Monthly Archives: August 2017

  • Dunkirk

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Nolan (2017)

    The Dunkirk evacuation and Christopher Nolan sound like a mismatch:  the little ships and Nolan’s penchant for technical grandiosity don’t go together.  Evidently aware of such prejudiced expectations, Nolan has come up with what seems, on paper at least, a neat solution.  His screenplay for Dunkirk, as well as allowing him plenty of scope for spectacular land and sky warfare, includes a human interest story aboard one of the flotilla of private boats.  Nolan’s description of the ordeal of a handful of soldiers and airmen aims for in-the-thick-of-it immediacy and intensity; the happenings on the representative little ship are dramatically conventional and separate.  This is an unsatisfying combination, though it’s proving a highly successful one, critically and commercially.

    The film begins in the streets of Dunkirk, where a British private, Tommy [sic], walks under a rain of German propaganda leaflets; within a few screen seconds, he and other Tommies are trying desperately to dodge a hail of German machine-gun bullets.  The opening is Nolanesque all right:  the pieces of paper falling through the air are a self-conscious image – so too is the screenful of fleeing soldiers, shot down one by one until Tommy alone escapes to progress into the action proper.  This comprises a threefold structure, reflecting the different timeframes of the evacuation for land, sea and air forces – one week, one day and one hour respectively – in late May and early June 1940.  Each of the three narrative components is introduced by an explanatory note on screen.  The viewer is meant to commit the notes to heart, in order both to make sense of what follows and to appreciate the structural ingenuity.  At the same time, Nolan wants to convey a sense of the awful physical realities – to make audiences feel they’re in the cockpit with Spitfire pilots and hiding with soldiers in a grounded trawler.  He uses his formidable hi-tech skills to create startling sequences of planes crash-landing in the sea and the terrifying claustrophobia of being trapped underwater.  These highlights occasionally make an emotional impression but more often merely confirm the director’s film-making knowhow.  The complicated timeline doesn’t amount to much in dramatic terms.  The army personnel barely register as individuals.  If we do keep a handle on what’s going on, it’s thanks to not being fully involved.

    Things are very different on the boat en route from Weymouth to Dunkirk, which isn’t typical of the little ships.  Rather than being requisitioned by the Royal Navy, the craft is crewed by its owner, Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance), his teenage son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and, at the last minute, Peter’s friend George (Barry Keoghan), eager for adventure and to get his name in the papers.  They rescue and take on board a soldier (Cillian Murphy), the traumatised survivor of a U-boat attack.  When he learns that Dawson is heading for the French coast rather than back to England, the soldier goes crazy and tries to take control of the boat.  In the scuffle that follows, George falls downstairs, sustaining what proves to be a fatal head injury.  Later on, the boat rescues Spitfire pilot Collins (Jack Lowden) and soldiers including Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and Alex (Harry Styles), whose life Tommy saved on the pier at Dunkirk.  Collins learns from Peter Dawson that his elder brother was a Hurricane pilot, lost in action in the early weeks of the war.  When they eventually return to Weymouth, Peter goes along to the local newspaper to make his ill-fated friend’s dream come true.  Christopher Nolan must mean for there to be synergy between the neatly packaged story (and backstory) of the Dawson crew and the high-octane hyper-realism of the major action sequences.  But they connect in only the most basic way – the succession of men rescued by Mr Dawson are switching from one half of the film to the other.

