Monthly Archives: February 2018

  • Journey’s End

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Saul Dibb (2017)

    R C Sherriff’s famous trench warfare drama was first performed in London in 1928 (with a cast that included a twenty-one-year-old Laurence Olivier).  Since then, it’s been repeatedly revived on stage and twice adapted for television.  The first cinema version of Journey’s End, directed by James Whale, appeared in 1930 and a German remake, Die andere Seite, the following year.   According to Wikipedia, there hasn’t been another since, until Saul Dibb’s film, whose release coincides with the centenary of the events on which Sherriff’s play is based.  The action of Journey’s End spans four days – 18-21 March 1918 – leading up to the launch of the Germans’ ‘Spring Offensive’.  Dibb’s version premiered at the Toronto festival in September 2017; it’s a little surprising that its UK release in cinemas hasn’t been synchronised exactly with the Spring Offensive’s hundredth anniversary.   Journey’s End would have faced significantly less box-office competition in the third week of March than it did in early February, when major awards contenders were appearing.

    Sherriff’s Journey’s End takes place entirely within a British officer’s dugout; the warfare going on above ground is suggested by sound and lighting.  Working with a screenplay by Simon Reade, Dibbs opens out the action a bit.  The fresh-faced, naïve young officer Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), newly arrived in France, call on his military top-brass uncle (Rupert Wickham), with a request to be assigned to a particular company.  This is headed by Captain Stanhope, whom Raleigh knew (and hero-worshipped) at school and who is now in a relationship with Raleigh’s sister, Margaret.  In the film’s closing scene, after Raleigh’s death in action, Margaret (Rose Reade) receives and reads a letter from her brother – an optimistic description of his arrival in France and first impressions of army life.   He also assures his sister that Stanhope is held in universally high regard:  the viewer not only knows that Raleigh is now dead but has also seen what a troubled character Stanhope (Sam Claflin) really is – or has become in the trenches.  This one scene in England supplies a quietly trenchant conclusion to the film.  Dibb returns to France for the very last shot – a panoramic overhead view of the trenches, accompanied by text on the screen that summarises the huge numbers of casualties still to come before the November 1918 armistice:  this too is effective.  (Saul Dibb’s restraint in use of the Olympian overhead compares favourably with Joe Wright’s direction of Darkest Hour.)   The most important opening out consists of the addition of brief bursts of warfare, when men from Stanhope’s company go over the top, usually to their death.  This gives an added edge to the claustrophobia of the candelit dugout:  getting out into the open means getting into mortal peril.

    The film also expands the play’s cast of ten characters but the no-frills narrative strongly implies that Dibb wants to commemorate Sherriff’s original rather than use it as a point of departure.  In a similar spirit, the  cast – which also includes Paul Bettany, Robert Glenister, Stephen Graham, Toby Jones, Miles Jupp and Tom Sturridge – all give capable and committed performances.  There’s a downside to this approach, though:  most of the actors are self-consciously respectful of the gravity of the play’s themes, and acting a shade evidently.  You sense too, in the source material, a problem familiar in middle-class plays of this vintage.  Sherriff (1896-1975) served as an officer in the Great War, fighting at Vimy Ridge, Loos and Passchendaele, where he was seriously injured.   A sense that the non-posh characters are simpler souls than the ones who speak RP English hangs heavy in the air.  It’s fortunate for this limited but creditable film that the two characters in question – the company’s erratic cook Private Mason (Cockney) and Second Lieutenant Trotter (Northern accent), commissioned from the ranks and fond of his grub – are played by the two best actors.  Thanks to Toby Jones (Mason) and Stephen Graham (Trotter), the lower orders come over as the most fully believable men in the company.

