Monthly Archives: November 2017

  • You Were Never Really Here

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lynne Ramsay (2017)

    Sometime in the early 1970s, a friend’s mother walked out of a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend at the University of York.  As she was leaving, a student in the foyer affably asked her, ‘Can’t you take it?’  ‘I can’, she replied, ‘but I don’t see why I should’.  Sally says this sums up what she felt departing the Leicester Square Odeon halfway through You Were Never Really Here.  (She also asked me to remind her ‘never to go to a film again just because I like the main actor’.)  There were several reasons why I saw Lynne Ramsay’s film through, none of them very good.  The screening was on the last morning of the London Film Festival, an event that I’d greatly enjoyed in spite of its disappointments:  it would have been a dismal anti-climax to end on a walkout.  You Were Never Really Here, unlike most of the LFF fare that I saw this year, is short – only eighty-five minutes.   There was always the remote possibility that the later stages would change my view of what had gone before.  If I sat the film out, I’d be fully justified in inveighing against it.

    The protagonist of You Were Never Really Here, adapted by Ramsay from a 2013 novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a psychologically disturbed ‘enforcer’.  At the start of the story, based in New York, Joe is living with his elderly, ailing mother (Judith Roberts); the main plot concerns the relationship that unexpectedly develops between him and Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), a teenage girl who first enters his life as a job of work.  Nina’s father (Alex Manette), an ambitious politician, employs Joe to find and retrieve his daughter, who has somehow been drawn into a paedophile sex-trafficking ring.  The film’s fragmented, disorienting structure and audiovisual scheme serve to express Joe’s disturbed, paranoid mind.  Visually and verbally assaultive, the narrative is dominated by killings, grievous bodily harm and self-harm.  Lynne Ramsay’s visual virtuosity is unarguable:  You Were Never Really Here is a succession of how-did-she-do-that compositions.  Letting the camera dwell on an image as if fascinated by it, Ramsay has the gift of making this fascination infectious – regardless of the cause or context of the image.  There are rapt contemplations of, inter alia, a sopping wet towel, jelly beans and pooling blood.  In other respects, Ramsay doesn’t transcend cliché – the brief flashbacks to childhood abuse and traumatising military service to ‘explain’ Joe, the repeated juxtaposition of scenes of mayhem and a soundtrack of tinny, easy listening music playing on a radio or similar.

    As Joe, Joaquin Phoenix is rarely off the screen.  The weight he’s put on for recent parts gives him an intimidating bulk.   He’s shaggily, uncomfortably convincing as a man out of control (he won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for this performance).  But the title of the Woody Allen film that Phoenix made between The Master and this one is in danger of becoming his trademark screen persona:  I hope he can take a break from irrational man roles in the near future.  Lynne Ramsay’s screenplay (which also, and more surprisingly, won at Cannes) requires Phoenix to be almost continuously in extremis.   The strongest sequence in You Were Never Really Here – because it’s so distinctive in the context of the film as a whole – shows a group of laughing, carefree young women on a New York street asking Joe to take their photo.  His behaviour and demeanour up to this point make you fearful of his response but he takes the phone offered to him and politely obliges; in doing so, he still inadvertently unnerves one of the women.  Joe’s situation is more compelling when it intersects with some kind of normality.  The lack of such intersection makes the film monotonously grim – a main reason why it doesn’t begin to deserve the comparisons with Taxi Driver that some critics are making.

    The climax epitomises the incoherence and aesthetic self-indulgence of You Were Never Really Here.  With virtually everyone else in the cast dead, Joe and Nina go to a diner together.  The girl asks a question along the lines of where do we go from here.  There’s no immediate reply so Nina goes to the bathroom.  Alone, Joe shoots himself through the head.  A waitress breezes by, oblivious to the fact that the bill she’s left on the table is tipped in the blood that’s spreading across its surface.  Nina returns and touches Joe’s head.  He wakes up.  They get up and leave the diner.  The vacated table is spotless.  Has Lynne Ramsay provided two alternative endings or did Joe imagine his suicide?   I guess the latter, even though the film hasn’t begun to suggest how the mentally fragile Joe and the by now deeply traumatised Nina could possibly ‘move on’ together.

    This back-from-the-dead finale echoes an earlier sequence in which Joe attempts to drown himself.  For a few moments, he appears to have succeeded but then ‘sees’ Nina struggling underwater to swim upwards to the surface.  Joe is impelled to save his own life in order to save the girl’s.   The clearest message of the diner sequence(s) is that Lynne Ramsay wants it both ways.   She can have the waitress inanely say ‘Have a nice day’ to a man she doesn’t notice is a corpse – that got a knowing laugh around the Leicester Square Odeon – and end with a vaguely hopeful indication that loving feelings between people are salvific.   Lynne Ramsay was likeably honest on stage before the screening.  Declining even a mini-Q&A with the LFF person introducing her, she asked to be judged by what she put on the screen.  I’ve done as Ramsay asked.  She also warned us that, after the film was over, ‘You’ll feel you need a walk’.   I gather from Sally she wasn’t the only person to bring the walk forward.  There were no breezy questions in the foyer this time, just another woman rolling her eyes and heading for the exit.

    15 October 2017

  • Downsizing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Payne (2017)

    Trying to solve the problem of world overpopulation, Norwegian scientists develop a technique to shrink human beings to a height of five inches.  It may not seem an unsuitable subject for Alexander Payne, a film-maker inclined to belittle his characters.  Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), the everyman protagonist of Downsizing, lives in Payne country – Omaha, Nebraska.  A sci-fi parable, however, is new – and proves to be alien – territory for this director.   The film begins promisingly.  The opening sequences in Norway are economical, the first images of miniaturised people witty and engaging.   Payne is at home with the mildly satirical social comedy of the scenes in Omaha that lead up to the decision of Paul and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) to get themselves downsized.  From an early stage, though, the storytelling is noticeably unhurried and it becomes more sluggish:  at 135 minutes, Downsizing was the most overlong of the ten films I saw at the London Film Festival (and the competition was strong). This is uncharacteristic of Alexander Payne.  Perhaps it’s a consequence of being a science-fiction newcomer that he wants to take time to show off the ingenious special visual effects and ambitious production design that aren’t part of his usual repertoire.

