Monthly Archives: October 2017

  • Mudbound

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dee Rees (2017)

    This formally ambitious racial drama, shown at the London Film Festival, is based on the 2008 debut novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan.  I didn’t know beforehand that Mudbound was adapted from a novel but it doesn’t take long to guess – especially since the film, unusually, has no less than six narrative voice(over)s.   The unappealing title is the name of a flood-prone cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s.  Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) buys the land and relocates there from Memphis with his city-born wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), who’s reluctant to move, their two young daughters and Henry’s malignantly crabby father (Jonathan Banks).  Henry intends that the family will live in the neighbouring town of Marietta, from where he’ll drive to work on the farm each day.  When he discovers that the owner of the house he’s paid to rent in Marietta has cheated him by selling the property to another man, the McAllans have no option but to move into the cramped, primitive farmhouse.  Their humble living conditions give them more in common than they would otherwise have with the sharecroppers on their land:  the Atwoods (Dylan Arnold and Lucy Faust), a young white couple; and the African-American Jackson family – Hap (Rob Morgan), his wife Florence (Mary J Blige) and their several children.  Another thing the McAllans and the Jacksons have in common is that one of their number is fighting in Europe in World War II – the Jacksons’ eldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), Henry’s younger brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund).

    In the opening scene of Mudbound, Henry and Jamie are attempting, in urgent haste because a storm is imminent, to dig a grave for their father.  After this prologue, the story moves back to 1939, when Laura and Henry first meet, and from there through the war years and the early post-war period, up to the point at which the story began.  A short epilogue completes the picture.  I’m guessing that the narrators of Hillary Jordan’s novel describe not just their feelings but also the events of the plot.   In the film, these multiple voices – of Laura, Henry, Hap, Florence, Ronsel and Jamie – aren’t needed to tell the story:  Dee Rees and Virgil Williams, who shares the screenplay credit with her, are doing that, from an essentially objective point of view.  Online summaries of the book suggest that the six characters, each in their different way, are prevented, in the time and place in which Mudbound is set, from expressing themselves.  While this is also true of the characters on screen, a filmmaker has other means – chiefly her actors’ faces– to get that message across.  The voiceovers occasionally supply significant information – for example, that Laura, when she first met Henry, was a thirty-one-year-old virgin and agreed to marry him largely out of gratitude for rescuing her from an old-maid future.  The actors’ voices on the soundtrack sometimes enrich the characterisations that the camera is recording.  For the most part, though, the multiple narrators are little more than a complicating decoration.  Perhaps they also contribute to Mudbound’s unfocused and episodic quality during its first half (where the different voices seem to be heard more often than they are later on).  Although there’s much of interest in the opening hour of the film, it doesn’t begin to gather momentum until Ronsel and Jamie return to their families after the war has ended.

    The film’s main strength comes from melding two familiar types of story and yielding something distinctive from their combination:  a tale of demobbed men struggling to acclimatise post-war is grafted onto a Jim Crow country melodrama.  The sequences describing Ronsel’s and Jamie’s wartime experiences aren’t imaginative but their legacy is potently realised.  Jamie’s experiences as a fighter pilot have traumatised him.  Ronsel has discovered that the racial segregation he’s used to at home doesn’t apply on the front line; he has also had a love affair with Resl (Samantha Hoefer), a white German girl.  Dee Rees does a particularly good job of describing the less blatantly offensive aspects of American racist conventions of the time – for example, the way that Laura, although kindly disposed towards the Jacksons, speaks to Florence with a natural condescension.  The same is true of Jamie’s attitude towards Ronsel, at least in the early stages of their curious friendship.  Rees also makes clear that working the Mudbound land is unrewarding for all concerned, regardless of race or economic circumstance.  A subplot concerning the ill-fated Atwoods is the starkest illustration of this.  Middle-class Laura’s politely aloof attitude towards white-trash Vera Atwood, until their last, shocking encounter, is another well-observed social detail.

    The central horror story is that of Ronsel, a young man whose life seems in greater peril in peacetime Mississippi than it was in wartime Europe.  The film’s atmosphere is increasingly ominous – you know, of course, that things are heading for a grim climax.  Tamar-Kali’s score is an insistent reminder.  Besides, the geography of the piece primes you for a Southern Gothic explosion.  You naturally wonder how it’s come about that the McAllan sons are preparing to bury their father, especially once it’s clear (as it is almost immediately) that he’s a vile racist.  The big finish is hardly unexpected:  Pappy, when he chances on evidence that Ronsel has fathered Resl’s child, gets together a lynch mob, including Klansmen, who torture Ronsel.  Jamie, in punishment for befriending the latter, is forced to choose which part of Ronsel’s body should be removed – eyes, tongue or genitals.  An earlier conversation between Jamie and Pappy, in which the father belittled his son’s military medals because Jamie had ‘never looked a man between the eyes’ before killing him, reeks of significance-to-come:  Jamie, once released by the posse, looks his father in the eyes before murdering him.   The predictability of all this doesn’t, however, make the torture sequence any less shocking – or stop you inwardly cheering the patricide.

