Monthly Archives: March 2018

  • Mary Magdalene

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Garth Davis (2018)

    Garth Davis is named as director but Mary Magdalene comes across like the work of a committee, set up to ensure the film doesn’t offend anyone – Christian or non-Christian.  Such a cautious approach is doomed to failure.  The movie, trying to avoid controversy, mostly steers clear too of both entertainment and theological interest.  Besides, there are those who’ll go to contortionist lengths to be outraged – as Katie Edwards, Director of the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, demonstrates in an article on the website ‘The Conversation’[1].  Not content with complaining that the film’s main parts are played by white actors – Rooney Mara is Mary Magdalene, Joaquin Phoenix is Jesus – Edwards is so determined to find fault that she also deplores the casting and ‘African’ accent of Chiwetel Ejiofor as the apostle Peter.  Because he shows some opposition to Mary, Peter ‘is in danger of portraying black African men as regressive, misogynistic and self-serving’.  Even without Ejiofor’s admittedly incongruous accent (no one else in the cast tries to sound ‘foreign’), his blackness, in what Edwards sees as a baddie role, would still be problematic.  The film’s third largest part of Peter, is, obviously, one in which Garth Davis should have cast a white actor[2].

    Mary Magdalene begins with a voiceover from the title character:  ‘I asked Him what the kingdom of heaven would be like … ‘   The words that follow are Jesus’s parable of the mustard seed but the image accompanying them shows a body floating in blue water – vast, depthless, mystically lit.  It’s an immediate reminder that film special effects have been preempting our visual imagination of a world hereafter for a long time now.  Cinematic convention also comes in handy at the climax to the story.  We’re so used to dream and fantasy sequences on screen that we don’t have to infer from Mary’s post-crucifixion encounters with the living Jesus that Garth Davis is saying Christ rose from the dead:  she may be seeing things and we, like the disciples with whom she discusses what she’s seen, can make of it what we will.  The same goes for the miracles included in the narrative, although Davis has to be a bit smarter with these.  A blind girl has barely a moment to react to the gift of sight before an hysterical crowd presses in and obscures her from view.   Lazarus is restored to life but was he really dead anyway?    He is lying apparently lifeless but not in the tomb, when Jesus appears on the scene.  (There’s nothing in the script that corresponds to the uncompromising words of the New Testament:  ‘Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days’.)

    Screen Daily describes Mary Magdalene as ‘a humanist, feminist take on the New Testament’ and quotes Philippa Goslett, who co-wrote the screenplay with Helen Edmundson, as follows:  ‘What happened to Mary Magdalene and her identity over the centuries was a travesty.  Here was an opportunity to give a voice for [sic] someone who had been silenced for so long’.  Goslett’s words announce the film as resonantly on-trend (though production wrapped in the Before Weinstein epoch).  A legend on the screen ahead of the closing credits makes clear the travesty was thanks to patriarchy:  in the late sixth century, Pope Gregory demoted Mary from the status of apostle to that of harlot.  But another closing legend imparts Catholic Church-friendly information.  It’s the current Pope who has called Time’s Up on his predecessor:  in 2016 Pope Francis (in elevating her annual Memorial Day to a feast in the Church’s liturgical calendar) named Mary Magdalene ‘Apostle of Apostles’.

    The film’s calculated modernity comes through in several ways.  It’s good to see that Jesus was ahead of the historical game in workforce diversity and equal opportunity matters.  The apostles are a multi-racial group; Mary Magdalene is authorised to do baptisms along with the men.  At one point, Peter stresses the need for the team to develop a ‘strategy’ (why not a mission statement?)  The implication that the first Christians were so enlightened is – like the premise of Noah (2014) that the eponymous hero was an eco-warrior ahead of his time – both preposterous and distinctive.  But as you watch Mary Magdalene and hear a version of the Lord’s Prayer shorn of some of the trickier phrases, you do wonder about the film’s target audience.  In particular, who exactly needs Mary to be ‘rehabilitated’?  For biblical fundamentalists, she is, presumably, whatever the gospels say she is.  Those more loosely sympathetic to the Christian story can see Jesus’s association with her as an expression of his notorious social broad-mindedness (‘he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners’).  Could modern secular audiences, for the most part, care less?  A small minority may even object to denying Mary her Gregorian status on the grounds that doing so unfairly stigmatises sex workers.

