Monthly Archives: March 2018

  • I, Tonya

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Craig Gillespie (2017)

    The high point of Tonya Harding’s figure-skating career came in 1991, when she became the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition, winning the US Championships in the process, then a silver medal at the World Championships.  Harding’s sporting achievements were completely and forever eclipsed by an off-rink incident in January 1994, when her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly orchestrated a physical attack on her big rival Nancy Kerrigan at the US Championships, just a few weeks before the Lillehammer Winter Olympics.  Kerrigan wasn’t badly hurt and was able to compete in Lillehammer, where she won silver and Harding finished eighth.  After the Games, Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the criminal investigation into the incident and was banned for life from the US Figure Skating Association.  She’s had subsequent short-lived careers in music, movies, wrestling, boxing and television.  In 2010, she ‘set a new land speed record for a vintage gas coupe … driving a 1931 Ford Model A, named Lickity-Split, on the Bonneville Salt Flats’ (Wikipedia).   She married her third husband the same year and gave birth to a son in 2011.  In recent years, she’s had jobs as a welder and hardware sales clerk.  She now lives in Washington State, north of her hometown of Portland Oregon.  Tonya Harding is, to put it simply, a notorious figure in American popular culture.  The title of Craig Gillespie’s new film about her life, as well as evoking respectable literary forerunners (I, Claudius, I, Robot), has the ring of in-her-own-words-putting-the-record-straight.  This is misleading.  I, Tonya is hard to define but it’s certainly not that.

    Gillespie and the scenarist Steven Rogers use a mockumentary framework, interspersing the biographical action with talking-heads interviews featuring Tonya (Margot Robbie), Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), Tonya’s mother LaVona (Allison Janney), Jeff’s pal and henchman Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), Tonya’s coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) and a television producer (Bobby Cannavale).  A legend at the start announces that what follows is ‘based on irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly’; the tone of those words is some hint of what’s to come.   The film implicates its audience.  As well as speaking to camera in the interview sequences, the main characters occasionally break the fourth wall in other scenes.  Tonya, in interview, can be confrontational:  at one point, she glares at the camera and tells us she knows we’ve bought a ticket for the movie only because of ‘the incident’.  (Even if I didn’t buy as many cinema tickets as I do, this wouldn’t hit home:  I don’t think the Harding-Kerrigan scandal is part of sporting folk memory this side of the Atlantic.  Brits old enough to remember the Lillehammer Olympics will know they were preoccupied with Torvill and Dean’s comeback there.)  Tonya comes from the wrong side of the tracks and I, Tonya makes much of the skating establishment’s snobbish prejudice against her, from the very start of her competitive career.  But foregrounding this prejudice and warning us voyeurs that we’re watching only out of schadenfreude is a subterfuge on the filmmakers’ part.  Their treatment of the error-prone redneck characters exudes what-are-they-like derision.

    With one important exception, the performances are effective.  Although Margot Robbie’s much more beautiful than the real thing, she and some clever make-up combine to give the heroine a rough, raw look that’s a good enough substitute for the real Tonya’s unpretty face.   Robbie gives a sympathetic, even empathetic, performance though she never seems inside Tonya’s head.  That may be intentional:  a more richly believable portrait would likely have made the physical violence inflicted on Tonya by both her husband and her mother even harder to stomach.  Robbie’s forceful, rather shallow portrait sits more easily with the brutal slapstick.  As Jeff, Sebastian Stan is a different problem (and the important exception).  His low-key playing is at odds with the style of I, Tonya.  The footage of the actual Jeff over the closing credits suggests that Stan’s inadequacy isn’t even the result of literal faithfulness:  the real-life Jeff has a slimy plausibility that Stan lacks – and which would have set up a sharper contrast between Jeff and his morbidly obese, cack-handed, delusional sidekick Shawn, well played by Paul Walter Hauser.   Bobby Cannavale’s caricature of the cynical TV man is amusing, though the role is minor.  Julianne Nicholson is fine as the somewhat precious coach, though I didn’t understand why Diane Rawlinson, having parted company once with Tonya, came back for more.