    What is usual in a Payne narrative is that it’s coherently character-driven, even though limited by his condescending tendencies (except in his best film, Sideways).  I suffered a loss of confidence in Downsizing, and never recovered it, from the point at which Paul wakes from his treatment to discover that Audrey, at the last minute, has backed out of hers and decided to stay in the big world.  Nothing about Audrey prepares the ground for this:  it simply has to happen to get her out of the way and leave the downsized Paul to build a new life alone in Leisureland, the specially designed, scaled-down habitat of the engineered little people.  Payne maintains a supply of visual jokes that are simple but likeable enough.  Medical staff pick the newly diminished up from the operating table as if they were canapés.  Waking from his downsizing, Paul checks nervously under the bedclothes that his genitals haven’t shrunk disproportionately and breathes a sigh of relief.  To signal their marriage is over, Audrey returns her colossal engagement and wedding rings to him; signing divorce papers is a physical challenge for Paul too.  The verbal jokes aren’t so good – they’re not only sometimes corny (‘Don’t get short with me’) but increasingly anxious too, as if Payne feels the need to reassure us (and himself) that he hasn’t lost his touch as a dialogue writer.

    The morality tale is a larger problem, in both its political and more personal aspects.  Alexander Payne hasn’t futurised the world beyond the revolutionary new shrinking technology invented by Dr Jørgen Asbjørnsen (Rolf Lassgård).  One soon wonders therefore about, for example, the international security implications of downsizing:  it’s a bit embarrassing when, rather later, Payne and Jim Taylor (his frequent writing partner, who shares the screenplay credit), make a comic satirical meal out of terrorism fears etc.   Outside America and Norway, the film doesn’t give much sense of the global take-up of downsizing, beyond an overall percentage quoted at one point and the storyline involving Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a political dissident whom the Vietnamese government shrinks against her will and who makes it, as a kind of latter-day boat person, to America.   There she becomes, very gradually, the new woman in Paul’s life.  The environmental idealism of the Asbjørnsen project soon converts to self-interest.  Within twenty years, the world’s first downsized baby to be born, in Norway, has become a vacuous celeb, coke-snorting and promiscuous.  The lower cost of living for the miniaturised means there’s no need for them to work – unless, of course, they were penniless when they switched to the new world.  Ngoc Lan works as a cleaner for the rich, unscrupulous hedonist Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz); through her, Paul soon discovers the down-and-outs of Leisureland, whom Ngoc Lan, in spite of her prosthetic leg, is always doing her best to help.  (My fault probably but I didn’t get how American have-nots came to have the treatment, since it isn’t free.)

    Downsizing ‘s cynical assumption that human selfishness won’t change sits uneasily with the sentimentality of Paul Safranek’s climactic choice.  When, thanks to the consequences of climate change, the environmental condition of the planet is pronounced terminal, Asbjørnsen and his wife (Ingjerd Egeberg) become the leaders of an international movement whose members  plan to move underground, beneath the slopes of a Norwegian fjord, there to breed a new human race to replace the old one bound to perish.  Paul must either go with them or return to Leisureland, with the altruistic Ngoc Lan.  In other words, he must either (a) devote himself to short-term humanitarian help to the needy or (b) participate in a project designed to ensure the longer-term preservation of humanity.   Since it’s clear by now that he and Ngoc Lan have feelings for each other, it’s not a shock that Paul opts for (a) – but I got the sense that Alexander Payne was somewhat embarrassed by the grandiose moral dilemma he’d devised for his hero.   Paul’s last-minute change of heart, which brings him out of the jaws of the underworld and back to Ngoc Lan, actually appears to be in response to the news that it will take the Asbjørnsen contingent eleven hours to walk to their new destination – a long haul for a man with wheelie luggage.

    Likeably proficient as he is as Paul, the contrast between Matt Damon’s regular guy persona and the out-of-this-world situation in which he finds himself was more satisfying in The Martian (2015) than it is here.  As implied above, Kristen Wiig has next to nothing to do as Audrey.  (It’s hardly surprising that Reese Witherspoon, whose collaboration with Payne on Election (1999) did much for the careers of both and who was expected to play Audrey Safranek, left the project.)   Even though Hong Chau is herself the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, her characterisation has drawn some criticism as a piece of racial stereotyping.  Chau’s playing, especially the broken English accent, is on the broad side and takes getting used to but she won me over.   There are agreeable cameos from Laura Dern, Neil Patrick Harris (both downsizing sales reps) and Jason Sudeikis (an old schoolfriend whose successful miniaturisation encourages Paul to follow suit).  After alternating between brilliant performances for Quentin Tarantino and awful ones in Carnage (2011) and Big Eyes (2014), Christoph Waltz, as the ageing party boy Dusan, is somewhere between the two.  The smirks and sniggers between lines are gruesome but, as Tarantino soon realised, Waltz is exceptionally skilled at handling an abundance of lines.  As Dusan’s sidekick, Udo Kier is better than usual, though that is damning with faint praise.  Rolfe Kent’s jocose, sprightly music is entirely appropriate – that’s not much of a compliment either.  The lighting by Phedon Papamichael is impressive, especially the eerie paradisal sheen of the sequences in the Norwegian fjord community.

    14 October 2017

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