    The film is so focused on presenting Mary Magdalene as not a scarlet woman that it fails to make her much else instead.  Except for Peter, the disciples accept her joining their number.  Until the aftermath of Jesus’s death, she is, in effect, a supporting character – overshadowed by Joaquin Phoenix’s Jesus in terms of screen time and screen presence.  Rooney Mara’s usual lack of dynamism, combined with a beauty more expressive in single shots than in movement, reinforces this effect, though she plays the part intelligently and does connect emotionally with Phoenix.  That’s important:  we’re clearly meant to infer that Mary ‘sees’ Jesus, in life and therefore after death, as none of the male apostles does.  Pace Katie Edwards, the disagreements between Mary and Peter not only bring a bit of much-needed tension to proceedings but also do more than anything else to give Mary individual substance and feminist meaning.   Her argument with Peter in the closing stages anticipates – in effect if not intention – the long-running theological debate as to what it means to say that Jesus ‘overcame death’ and the difference of opinion is plausibly gendered here.  Go-getting Peter is frustrated by the elusiveness of what Mary says about the kingdom of heaven being ‘now’ and ‘within’.  He has no time to waste:  there’s a Church of Rome to found.

    Fears that Jesus would be just the latest of Joaquin Phoenix’s worrying wild men prove largely unwarranted – at least, Phoenix’s unstable quality seems to increase Jesus’s mystery rather than reduce him to a Messiah complex case study.   Mary Magdalene is a pretty traditional biblical film in that, among the male disciples, Peter and Judas (Tahar Rahim) are just about the only ones with more than a couple of lines of dialogue. (In the film’s smaller parts, it’s the Israeli actress Irit Sheleg, as Jesus’s mother, who makes the strongest impression.)  Judas looks to Jesus to bring about social and political revolution and betrays him because these hopes are disappointed.  It’s hardly an original idea but, with Tahar Rahim in the role, it’s a reasonably effective one:  Rahim’s passion and desperate, still youthful enthusiasm give an occasional jolt of energy to the even-paced, often dull narrative.  The Judas kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane is a puzzle, though:  those who arrive (on horseback) to arrest Jesus are too far away at the time to see the embrace.

    In Lion (2016), Garth Davis and his cinematographer Greig Fraser eschewed obvious colourfulness to present India in, for the most part, neutral tones.  The parched, bleached look they give the Holy Land (actually southern Italy) in Mary Magdalene may be less striking but the occasional flashes of intense colour have a bracing impact.  This is a handsome film to look at, with some impressive overhead and panoramic shots (also used sparingly).  With the score, however, we’re back to the balancing-act committee.  The music, by Hildur Guðnadóttir and (the late, sad to say) Jóhann Jóhannsson, can be read as solemnly reverent/quietly inspirational if so desired. But the sound of it is familiar from films with secular subjects.  That makes it unexceptionable, as well as unexceptional.

    20 March 2018

    [1] https://theconversation.com/mary-magdalene-is-yet-another-example-of-hollywood-whitewashing-94134

    [2] In what amounts to a comical error in a piece headlined ‘Mary Magdalene is yet another example of Hollywood whitewashing’, Katie Edwards notes that Chiwetel Ejiofor won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave.  The Best Actor award that year went to Matthew McConaughey.

  • The Square

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ruben Östlund (2017)

    As suggested in Force Majeure (2014) and now proved at greater length in The Square, the writer-director Ruben Östlund is a decidedly smug misanthrope.  He has a low opinion of other people and, in making that clear, seems very pleased with himself.   The main character in Östlund’s new film is Christian (Claes Bang), head curator of the (fictional) X-Royal museum in Stockholm.  The title refers to an artwork recently acquired to headline an exhibition in the cobblestoned courtyard of the former royal palace that the museum occupies.  The creator of the piece, represented by a small metallic square, is an Argentinian called Lola Arias[1], whose artist’s statement describes it as a ‘sanctuary of trust and caring.  Within it we all share equal rights and obligations’.  It’s soon clear that Östlund means to satirise both the modish values of the art world and the hypocrisies of professedly liberal capitalism.  An early sequence shows a military statue, being removed to make way for the new acquisition, detaching from its crane harness and crashing down.  Inside the museum, the exhibits include a room filled with apparently identical cones of gravel.  Outside on the street, immigrant beggars are ignored by well-heeled passers-by with eyes only for their smartphones.