    Which leaves Allison Janney as mother-from-hell LaVona.  She starts her daughter skating at four years old (Maizie Smith and Mckenna Grace play the younger Tonya at different ages); when the child wants the toilet, LaVona tells her it’s not time for that yet, a yellow puddle forms on the rink and LaVona says, ‘So skate wet’.  In the course of the film, LaVona, inter alia, kicks her daughter off a chair, lands a kitchen knife in her upper arm, and sits impatiently at Tonya and Jeff’s wedding reception without taking her coat off.  LaVona needs her coat in another key scene: after the ‘incident’, she visits Tonya, professing unusual respect and admiration but concealing a recording device supplied by the press in the hope that LaVona can extract a confession from her daughter.  Allison Janney has been one of my favourite character actresses for approaching two decades.  I should be more pleased than I am that she’s sweeping the Best Supporting Actress board for this performance.  It’s precise, witty and grimly amusing – especially in LaVona’s brisk self-justifications and remarks to the pet parrot perched on her shoulder in the present-day faux interview.   Craig Gillespie also exploits Janney’s unusual height to convey LaVona’s towering monstrosity.  (I don’t know if the real-life LaVona was similarly tall:  there’s only a brief shot of her seated at the end of the film.)  Yet in spite of all this, Janney’s brilliant turn hits few notes (compared anyway with Lesley Manville in Phantom Thread  and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird).  This and her physical appearance help to reinforce the cartoon quality of I, Tonya but Janney’s credibility makes the film’s contempt for its characters more offensive.

    Like Margot Robbie and Allison Janney, the editor Tatiana S Riegel is Oscar-nominated and deserves to be:  the cutting between Robbie on the ice and the double executing the jumps and spins is seamless.  If you end up wanting to think well of I, Tonya you can probably admire it as a formally inventive biopic.  If you don’t you’ll realise the distinctive title is nothing more than attention-getting and that breaking of the fourth wall is designed just to give a few scenes a bit of extra pep.  I found I, Tonya very uncomfortable to watch – and not as a result of what Tonya says to make the audience uncomfortable.  When Craig Gillespie and Steven Rogers put those words about ‘the incident’ in her mouth, they may be tongue in cheek but you get a stronger impression of their smirks.  The on-screen legends at the end tell us that Tonya now not only is happily married but also wants it to be known that she’s a good mother.   What a gift for Gillespie if Tonya Harding really did ask for this to be made clear.   What a pleasing irony – and final joke at her expense.

    26 February 2018

  • Face to Face (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Ansikte mot ansikte

    Ingmar Bergman (1976)

    Cries and Whispers (1972) was the last famous Bergman work to appear exclusively in cinemas.  Over the next decade or so, his four best-known pieces – Scenes from a Marriage (1973), The Magic Flute (1975), Face to Face (1976) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) – were all made either for television or in dual film and TV versions.  Face to Face, released in cinemas in April 1976 as a two-hour feature, was shown on Swedish television in May and June of the same year as a four-part mini-series, running just under three hours in total.  It was this version that BFI screened in their current Bergman retrospective.  Both the film and the television series cover a short period but a major crisis in the life of Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann), a psychiatrist at a Stockholm hospital.  Her husband, also a psychiatrist, is attending conferences in America; their daughter and only child is away at summer camp.  The family is soon to move to a new house, which is not yet ready.  In the meantime, Jenny goes to stay with her grandmother (Aino Taube) and ailing grandfather (Gunnar Björnstrand) in their apartment on Strandvägen.  Her professional responsibilities are greater than ever – she’s currently deputising for the absent chief psychiatrist – but it’s soon clear that Jenny’s own mental health is precarious.

    In the first shot of the first scene of the first episode (‘The Separation’), Liv Ullmann looks into the camera; her face is that of a woman who sees the void.  The camera pulls back to reveal a room in the house that Jenny’s family is about to vacate – empty but for a plant and a telephone on the floor.  Jenny bends down to make a phone call to her grandmother, to confirm her arrival later in the day, and instantly switches into bright sociability.  At work, she retains a cheerful mask virtually throughout an interview with a demented patient:  disturbed as she is, Maria (Kari Sylwan) sees through the mask but, except when she’s briefly violent towards Jenny, fails to dislodge it.  Her grandparents’ home is close to a church whose bells ring as Jenny enters the apartment building.  An elderly, veiled woman in black comes down the stairs and acknowledges her.  Jenny is immediately disconcerted but reverts to determined cheerfulness when her grandmother opens the front door.

