Monthly Archives: December 2017

  • Ingrid Goes West

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Matt Spicer (2017)

    Matt Spicer’s debut feature, which he co-wrote with David Branson Smith, is slippery, unconvincing and very entertaining.  Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza), a young woman living in Pennsylvania, is furious she didn’t get an invitation to the wedding of Charlotte (Meredith Hagner), with whom Ingrid has an unrequited friendship.  She crashes the reception and maces the bride in the face.  Ingrid emerges from a subsequent spell in a mental hospital to develop a new attachment.  Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) is a photographer with a sizeable Instagram following.  The look of Taylor and of her life in Los Angeles is, to Ingrid, thoroughly enviable.  Although her first online contact with Taylor yields a negligible response, Ingrid is undaunted:  she decides to use the $60,000 she inherited from her late mother to subsidise a new life and moves to LA.  Ingrid, although she hangs out in places where Taylor likes to hang out, is getting nowhere fast until she comes up with the idea of kidnapping her idol’s dog Rothko – in order to return him to, and thereby ingratiate herself with, Taylor.  The plan works and the two become friends – in a more real way, it seems, than Ingrid was friends with Charlotte.  Not for long, though:  Ingrid’s crazy possessiveness and Taylor’s egocentric inconstancy are a recipe for disaster.  Is Ingrid Goes West the tale of a sick individual?  Is it a critique of a cyber-epidemic (Instagram was described by the journalist Eleanor Margolis, in a New Statesman piece in June this year, as a ‘cultural pissing contest’)?   It’s both, but rarely at the same time.  In Nightcrawler (2014), Dan Gilroy dramatised the synergy of a pathological personality and a morbid journalistic practice.  Matt Spicer tends to switch focus between Ingrid’s psychological instability and the mad inanity of internet ‘celebritization’.  He does so according to whichever of the two will deliver more instant impact – and, often, humour – in taking his film forward.

    Social media don’t appear to be the root cause of Ingrid’s mental problems.  Her Charlotte obsession developed when she was reeling from the loss of her mother:  Ingrid’s essential need, it seems, is to be the most important person in someone’s life rather than in-with-the-in-crowd online.  She rents accommodation in Los Angeles from Dan Pinto (O’Shea Jackson Jr), an aspiring screenwriter and Batman enthusiast – ie he’s writing what he hopes will be the screenplay for the next Batman film.   Though he finds Ingrid exasperating, Dan is soon attracted to her.  When they eventually go on their first date, both reveal the painful losses they’ve suffered in their life.  That night, they sleep together.  Spicer ignores the implications of Ingrid’s discovery that she matters to Dan for as long as these would get in the way of the plot.  Instead, like Ingrid, he uses Dan’s affections to justify his assisting in her bizarre projects, which, of course, dig Ingrid into a deeper hole.  Her urge to monopolise isn’t uncontrollable and there’s no suggestion that she desires Taylor physically.  She gets along well enough with Taylor’s husband Ezra (Wyatt Russell), an unsuccessful artist.  (The only picture he sells is to Ingrid, as part of her Taylor campaign.)   When, however, Taylor’s brother – recovering drug addict Nicky (Billy Magnussen) – appears on the scene, he and Ingrid are immediately at daggers drawn.  Matt Spicer, well aware of his influences, has Nicky explicitly accuse Ingrid of ‘Single White Female stuff’ but Jennifer Jason Leigh’s antagonist in Barbet Schroeder’s film was a good deal more single-minded.

    It’s never clear how big a fraud Taylor is meant to be.  Ingrid, once she’s returned Rothko to Taylor, insinuates herself in the latter’s life very easily; they spend plenty of time in each other’s company until Taylor herself starts trying to get in with a high-profile fashion blogger (Pom Klementieff).  On the other hand, Taylor’s self-advertisement as a successful photographer presumably isn’t a complete sham:  with Ezra making no money at all, it’s Taylor who appears to finance their lifestyle.  Matt Spicer’s attempt to suggest that Taylor and Ingrid are essentially alike is half-hearted.  Ezra tells Ingrid that Taylor too, when she first came to LA, was desperately friendless but when, in their final confrontation, Ingrid tells her this, Taylor’s refutation seems fair enough:  she may be part of a cultural malaise but she’s nothing like the maladaptive Ingrid.  The climax to Ingrid Goes West works well because Spicer is able to fuse the protagonist’s fragile state of mind and his satire of internet pathology.  Ingrid makes a video – in which she explains that she’s alone, sick of being herself and about to take her own life – and uploads it to Instagram.  She wakes in hospital to learn from Dan that her suicide attempt failed because he immediately saw her video and called emergency services.  Since then, the video has gone viral, with gazillions of expressions of love and encouragement sent to Ingrid’s hashtag (#iamingrid).  All the young actors in the film are good but Aubrey Plaza holds it together – she plays Ingrid with fierce empathy, as well as plenty of comic skill.  Elizabeth Olsen’s performance as Taylor can hardly be subtle but it’s a pleasant change to see her in a role where she can be glamorously vivid.  O’Shea Jackson Jr is likeable and witty as the long-suffering Dan.