    Östlund’s prompt exposure of the fatuity of Lola Arias’s statement as a description of a modern European democracy whets the viewer’s appetite for iconoclasm.   I thought for a while the film was going to be cynical enough to reveal the hungry and homeless figures to be part of the X-Royal’s promotional campaign for The Square – especially since these people look artificially placed in the street scenes.  The gravel cones seemed such an antique idea of up-itself conceptual art that I assumed there must be more to them than that.  I was wrong on both counts.  The gravel ends up vacuumed by one of the cleaners (a comic accident that confirms the cones are rubbish).  The have-nots really are that – though publicity for The Square does turn out to be an important part of the plot.  The advertising agency commissioned to promote the exhibition recommends, for maximum impact, an apparently shocking contradiction of the bland humanitarian message of the artist’s statement.  They devise a video in which an impoverished young girl – white, blonde-haired, holding a kitten – is blown up in an explosion.  The strapline is ‘How much inhumanity does it take before we access your humanity?’  The video has the desired effect of going viral but generates outrage from the media, religious leaders and the public.  The PR disaster leads to Christian’s eventual resignation.

    Östlund is doubly hard on his anti-hero.  It’s not enough for Christian to be so absorbed in his insulated, elitist job that he ignores what’s happening in the real world.  His professional downfall is the result of unprofessional negligence:  he hasn’t the time to watch the promotional video before approving it because he’s preoccupied with matters outside work.  On his way to the museum one day, Christian is the victim of a confidence trick that leaves him without his smartphone and wallet.  (As in Force Majeure, a smartphone catalyses the laying bare of Östlund’s modern-man protagonist’s moral deficiency.)  Michael (Christopher Laessø), a junior work colleague, tracks the phone to an apartment building in a rough neighbourhood.  He encourages Christian, after work and a few drinks, to write a threatening anonymous letter to all occupants of the building, demanding the return of the wallet and phone.   When Christian hesitates, Michael tells him not to be ‘so Swedish’ and the two put together a text, make copies of it and drive to the apartment block.  Christian expects Michael to put the notice through letter-boxes but Michael tells Christian to do this himself.   The anonymous letter instructs the thief to hand in the stolen goods to a 7-Eleven convenience store/eatery close to the museum.  A couple of days later, a package for Christian arrives there.  It contains the phone and the wallet, from which no money has been removed.

    Christian is delighted by the success of the plan but the next day a second package arrives at the same destination.  Having agreed to pick it up on Christian’s behalf, Michael is confronted in the 7-Eleven by a furiously angry boy (Elijandro Edouard).  The boy claims that, thanks to Christian’s letter, his parents now believe that he’s a thief.  He demands an apology; if he doesn’t get it, he’ll ‘create chaos’ for Christian.   By now, Christian is also involved with Anne (an amusingly precise Elisabeth Moss), an American journalist who interviews him at the start of the film and with whom he goes to bed after they meet again at a party.  A few days later, she turns up at the museum to make clear that she’s after more than casual sex with him, a desire that is not reciprocated.   These extramural activities distract Christian from looking at the media advisers’ sensational video before signing it off.

    The Square’s force as cultural critique depends on its taking place in an actual world.  The acting style is predominantly naturalistic and the physical settings realistic.  Self-confident and cavalier Ruben Östlund, however, takes the view that, because his intentions are satirical and his film includes surrealist elements, he can dispense with credibility, or resort to it, just as it suits him.  For example, it’s unlikely that Christian, at an especially high-pressure time in his high-profile job, would be bothered to adopt Michael’s leafleting plan in the first place; even more unlikely that he’d meekly accept his subordinate’s insistence that he scurry from floor to floor of the apartment block while Michael waits in his boss’s expensive car.  But Christian’s furtive leafleting makes for a tense, spooky sequence – as does Michael’s car park vigil, with shadowy, menacing, envious locals gathering round the vehicle.  Christian has to behave the way he does in order for the story to move forward – but what impels his behaviour hardly connects with the ethical bankruptcy of the world he represents, and which Östlund is out to skewer.