    15 February 2018

  • The Mercy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Marsh (2018)

    Perhaps Colin Firth, who plays the ill-fated amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst in The Mercy, doesn’t look his fifty-seven years – but he definitely doesn’t look thirty-six, the age Crowhurst actually was when, in 1968, he took part in the Sunday Times ‘Golden Globe’ event, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race, inspired by the lone circumnavigation exploits of Francis Chichester the previous year.  James Marsh and the screenwriter Scott Z Burns haven’t made other adjustments to accommodate this large age discrepancy:  the film’s Crowhurst has three pre-adolescent children.  Since he entered the Golden Globe in the hope of winning a £5,000 cash prize (equating to around £60,000 today) to bail out his failing business, Firth’s maturity makes a difference.  The entrepreneur Stanley Best (played here by Ken Stott) sponsored his participation in the Sunday Times race but Crowhurst mortgaged his home, as well as his business, against Best’s continued financial support.  There’s a particular poignancy in the desperation of a man with a wife and young family to support who’s entering the twilight years of a normal breadwinning life.

    A bigger problem for The Mercy is Firth’s temperamental unsuitability for the role.  There are suggestions in what other characters say about Crowhurst that he’s meant to be driven and impulsive – a bit of a chancer maybe, but charismatic and plausible.   These are not the qualities naturally associated with sound, conscientious Colin Firth.  His specialty is playing men whose struggle with their weaknesses or demons is written on their faces.  Donald Crowhurst was competing in the Golden Globe with big-name sailors, including Robin Knox-Johnston (who won the race and, as the film’s closing legends explain, donated his prize money to Crowhurst’s widow), Bernard Moitessier and Chay Blyth.  Crowhurst secretly abandoned the race at an early stage of his aimless travels; unable to bear the burden of failure or face the financial music, he reported false positions – with the idea of claiming, without actually having achieved, a circumnavigation.  With Firth at the helm, the prospects for Crowhurst appear doomed from the start:  there isn’t a heady, optimistic height from which the protagonist can plummet.  Firth seems more at ease when things start going wrong on board – as they soon do – but he’s not the right actor either for Crowhurst’s climactic mental breakdown, religious hallucinations, etc.  Hard as he tries, Colin Firth always seems sane.

    The Mercy seems miscast throughout – in the supporting parts because the actors playing them are largely wasted.  As Crowhurst’s wife Clare, Rachel Weisz is effective in her silent expressions of emotion that go unseen by other characters but has very little to do until her last and worst scene.  After Crowhurst’s disappearance and presumed death at sea (his body was never recovered), Clare confronts a pack of baying newshounds outside her front door and gives them what for.  You get the sense that Rachel Weisz has been waiting the whole film to let rip with this big monologue, which, unfortunately for her, is more editorial than human speech.  As the tabloid journalist Rodney Hallworth, hired by Crowhurst as his PR man for the Golden Globe, David Thewlis gives proceedings a bit of pep, though his acting is broad.  Otherwise, James Marsh has signed up the likes of Ken Stott, Jonathan Bailey, Andrew Buchan, Mark Gatiss and Simon McBurney to play ciphers.  Gatiss manages a bit of characterisation as the Sunday Times editor but I didn’t get who Buchan (‘Ian’) was even supposed to be.  If you blink you miss McBurney’s cameo as Sir Francis Chichester, who appears at the Sunday Times launch of the Golden Globe.  This is baffling:  Chichester it was who publicly expressed disbelief of the daily distances that Crowhurst alleged he was covering.

    As Clare Crowhurst’s final diatribe suggests, the narrative makes much of the heartless fickleness of a press that goes along unquestioningly with Donald Crowhurst’s desperate fictions because the plucky-no-hoper-defies-the-odds theme sells papers, then turns emphatically against him to sell even more.  (A double-bill screening of The Mercy and The Post might be amusing.)   The irony of this film is that James Marsh and Scott Z Burns are also thrashing around for an ‘angle’ on the material and keep changing their mind.  The Mercy lurches from moral dilemma to family tragedy to survival epic but never gets close to integrating these aspects.  Having given plenty of attention to the curiosity and excitement of the Crowhurst children during the race, Marsh and Burns chicken out of presenting their reactions to the double horror of its ending.  (The filmmakers also ignore the fact that, in long retrospect anyway, the Donald Crowhurst story reads like a truly terrible joke.)  I’d assumed the film’s title was the name of Crowhurst’s craft; in fact, his trimaran was the ‘Teignmouth Electron’ and the title refers to the last entry recorded in his diary, found in the abandoned boat.  The film, in other words, implies that he took his own life and came to view the end as a release.   The audience of The Mercy can’t be blamed for feeling the same way.

    13 February 2018

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