    The remainder of this episode and the second one (‘The Border’) build up a picture of Jenny’s troubled mind and unhappy marriage – chiefly through her dreams and visions, and her conversations with Tomas Jacobi (Erland Josephson).  She first meets Tomas, a gynaecologist, at a party; they subsequently go out for dinner and back to his house.  When she returns to her grandparents’ apartment that night, Jenny watches unseen as her grandfather, wandering about the place in his nightshirt, becomes terrified that the clocks in the apartment are telling the wrong time, and her grandmother comforts him.  Jenny then receives a phone call that sends her hurrying to the family home she’s recently left.  There, she finds Maria lying unconscious and is confronted by two men (Birger Malmsten and Göran Stangertz), the younger of whom tries to rape Jenny.   Shortly afterwards, she and Tomas attend a piano recital together; again, she accompanies him back home.  Lying in bed beside him, Jenny quietly describes to Tomas the attempted assault on her.  She then suffers rapidly consecutive panic attacks (impressively realised by Liv Ullmann). Next day, back at her grandparents, she sleeps continuously for many hours.  She’s woken by her grandmother, who’s about to leave for a short trip away with her husband.  Jenny insists she’ll be fine on her own.  She gets up, showers and dresses.  In the empty apartment, she records a message for her husband – an oral suicide note.

    As she makes this recording, there’s a striking convergence between Jenny’s calmness and clarity and the narrative mood of Face to Face.  Just as Jenny’s long sleep seems to have soothed her nerves and cleared her mind, Bergman now feels able to jettison the Freudian paraphernalia of nightmares and flashbacks to childhood trauma, the knelling bells, the ticking clocks.  Jenny addresses her husband in a voice mildly affectionate and apologetic but quietly purposeful too.  She describes her life as ‘a process of suffocation’; the widening gap between her ‘external behaviour and internal impoverishment’; the ‘vast sense of dread’ that alone remains.  The ringing telephone that ends the second episode sounds like a summons back to life but isn’t.  The next episode (‘The Twilight Land’) starts with her sealing the envelope containing the cassette recording and resuming her suicide preparations.  Liv Ullmann’s movement expresses the fine line between Jenny’s single-mindedness and apprehension – the latter isn’t fear so much as awareness of the momentousness of what she’s about to do.  She sits on her bed, taking handfuls of Nembutal, washing each helping down with water until she’s emptied the bottle of tablets.  She lies down on the bed.  Her fingers move up and down the patterned wallpaper as she loses consciousness.  Though the image isn’t especially original, it evokes, for Bergman followers, the wallpaper in Through a Glass Darkly (with which, of course, Face to Face is also connected by title).

    The Nembutals obviously – one’s tempted to say unfortunately, as far as the rest of this third part is concerned – don’t signal the end of Jenny or of Face to Face.  The unanswered call came from Tomas; concerned that Jenny had suddenly broken off their previous phone conversation and now wasn’t picking up, he came round to the apartment and (don’t ask how exactly) got her to hospital just in time.   As she drifts in and out of consciousness, Jenny, clad in scarlet, moves through a dream world that is less than startling:  ’The Twilight Land’ proves to be over-familiar Bergman terrain, full of just the kind of imagery he seemed to have sloughed off when Jenny made her tape-recording.  A shot of dark waters accompanies the start of the opening credits of each episode of Face to Face; this, on its own, is more powerfully suggestive than most of the oneiric stuff that follows.  Though there are strong moments in the fourth and last part (‘The Return’), nothing emulates, in terms of visual and verbal drama, the prelude to and execution of the suicide attempt.

    It was almost a relief to read in Images: My Life in Film that Bergman regarded the piece, or at least its second half, as a failure.  He intended:

    ‘… a film about dreams and reality.  The dreams were to become tangible reality.  Reality would dissolve and become dream.  I have occasionally managed to move unhindered between dream and reality:  Wild Strawberries, Persona, The Silence, Cries and Whispers.  This time it was more difficult.  … The dream sequences became synthetic, the reality blurred.’