    Except for Pappy, the main white characters are more complex than the black ones, whose virtues are more or less unqualified.  I can only speculate as to why this is.  The novelist Hillary Jordan is white and, I assume, a liberal.  Dee Rees is African-American but it’s clear enough (and the lyrics of a song played over the closing credits seem to confirm) that she means Mudbound, in spite of its historical setting, to reflect depressing aspects of race relations in America seventy years later.   Making the Jacksons morally ambiguous might get in the way of the political view Rees wants to convey.  Florence Jackson is a thoroughly admirable wife and mother, from whose nursing and housekeeping skills the McAllans benefit.  Hap is a thoroughly admirable husband and father, and a preacher well respected in the local black community.  We sometimes see in Hap’s eyes that it sticks in his craw to obey his white bosses but he knows co-operation is in his family’s best interests.  The Jackson children want to better themselves and their parents encourage this but Ronsel, when he returns to Mississippi, feels a duty to help his parents, especially with Hap still recovering from a serious leg injury.

    The Jacksons’ marital fidelity contrasts with the compromised relationship of Laura and Henry, and the longstanding mutual attraction between Laura and Jamie.  As indicated above, Laura admits the expediency of her agreeing to wed Henry.   One of the most emotionally rich scenes in the film comes before they marry, when Laura and the McAllan brothers go to a dance in Memphis.   Laura has just met Jamie for the first time and the spark between them is especially evident when they take the floor.  Henry perceives it but watches with an almost gratified calm: he knows the effect his brother has on women.  Jamie’s increasing alcohol dependency is familiar enough for a young man in his psychologically snarled-up situation but he’s far from a standard hopeless drunk.  He does constructive things – whether it’s getting to know Ronsel or putting together a shower that allows Laura to stay clean in greater privacy than she did before.  That Jamie does these things with a degree of self-interest makes him all the more convincing a character.

    Mudbound is strongly acted.  Jason Mitchell builds a powerful sense of Ronsel’s feelings of furious suffocation back home after the war.  As his father, Rob Morgan tends to read his lines deliberately but gives perhaps the most physically eloquent performance in the film – along with Mary J Blige’s sensitive, capable Florence.  Dee Rees makes effective use of Carey Mulligan’s ability to switch imperceptibly between looking plain and beautiful.  Because Mulligan is so incisive and, in her understated way, magnetic, it’s somewhat frustrating that Laura seems to recede from the centre of the story.  Jason Clarke is nuanced in the first part of the film:  it’s not his fault that the script narrows the personality of Henry once the family settles on the farm.  (Contrast the look he gives his brother and his wife-to-be at the dance with the standard jealous husband shot of Henry watching Laura watching Jamie later on.)  Garrett Hedlund, excellent as usual, captures Jamie’s mixture of charm and cynicism.   A quibble:  given how young Laura’s children are when America enters the war in December 1941, I was surprised that they excitedly recognise Jamie when he returns four years later.

    Although the film’s name predicts the prevailing colour scheme, the cinematographer Rachel Morrison gets more tonal variety from the landscape than might be expected.  The postscript sees Ronsel Jackson returning to Resl in Germany and meeting their young son for the first time.  While it’s a great relief that Ronsel survives his ordeal at the hands of the white racists, the price he has paid is too neatly symbolic:  it was his tongue that the torturers removed.    This is another element of the story that may work better in the book than it does on film.  On the printed page, we can easily accept the continuation of a narrative voice that can no longer actually speak (and feel the impact of this).  On screen, it seems wrong – a cheat – that we still hear Ronsel’s voiceover on the soundtrack, commenting on this last sequence.  Mudbound is narratively awkward.  It isn’t the expansive drama that its themes (and length – 135 minutes) might suggest.  All in all, though, it’s a very decent film.