    23 November 2017

  • Human Desire

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fritz Lang (1954)

    The determination of Hollywood eventually triumphs over the determinism of Emile Zola in Fritz Lang’s reworking of La bête humaine.  This is a relief for the viewer even if, in light of the Zola elements that Lang retains, it makes limited sense.  The critic Dave Kehr complained that Human Desire was ‘marred only by [Glenn] Ford’s ability to register an appropriate sense of doom’ but any sense of doom on Ford’s part would be inappropriate.  His character, unlike his Jean Gabin counterpart in Jean Renoir’s version of the Zola novel, is a leading man predestined not to come to a bad end.  What mars the film isn’t Glenn Ford’s solid, convincing acting but Fritz Lang’s failure – or disinclination – to integrate Human Desire’s disparate elements.

    The screenplay, by Alfred Hayes, updates the Zola story to the present day and relocates it in America.  The Ford character, Jeff Warren, is returning to work as a train driver after military service in the Korean War.  As he did before the War, Jeff boards with his work colleague Alec Simmons (Edgar Buchanan) and Alec’s family – his wife Vera (Diane DeLaire) and daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case).  While Jeff has been in Korea, Ellen has changed from a cute teenager into an attractive young woman.  (Kathleen Case was twenty-one at the time but looks considerably older.)  It’s clear from the start that Ellen has eyes only for Jeff but he gets embroiled in a love affair with Vicki (Gloria Grahame), the much younger wife of hard-drinking railyard supervisor Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford), who is violently possessive of her.  When he loses his supervisor job, Buckley urges Vicki to exploit her acquaintance with railroad executive John Owens (Grandon Rhodes) to get him reinstated:  her mother used to be Owens’s housekeeper and Vicki grew up in his home.  She reluctantly agrees to visit Owens but with disastrous results.  She’s gone for several hours and Buckley guesses how far she had to go to accomplish the mission he gave her.   He constructs a plan to murder Owens and forces Vicki to assist.  He makes her write a letter to Owens, setting up a meeting on a train.  After killing Owens in the latter’s private compartment, Buckley retains Vicki’s potentially incriminating letter, to dissuade her from going to the police.

    Jeff is taking a complimentary ride back home on the same train.  He witnesses Vicki leaving Owens’s compartment but, immediately smitten with her, denies having seen her before when he subsequently gives evidence to the inquest into Owens’s death.  As their liaison develops, Jeff finds out more about Vicki’s unhappy past (Owens used her sexually when she was a teenager) and present (Buckley is a different kind of domestic abuser – a wife-beater).   Vicki urges Jeff to kill Buckley, insisting that’s the only way they can be together.  It’s in the closing stages that the storyline departs most decisively from that of Zola’s novel (and Renoir’s film).  Jeff can’t bring himself to murder Buckley and decides that Vicki was, from the start, setting him up to get rid of her husband.  Jeff ends the relationship with her but he does obtain from the drunken Buckley, and gives to Vicki, the letter she wrote to Owens.  She is now free to escape and takes a train out of town but Buckley arrives in her compartment.   In a paroxysm of jealous rage – he begs her not to leave him, accuses her of preparing to run off with Jeff – Buckley strangles Vicki to death.  Up front in the driver’s seat, Jeff takes from his pocket a ticket to a dance which Ellen Simmons sold him a while previously, hoping that Jeff would invite her as his partner.

    There are plenty of individually strong elements in Human Desire.  The sequences of the train in motion, hurtling through tunnels and open country; the domestic scenes at the Simmons’s; the sense that Jeff, at the start, is both relieved and disappointed that his pre-Korea existence is resuming; his later realisation of the difference between killing a man in warfare and in civilian life.  But the train’s speeding inexorably along the track ahead doesn’t make the sense it made in Renoir’s film since Jeff Warren ends up controlling his fate as well as the engine.  Lang’s quasi-documentary observation of the railyards and their environs sits oddly with the noir visual conventions in evidence elsewhere.  Human Desire was showing at BFI as part of the Gloria Grahame season programmed to coincide with the release of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.  Good as she is in Crossfire, the first film that I saw in the season, her appearance in it is so brief that it came as a relief that Grahame’s role was bigger here.  She’s excellent early on at conveying Vicki’s attraction to Jeff – and fear of him, as a witness to her exit from Owens’s train compartment.  Her performance pays diminishing returns, largely because Vicki has to do so much half-truth telling and Grahame’s playing of this is repetitive.  Broderick Crawford also starts well but overdoes Buckley’s alcoholic misery at the business end of the story.  While Buckley is waiting impatiently for his wife to return from her appointment at Owens’s home, he talks with Vicki’s friend Jean (Peggy Maley), who is getting ready to go out.  ‘You dames’, grumbles Buckley, ‘you spend more time gettin’ dressed …’  Jean replies with the most enjoyable line in the script:  ‘Have to – it’s much better to have good looks than brains ‘cos most of the men I know can see much better than they can think’.   The music by the splendidly named Daniele Amfitheatrof is conscientiously over-explanatory.

    21 November 2017

Posts navigation