    The Square’s political point of view is soon clear and the film lasts 151 minutes.  It therefore relies on technical flair and the impact of individual scenes to hold our interest – and succeeds in doing that (though it’s still unnecessarily long).  There are many attention-getting images on the screen (the DP is Fredrik Wenzel).  Christian’s euphoria in light of the the first 7-Eleven pick-up takes him and us by surprise, and is all the more enjoyable for that.  Another strong, if protracted, sequence is a post-coital power struggle between him and Anne:  she persistently offers to dispose of his used condom; he persistently refuses, for fear that she wants to keep his semen for future use.  Earlier on, Christian says a few words to a gathering of museum donors before handing over to the chef who explains lunch arrangements to them.  As soon as this minion starts to speak, the audience loses interest and drifts away:  the chef yells at them.  This startling moment is also, perhaps, the film’s funniest: you wonder briefly if Östlund is going to take a more imaginative direction – if the chef’s refusal to take shit from the museum’s ruling class heralds the start of a revolution throughout the system.  It doesn’t, even if it somewhat foreshadows the highlight of The Square.

    An X-Royal black-tie fund-raiser at which a performance artist called Oleg Rogozjin terrorises the guests is by far the most compelling episode (not just because, for this audience-participation-phobic viewer, it was such a nightmare).  A voice on the public address system welcomes the assembly to ‘the jungle’ and announces the entrance of the powerfully built Oleg (Terry Notary), whose ape-like noises and movement, and bestial behaviour, soon wipe the amused smiles from the wealthy diners’ faces.  (Oleg’s own face has appeared previously on a giant screen in the museum, implying that he’s an installation there.)  This relentless scene features spectacular physical acting from Terry Notary (who has done simian work in Planet of the Apes films etc).  Yet the climax to the sequence and its aftermath prove to be further examples of the obviousness of Ruben Östlund’s ideas and the inconsistency of his approach.

    As the apeman drags a woman by her hair towards the exit, a posse of tuxedoed diners intervenes and overpowers him.  When the going gets tough, says Östlund, men revert to the law of the jungle (except that Christian is so contemptible that he watches Oleg’s performance impotently and doesn’t participate in the fightback).  Perhaps Oleg is killed – the next shot, at any rate, shows a large object wrapped in plastic sheeting lying in what appears to be a waste disposal area.  Whether or not Oleg survives, there are no consequences to the fund-raiser mayhem to add to the museum management’s increasingly embarrassed situation.  There are no questions about the X-Royal’s security staffing; no complaints from donors or even from the Julian Schnabel-inspired artist (Dominic West) who flounces out of the dining room to avoid further humiliation by Oleg.  It would be inconvenient to Östlund to have to bother with such follow-up:  the sequence, once it’s over, seems meant to be interpreted as much metaphorically as an actual event.  It’s possible to read Oleg’s performance as a representation of Östlund’s own épater les bourgeois intentions although this really doesn’t hold water.  Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of the film’s smugness is its awareness that a large part of its audience will espouse values not unlike the ones it excoriates – and that, while we’ll pretend The Square is disturbingly thought-provoking, we’ll take the criticism on the chin and (dare we say!) chuckle at it.

    If The Square ends up reinforcing the complacency of a typical viewer, does that make Ruben Östlund feel he’s failed in what he set out to do?   Perhaps not – perhaps he considers his target audience (in more ways than one) as incorrigible, the way Luis Buñuel saw the characters he mocked in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (which the closing shots of Force Majeure brought to mind).  But whereas Buñuel expressed through what he put on the screen a past-caring acceptance that the Western European middle classes would carry on regardless, Östlund makes Christian pay – repeatedly – without seriously challenging the like-minded audience that watches, if not from Östlund’s lofty, censorious viewpoint, at least from a safe distance.   The Square would be a more telling and disturbing film if  the protagonist extricated himself and didn’t learn his lesson.