    6 October 2017

  • Goodbye Christopher Robin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Simon Curtis (2017)

    Goodbye Christopher Robin follows Finding Neverland (2004) and Saving Mr Banks (2013) in the recent sequence of true-story-behind-the-children’s-classic biopics.   Although Simon Curtis’s A A Milne film is weaker than either of those predecessors, it finds itself in a bind similar to Saving Mr Banks:  how do you do justice to the writer’s largely unhappy situation without tarnishing the thoroughly jolly reputation of the much-loved literary work they created?   In the case of Mr Banks, the issue was complicated and more acute because Walt Disney was one of the main characters in the story and Walt Disney Productions were behind the movie.  No such conflict of interest impedes Goodbye Christopher Robin but the end product is impacted, mired in contradiction.  Simon Curtis makes the case that A A Milne, against his better judgment, got swept up in the huge popular success of his Winnie-the-Pooh stories in the late 1920s – that this runaway commercial enterprise effectively exploited and served to alienate his young son Christopher Robin.  The film, almost from the start, becomes virtually an illustration of the predicament for Milne père that it means to describe.  Curtis may well value his creative integrity.  He’s nevertheless required to come up with a piece of heritage British cinema with an eye on international markets, especially the American one.

    Shafts of Edenic sunlight illuminate Ashdown Forest (the inspiration for Hundred Acre Wood), through which Milne (Domhnall Glesson) and Christopher Robin (Will Tilston) walk and talk and play Poohsticks.  Carter Burwell’s standard-issue score drips twinkly nostalgia.  Christopher Robin is incarnated by a round-cheeked, dimpled poppet.  These elements of the film are so blatantly designed-to-please that the thought crosses your mind that Simon Curtis could be using them as an ironic counterpoint to the predominantly miserable narrative.  That thought’s transit is rapid, however:  to all intents and purposes, the prettifying and the film’s (questionable) version of the truth operate in parallel.  The poppet makes for especially uncomfortable viewing.  Will Tilston is now ten; according to a recent interview in the Daily Telegraph, he’s small for his age and had to ‘change his voice and bearing to play the six-year-old Christopher’.  This overlooks the fact that the boy ages several years over the course of the story.   The real Christopher Robin was barely five when Pooh first appeared in print in late 1925 and the screen Christopher appears on the scene well before his father creates the famous bear.   Will Tilston plays him all the way through until Christopher starts boarding school, which he did at the age of thirteen.  It’s unclear whether the child’s unchanging look – the pudding-basin hairdo, perfectly bobbed, remains even after he’s graduated from nursery smocks – is meant to reflect a grotesque, commercially-driven retardation of Christopher Robin’s growing up, to suggest that he can’t be himself but only the public image of himself.  What’s undeniable is that it leaves a queasy sense that the child actor’s cuteness is being exploited.

    Whether the screenplay, by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan, was negligent in the first place or has been subject to careless editing is hard to tell.  At the start of the film, Alan Milne, struggling to come to terms with his experiences as a soldier in the recently ended Great War, is solemnly determined to write a pacifist tract.   That’s the last we hear of it until the closing legends, which mention that Peace with Honour was published in 1934.   Milne’s wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) is portrayed first as a brittle socialite, who resents the family’s move from London to the Sussex countryside, then as an all-round bitch, greedily enjoying the fruits of Pooh and leaving the maternal side of things to Christopher’s nanny Olive (Kelly Macdonald).  Daphne supposedly wanted a daughter rather than a son to avoid any risk of her child going to war yet she seems disappointed when World War II arrives and Christopher fails his army medical.  She pressures her husband to use his influence to get the authorities to change their mind and it seems that he does so.  When Christopher goes missing presumed dead she bitterly criticises Milne for doing what she urged him to do.  How this marriage survives is a mystery:  the Milnes appear to have nothing in common.  They don’t even get a we-must-stay-together-for-the-sake-of-the-child scene to explain things.

    More crucially, how does Milne – independent-minded and far from biddable, wary of the trappings of easy success – get sucked into the Pooh industry and neglect the son he dearly loves?  If we’re meant to think it’s because he’ll do anything for the sake of Daphne, this doesn’t come through at all:  he seems utterly remote from her.  When Christopher is upset that Olive is going to abandon him by marrying, he refuses to get out of bed, insisting that ‘I won’t go to school today!’  There’s been no sign of him going to school any day up to this point:  it would have been interesting to see how an infant superstar of the 1920s got on with kids his own age.  Perhaps Simon Curtis felt this would lessen the melodramatic impact, when Christopher eventually goes to boarding school, of showing how the other boys hate his guts and bully him (‘Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs …’)