    The concentration on a single little ship makes it hard for the uninitiated to understand how the Dunkirk evacuation delivered 300,000 men to (at least temporary) safety.  That said, Nolan is sometimes impatient to indulge his natural pomposity and the most flagrant instance of this occurs when he cuts to a shot of the little ships flotilla approaching the French coast, well before the tale of Dawson’s boat is complete.  The score by Hans Zimmer (the ideal musical collaborator for Nolan) suddenly goes all Elgar’s Nimrod, as it also does in later, supposedly heart-swelling moments.  Some of the last bits of Dunkirk, however, are understated and more genuinely affecting.  It’s corny and predictable that George is posthumously a front-page hero; but, when Mr Dawson reads the story, Mark Rylance’s silent, contained pride in what Peter has done, is eloquent.  Back in England, Tommy, in a train compartment, also reads a newspaper and the text of Churchill’s ‘We will fight on the beaches’ speech aloud to Alex.  The final, brief shot of Fionn Whitehead’s face is, for Nolan, unusually complex and humanly imaginative.  Tommy looks puzzled.  Almost foreseeing the Dunkirk mythology that was to develop subsequently, his face seems to ask, ‘Is Churchill talking about me?’  There are repeated elegant compositions of tiny figures arranged, in various configurations, in a vast beachscape.  The film’s palette is wearyingly tasteful, though.  The cinematographer is Hoyte van Hoytema but sand and sea in Dunkirk often suggest a Farrow and Ball colour chart.  Though it’s an appalling sight, it’s also a chromatic relief when a sinking ship spills oil that ignites and the water is suddenly aflame.

    As suggested above, Mark Rylance again does fine work:  it’s remarkable how substantial a personality he creates from the material he’s given.  Kenneth Branagh has a good steely authority as the senior officer in charge on the Dunkirk pier.  The two Spitfire pilots are Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden.  With most of his face obscured by his pilot’s mask, Hardy is admirably expressive:  it’s almost anti-climactic when, after making an emergency landing, he removes the disguise (‘Yes, it was me all along …’)  Lowden makes by some way the best impression of the newer actors.  I don’t like to sound even older than I am but I often struggled to hear what the other youngsters were saying.  I got every word of Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance.

    31 July 2017

  • Howards End

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Ivory (1992)

    Howards End has aged well.  I don’t know if I failed to appreciate its virtues in 1992 or if nostalgia for the Merchant-Ivory narrative style has set in now, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed the film twenty-five years after its original release.  The pace, though never sluggish, is unhurried:  James Ivory and the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who are faithful to E M Forster’s novel, unfold its themes gradually, enabling them to be fully appreciated.  They capture, with clarity and economy, the characters’ different cultural inheritances, the class (and wealth) distinctions at work in their relationships.  Ivory and Prawer Jhabvala dramatise the crucial tension between the different values of the two main families – the liberal humanity of the cultured Schlegels, the materialistic drive of the philistine Wilcoxes.

    Before their connection is eventually formalised through marriage, the families collide repeatedly and in several ways.  First, there’s the short-lived romance (and even shorter-lived engagement) between the younger Wilcox son Paul (Joseph Bennett) and Helen Schlegel (Helena Bonham Carter), while she’s staying with the family at Howards End, their country home.  The house belongs to the Wilcox materfamilias Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave), whose acquaintance Helen and her sister Margaret (Emma Thompson) had made on holiday in Germany the previous year.  A few months after Helen’s ill-fated stay with them, the Wilcoxes take a flat in London, which happens to be on the opposite side of the street on which the Schlegels live.  Margaret and the ailing Ruth Wilcox become friends; on her deathbed, Ruth writes a note bequeathing Howards End to Margaret.  Ruth’s widower, the hard-headed businessman Henry (Anthony Hopkins), presides over a family conference that decides to ignore and destroy the note.

    A subsequent chance meeting marks the start of a growing mutual attraction between Henry and Margaret.  They become engaged, to the displeasure, for different reasons, of both Henry’s children and Margaret’s sister.  Helen, whose feelings about the Wilcoxes have been prickly since her mortifying romantic experience at Howards End, has since adopted as a worthy cause Leonard Bast (Samuel West), a young insurance clerk anxious both to make ends meet and to further his education.  Helen bitterly resents Henry’s careless and counterproductive advice that Leonard move to a different insurance company.   This leads to a three-way family collision:  the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes and the Basts – Leonard and his wife Jacky (Nicola Duffett), the troubled ‘fallen woman’ whom he felt morally compelled to marry.  Determined that Henry, quite literally, doesn’t lose sight of the now jobless Leonard, Helen gatecrashes the wedding reception of the Wilcox daughter (Jemma Redgrave), with the Basts in tow.  Hungry and thirsty, Jacky has too much to drink but she recognises Henry as a man who once had sex with her, a pivotal revelation.  This is far from the whole story but it’s enough for this note – and not just because E M Forster’s novel is so well known:  reducing Howards End to a series of events gives a misleading impression of melodrama, unfair to Forster and to the people who made this film.

