer (Christine, a fellow pen-pusher at the Inland Revenue), Katherine Pearce (the ill-fated Anji Hardie), Vivienne Bell (Steven’s sister, Jackie), Laurie Kynaston (Johnny Marr).   It’s good that petty authority figures in the story are interpreted with more nuance and sympathy than you might expect – by Graeme Hawley, as the exasperated manager at the tax office, and the uncredited actor who plays a job centre employee struggling unavailingly to conduct an interview with Steven.  This is a positive difference from the autobiography, which features a long succession of viciously inadequate schoolteachers etc:  Morrissey gets his own back on these physical and/or emotional sadists through verbal sadism.

    Mark Gill’s low-key narrative is occasionally interrupted by jarring biopic clichés – like the crushing setback Steven suffers when Billy Duffy gets taken up by a London music producer while he is left behind in Manchester.  Or the episode in which, working briefly as a hospital orderly, Steven sees Anji again:  she’s now a terminally ill cancer patient and her death sparks unsurprising existential reflections on the part of the depressed hero.  There’s even a you-can-be-anyone-you-want-to-be pep talk from Steven’s mother (Simone Kirby).   A few days after seeing Prick Up Your Ears again and reading of Alan Bennett’s struggle to dramatise the act of writing, it was a bit astonishing to find Mark Gill, thirty years later, unashamed to include repeated shots of Morrissey labouring at the typewriter.  (The machine, along with the vinyl, supplies a touch of retro charm to proceedings but it hardly reactivates the cliché.)   It’s disappointing not to get more sense from the film of the protagonist’s way with words, other than the letter he writes that gets published in NME.   Mark Gill’s concern not to give offence to Morrissey undersells him and therefore seems unlikely to achieve its aim.  Still, I was one of only two people in the audience for England Is Mine, at HMV Curzon in Wimbledon:  it struck me that might appeal to Morrissey’s voice-in-the-wilderness side.

    10 August 2017

    [1] The book uses American English spelling.

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