    Domhnall Gleeson unwisely attempts a portrait of A A Milne that’s uncompromising and penetrating – qualities signally lacking in the script.  Without the material to go deeper into character, Gleeson is merely glum and standoffish and, most of the time, inexpressive – he isn’t able to dramatise Milne’s remoteness or inner conflicts.  Margot Robbie is relatively in tune with the negative writing of the part of Daphne but the result of that is predictably disagreeable.  This is a material girl with no sense of fun.  Robbie’s cut-glass English accent is precarious.  Kelly Macdonald does a decent job of Olive although the script is as simplistically sympathetic towards nanny as it’s hostile to Daphne.  The Great War flashbacks and their traumatic legacy for Alan Milne and his friend Ernest (E H) Shepard are perfunctory but Stephen Campbell Moore manages to give Shepard, illustrator of both Pooh books as well as the When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six collections, a bit of individuality.  The same is true, with even less to work with, of the reliably entertaining Vicki Pepperdine, as a bicycling  postwoman.

    In the aforementioned Telegraph piece, arts correspondent Hannah Furness is at pains to stress Will Tilston’s ordinariness:  he’s been ‘propelled from playing the donkey in his state school nativity play to one of the hotly-tipped future talents of the British film industry’.    Her interviewee rather puts paid to Furness’s efforts when he describes his reaction to learning that he’d landed the role  of Christopher Robin:   ‘I was so excited I ran downstairs and jumped in my auntie’s pool with my pyjamas on.’   At his age, it can’t have been a paddling pool.  Will Tilston has a stage-school sheen and eagerness but Simon Curtis fails to bring anything out of him:  Tilston switches moods proficiently but superficially.  The boy Christopher Robin is replaced by a young man in the course of the bullying sequence at (what was actually) Stowe School in Buckinghamshire.  From this point onwards, the story gets briefly more interesting because Will Tilston turns into Alex Lawther.

    It’s true that this piece of casting sustains the worrying arrested-development theme:  although he’s in his early twenties, Alex Lawther looks much younger; his voice is so light-coloured as to sound unbroken.  He’s a proper actor, though.  As the schoolboy Alan Turing, he was the best thing in The Imitation Game.  The scene between him and Domhnall Gleeson, in a station buffet – as Christopher prepares to go off to war and reproaches his father for, in effect, hijacking his boyhood and selfhood – is the dramatic highlight of Goodbye Christopher Robin.  The competition for that accolade isn’t keen but Lawther gives the exchange an emotional urgency and rawness that cuts through the prevailing awkward artificiality of the film.  He brings to life the extreme oddity of Christopher Milne’s identity.  This is a boy who should have been a girl (and who, as his schoolboy persecutors jeer, looks like one).  Although he was given the birth names Christopher Robin, his parents and nanny always called him ‘Billy Moon’ – this must have reinforced his sense of his actual name being only a kind of stage name.  (Christopher’s nickname for his father, unexplained unless I missed it, is, appropriately enough, Blue.)  The missing-in-action Christopher turns out to be alive and well and, according to the screen tradition of returning from the dead, arrives unannounced at the family home to give his nearest and dearest a big surprise.  He then tells his father what Winnie-the-Pooh meant to his fellow soldiers; realising this has been enough to convince Christopher that A A Milne not only meant well but did a great thing in writing the immortal books.  Alex Lawther can’t do much with this pat (and, in terms of historical accuracy, misleading) reconciliation scene.  But I’ll look forward to seeing what he does next, in the first instance as Tibby Schlegel in the upcoming BBC dramatisation of Howards End (with a screenplay by Kenneth Lonergan).

    Although Simon Curtis encourages the audience mentally to tick off the Pooh references and resonances as these occur, it’s worth noting that this film is highly unsuitable for children.   The certificate warns only of ‘mild war violence’ but the themes, in spite of being poorly realised, are more variously upsetting – failure to love or to show love within a family, the loss or even theft of childhood.   The emphasis is on the Pooh tales to the virtual exclusion of Milne’s poems – perhaps inevitable but still surprising for this viewer, who enjoyed Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner but on whom When We Were Very Young made a deeper impression.  (It’s the only book I still have from early childhood.)  Stultified in the country and annoyed that their move there isn’t helping Milne to get writing and earning, Daphne Milne temporarily returns to London.  This estrangement from her husband and son is presented as the real-life basis of ‘Disobedience’[1].  The effect of knowing this is hardly one of disenchantment.  Even on first acquaintance with the poem (when I was four or five), I found it very worrying.

    3 October 2017

    [1] ‘James James/Morrison Morrison/Weatherby George Dupree/Took great/Care of his Mother,/Though he was only three./James James/Said to his Mother,/”Mother,” he said, said he;/”You must never go down to the end of the town, if/you don’t go down with me.” ’  (Etc)

Posts navigation