    This would also have exploited more interestingly Claes Bang’s qualities in the central role.  Bang’s quietly magnetic performance is one of the few likeable things about The Square.  He holds the screen without ever overdoing things; Christian retains our interest in large part thanks to Bang’s making him more sympathetic than the script suggests.  Behind his cool arrogance, designer-stubbly good looks and chic spectacles, there’s something sheepish and uncertain about Christian.  In plot terms, he’s on the receiving end from an early stage:  an eventual reversal of fortune would have made a change, as well as a point.  It could also have pulled the rug from under the feet of those of us who’ve to some extent kept faith with Bang’s Christian.  Östlund feels for his protagonist only in the press conference in which he resigns.  Now that Christian’s fall from grace is official, Östlund can switch his contemptuous attention to the media.  While some of the journalists at the press conference condemn Christian for the tasteless, controversial video, others decry his decision to step down as a form of self-censorship.

    The only shift in feeling in The Square occurs with the arrival on the scene, about halfway through, of Christian’s daughters (Lise Stephenson Engström and Lilianne Mardon).   They join the film in a scene that’s typical of Ostlund in being immediately striking but, on a moment’s reflection, nonsensical.  Home alone and increasingly spooked by the consequences of his earlier actions, Christian is alarmed by the sound of someone trying to get in the door of his apartment.  The banging on the door isn’t accompanied by anyone’s voice – this makes for an unnerving few moments.  When Christian opens the door, his two young daughters burst in:  they’re deep into a noisy argument with each other – one that was inaudible to their father when he moved anxiously to listen at the door.   The girls tell Christian that ‘Mummy said it was your turn to pick us up’.  So he’s a negligent father too – though, from this point onwards, his daughters are with him for the duration and their mother isn’t mentioned again.  The girls’ rowdy first entrance turns out to be uncharacteristic:  as understandably miserable as their counterparts in Force Majeure, they wear a default expression of silent accusation of their father.   The what-sort-of-a-world-are-we-making-for-our-children look is an expression too of the trite thinking at the heart (if that’s the word) of The Square.

    These children come off better, though, than the young boy who threatened chaos.  When he comes to Christian’s apartment and kicks up a racket (Elijandro Edouard brings some welcome vocal vigour to proceedings), the boy ends up being pushed away by Christian and falling downstairs.  Inside the apartment so noticeably soundproofed when his daughters were yelling outside it, the guilty Christian hears the boy whimpering for help from downstairs – the fortissimo noise of migrants seeking refuge in Europe being let down by the continent.  Rooting desperately through trashcans outside the building for a piece of paper containing the boy’s phone number, Christian locates it remarkably quickly.  He gets no reply on the number so records an apologetic video message but his contrition comes too late.  In the final scenes of the film, he goes to the apartment building where the boy lived. Another resident (with an evidently comprehensive knowledge of all the building’s residents) tells Christian he hasn’t seen the boy around for a while …

    Immediately before this, Christian, with his younger daughter, attends a school gymnastic display in which the elder daughter participates.  This routine, executed within a square performing area, depends on teamwork – on the young gymnasts’ mutual trust and support, without which they would fall and the structure they form collapse.  This could be either numbingly obvious symbolism or another instance of Östlund’s merely clever patterning of images and details.  A man with Tourette’s syndrome repeatedly interrupts an interview with the Dominic West character; Anne imitates this man as part of her seduction of Christian.  Anne shares her hotel suite with a seemingly house-trained ape that surreally complements the homo sapiens performance artist who wreaks jungle havoc.  Östlund is clearly doing something right – or smart, anyway.  The Square has made money and won prizes, most notably the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a notorious point of intersection between artistic effort and conspicuous wealth and privilege.  Talk about feeding the hand that bites you.  That award gives Ruben Östlund all the more reason to smirk.

    18 March 2018

    [1] Also presumably fictional – though she shares her name with an actual Argentinian director and performance artist.  According to recent pieces online, the real Lola Arias is not best pleased by the coincidence.

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