    As usual, Bergman is hard on himself.  There are passages in Face to Face where the distinction between dream and reality is virtually imperceptible – for example, between Jenny’s grandfather’s semi-sleepwalking preoccupation with time and the following sequence in the empty house.  (I was never sure whether Jenny imagined the attempted rape and whether her hysterical panic in Tomas’s bed was a reaction solely to the assault or signalled a larger mental disintegration.)  Bergman’s self-criticism is essentially right, though – so too his comment that Liv Ullmann’s ‘strength and talent held the film together’.  He must have realised he was unable to achieve the effect he was after not just in retrospect but while he was making Face to Face.   The momentum of the piece is increasingly to do with Ullmann’s acting – the performer, rather than the character she’s playing, becomes the focus of attention.  Bergman seems impelled principally by the exciting uncertainty of how much he can keep asking of his lead and whether she can keep delivering.  She can and she does:  it’s a magnificent performance (an Oscar-nominated one that should have been Oscar-winning:  the Best Actress award that year went instead to Faye Dunaway in Network!).

    Tomas Jacobi’s role in the story doesn’t make complete sense.  His medical specialty may be meant to have a quasi-symbolic meaning (as with, in a more light-hearted vein, Gunnar Björnstrand’s gynaecologist in A Lesson in Love) – but it’s not clear why, once Jenny is recovering in hospital, Tomas should be the doctor in charge of her.   Erland Josephson is very good, though, especially at listening to Jenny and when, in a surprising monologue, Tomas tells her about his love for one of the young men at the party where he and Jenny first met.   The weaker ‘reality’ sequences in the third and fourth episodes include Jenny’s encounters with her husband Erik (Sven Lindberg) and daughter Anna (Helene Friberg).  Erik, who briefly interrupts his American tour to visit Jenny in hospital, seems merely dull:  one expects a marriage in a Bergman film to have failed for more dramatic reasons.  Helene Friberg is the same girl to whom Bergman’s camera devoted too much attention in the theatre audience of The Magic Flute.  Friberg’s face in that film didn’t reveal as much as Bergman must have seen in it:  in Face to Face, she’s required to act too and the result is worse.  Friberg has a look but it’s mostly the same look; she also anticipates the dejection and hostility which Jenny’s words are meant to induce in Anna.

    In his 1972 book Ingmar Bergman Directs, John Simon quotes Bergman as follows:

    ‘I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being.   It’s a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.’

    There are more than a few characters in Bergman films whose ‘dignity or wholeness’ is so deeply hidden that it might as well not be there.  One of the most appealing things about Face to Face is that, although this is far from the dream-reality scheme he says he had in mind, Bergman comes closer than usual to substantiating his humanist creed – thanks to his writing and to what some of his actors make of it.  Jenny talks at one point about children who, frightened of the dark, don’t cry out – for fear that, if they do and no one replies, it will make matters worse.  It follows that her suicide attempt is not a cry for help but the need for another human voice emerges in a lower-key request, when Tomas first comes to see her in hospital.  She asks him to talk – about, say, a film he’s seen or a piece of music he’s heard; some kind of anecdote that will engage Jenny and confirm her in the land of the living.  This chimes with Tomas’s later summary of what he describes as, ‘for us non-believers’, an incantation: ‘I wish that someone or something would affect me so that I can become real’.

    Discharged from hospital, Jenny soon returns to work.  (In what’s an odd postscript to a piece about a fictional character, a closing legend explains that she subsequently divorced and went to America to do research.)  Before she resumes her professional life, she witnesses a scene in her grandparents’ bedroom that is the culmination of the benign, humanist aspect of Face to Face.  Her grandfather has taken a turn for the worse and lies on what her grandmother fears will be his deathbed.   As she watches the old couple – the wife sitting on the bed, holding her husband’s hand – Jenny sees ‘for a moment that love embraces everything, even death’.  Her voiceover jars (it’s not been heard hitherto) and Jenny withdraws quickly:  both she and Bergman are prudent enough not to linger, in case the epiphany – and the viewer’s belief in it – can’t be sustained.   While it lasts, though, this scene is marvellous.  Although Gunnar Björnstrand wasn’t himself in good health by the time Face to Face was made, it hardly impairs his acting.  While the camera’s on him, Björnstrand’s look and attitude validate Jenny’s and Bergman’s wishful thinking.

    24 February 2018

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