    By the time their Howards End reached the screen, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were already the go-to partnership for audiences eager for decorous, opulent period drama, even though those adjectives are a travesty of Merchant-Ivory’s favoured authors, Forster and Henry James.  (Merchant-Ivory had previously adapted A Room With a View, Maurice, The Europeans and The Bostonians for the screen.)  It was hard not to be aware of the sizeable middlebrow audience primed to coo at the furnishings, frocks and past-times comfort of the Merchant-Ivory world.  I think this awareness – and not wanting to be part of this kind of enthusiasm – blinded me to the merits of Howards End.  Shot by Tony Pierce-Roberts, designed by Luciana Arrighi and Ian Whittaker, costumed by Jenny Beaven and John Bright, the film is pictorially beautiful but it’s much more too.  Visual details recur and, because they feature in sequences that are emotionally very different from one another, resonate strongly: gowns trailing on the grassy bank outside Howards End; lights within the house, viewed from without; notes thrown on the fire.  The occasional repetition of words reverberates too – like the phrase ‘ever so long’, at the beginning and end of a conversation between Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox.

    The narrative rhythm and tone are less satisfying in the closing stages (oddly enough, something similar happened in David Lean’s film of Forster’s A Passage to India).  Some of the later scenes are too emphatic, others are overpowered by Richard Robbins’s score.    When James Ivory pushes for a powerful image, it can appear bombastic and artificial – as in Leonard Bast’s fatal collapse, bringing a bookcase and its contents symbolically down on top of him.  Less attention-grabbing moments involving this character are eloquent.  After his first visit to the space and light of the Schlegels’ home, Leonard registers silent dismay on his return to the cramped rented room he shares with Jacky.   It’s close to a railway line, the place repeatedly shaken by the noise and shot through with the flicker of passing trains.  He doggedly continues to wear a work suit; there’s a poignant glimpse of his creased shirt collar.

    Similarly, a few illustrations of the clash of family values are harshly unconvincing – James Wilby is too dynamically nasty as Charles Wilcox, for example – but more are persuasive.  Margaret and Helen, scions of a middle-class, intellectual Anglo-German family, are benevolently keen to encourage Leonard’s intellectual ambition and unaware – until he becomes, for Helen, an altogether more serious business – that they treat Leonard as a rather amusing curiosity.  Henry’s curt indulgence of his new wife’s books makes it all the clearer that he thinks them a waste of time.

    The explicit brusqueness and implicit underlying brutality of Anthony Hopkins’s Henry are impressive, even if their powerful combination makes Margaret’s love for him harder to credit.  Emma Thompson’s face is animated and expressive.  Her characteristic tone and phrasing, which can be tiresome, are just right here, getting across, in addition to the well-meaning Margaret’s intelligent sincerity, her sometimes overbearing quality.  Vanessa Redgrave is very good:  she would have been even better if her presence and voice had complemented each other more.  Both are otherworldly and the fey line readings detract from some of Ruth Wilcox’s recollections but the effect is unarguably compelling:  Redgrave doesn’t have much screen time but she leaves, very appropriately in the role she’s playing, a legacy that persists throughout the film.  Helena Bonham Carter and Samuel West give admirably committed performances and Nicola Duffett is touching as the fleshy, vulnerable Jacky.    The cast also includes Prunella Scales as the Schlegel sisters’ hyperactive aunt and Adrian Ross Magenty as their hypoactive brother.

    28 July 2017

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