Monthly Archives: April 2018

  • Ghost Stories

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andy Nyman, Jeremy Dyson (2017)

    Andy Nyman’s and Jeremy Dyson’s Ghost Stories has enjoyed more than one good run on the London stage since it began life at the Liverpool Playhouse in early 2010.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘… [The] basic structure of the plot … revolves around Dr Goodman, a Professor of Parapsychology … delivering a lecture on ghost stories.  In the lecture he discusses a website featuring ghostly pictures …  He has recorded interviews with three people who claim to have had a supernatural experience. …  As each interview is played back, the story is re-enacted on stage. The stories are recounted by a night watchman, a teen driver and a businessman awaiting his first child.  These stories are then drawn together at the end, with a twist, as it becomes clear that [Goodman] is a participant in the stories and not simply a narrator. … The script ingeniously incorporates jump scares that echo similar scenes in celebrated horror films, including Don’t Look Now, Halloween, Rosemary’s Baby and Le Serpent.’

    Both authors have a strong interest in parapsychological material.  Dyson (the invisible member of The League of Gentlemen) has adapted the stories of the fantasy and supernatural fiction writer Robert Aickman into several media.  Nyman has worked extensively with the psychological illusionist Derren Brown.  It’s no surprise, given the success of the theatre piece and its references to horror movies, that Dyson and Nyman have now turned Ghost Stories into a film.   The chief disappointment of their screen adaptation – which is a surprise in view of the reported technical ingenuity of the piece on stage – is a lack of visual and sonic flair and variety.

    The Wikipedia summary of the stage show doesn’t go into details of the professor’s attitude towards the alleged paranormal but this is crucial to the film.  It begins with Philip Goodman’s voiceover asserting that religion destroyed his family.  His words are accompanied by video footage of Philip’s bar-mitzvah and – a more puzzling choice for home-movie recording – an incident that reveals his Orthodox Jewish father’s violent reaction to the discovery that Philip’s sister has an Asian boyfriend.   The antipathy to religion that he carried into adulthood is presented as the basis for Philip Goodman’s career as a vigorous debunker of all things purportedly paranormal.  (The film’s blurring of distinctions between ethno-religious prejudice and spiritualist fraud is fine, provided you’re someone who dismisses anything at all faith-related as noxious nonsense.)

    Goodman’s professional inspiration was a paranormal investigator called Charles Cameron, who made television programmes in the 1970s when Philip was a boy, but who disappeared without trace several decades ago.  Goodman, who fronts his own psychic fakery exposure TV series, receives a phone call from the long-missing Cameron – an old man now, living in a shabby caravan.  He asks Goodman (Andy Nyman, reprising his stage role) to revisit three cases of alleged supernatural activity that Cameron himself was never able to explain away to his own satisfaction.  This is, in effect, the starting point of a plot that’s faithful to the stage show, at least in terms of the three stories and the eventual ‘twist’.  But Goodman’s hostility to parapsychology, whether or not it’s an invention of Dyson’s and Nyman screenplay, makes the shape of the story to follow too obvious.  Recent films as different as Magic in the Moonlight, The Ornithologist and Under the Shadow have all involved more-things-in-heaven-and-earth surprises for rationalist characters:  it’s a given that his investigations are unlikely to bolster Professor Goodman’s proud and prickly scepticism.   The success of Ghost Stories therefore depends on how compelling the three strange tales are, and how ingenious Goodman’s comeuppance turns out to be.

    The tales are the letdown.  Each one is set in a place deserted except for the person experiencing weirdness there.  The first and second, set in a warehouse and a wood respectively, take place entirely after dark.  The scary sights and sounds deliver occasional jolts but didn’t stop this viewer being bored by the directors’ unsettling tactics.  Earlier this year, the BBC screened a six-part fantasy mystery called Requiem.  Sally and I gave up after the first episode because the spooky atmosphere was so tediously pervasive:  there wasn’t any sense of – or, as a result, shock at – inexplicable events or perceptions arising from the apparently everyday.  I had a similar problem with the three stories here, in spite of the tincture of Royston Vasey decay that’s applied throughout.  Connoisseurs of horror may well be able to slot the effects into a frame of reference I don’t have but the tales are insufficient in themselves.   They soon become merely means to the end of discomfiting Philip Goodman.

    The denouement is more interesting.  The dramatic energy level briefly soars in a truly horrifying flashback to the protagonist’s schooldays, when the young Philip (Samuel Bottomley) is on the receiving end of anti-Semitic abuse from two bullies, then too scared to intervene to help their next victim, a boy with learning disabilities (Jake Davies).  The resolution is essentially an it-was-all-a-dream number but one that’s adjusted to fit the film’s central theme.  Philip Goodman lies motionless and apparently unconscious in a hospital bed.   The staff who come in and out of his room are played by the same actors who were the principals in the three stories:  the nightwatchman (Paul Whitehouse) is now a ward orderly; the teenage driver (Alex Lawther) a junior doctor; the money man (Martin Freeman) a senior consultant.  Goodman has made a failed suicide attempt.  The consultant announces that the brain damage he’s suffered means the patient is wholly unaware of his surroundings, adding as a smug parting shot, ‘I hope his dreams are sweet’.  A repeated baffling image from earlier in the film is now revealed to be Goodman’s viewpoint from his bed.

    Perhaps it’s a witty homage to the low production values of other horror pictures but the cinematographer, Ole Bratt Birkeland, shows an exasperating preference for combining a white, seemingly overlit background with a scuzzy foreground in which the characters’ faces can’t properly be seen.  Similarly, from the moment the geriatric Cameron appears in close-up, you’re waiting for him to peel off the prosthetic bald cap to reveal he’s someone different underneath.  The main actors are all good but Alex Lawther, on a constant knife-edge between tears and laughter, is the only one whose intensity is enough to be involving.  There are moments too when Lawther’s red, staring face has the look of a ventriloquist’s dummy.  That brings to mind a superior paranormal portmanteau film, Dead of Night.

    12 April 2018

  • Wonderstruck

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Haynes (2017)

    A few minutes into Wonderstruck, young Ben (Oakes Fegley) pleads with his mother Elaine to tell him who his father was.  ‘Was he an astronaut?’ asks Ben, ‘is that why I’m fascinated by the stars and space travel?’   The following conversation between them makes clear that Ben has asked the question before and that Elaine has always fobbed him off, as she does now, by saying it isn’t the right time.   Since today is Ben’s twelfth birthday he’s understandably baffled and frustrated by his mother’s continuing reticence.  What’s more, this was his last chance to break it.  The birthday scene is a flashback:  Elaine has recently died in a car crash and orphan Ben is now living with another family.   (It’s all the more regrettable that Elaine vanishes from the picture so soon because she’s played by Michelle Williams.)  We never find out more about her personality or why she was so secretive about Ben’s father.  We can only assume she didn’t want to give the film’s ending away.

    These early sequences take place in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota in 1977.  Then black-and-white replaces colour and Todd Haynes puts up a new signpost – Hoboken, New Jersey, 1927.  Rose (Millicent Simmonds), about the same age as Ben, lives with her cold, cruel father (James Urbaniak).   There’s no sign of her mother.  Rose is very unhappy:  beside a lake, she writes ‘Help me’ on a piece of paper, which she folds into a yacht and sends onto the water.  She takes refuge from her grim home life in a cinema, absorbed by tear-jerking silent melodramas starring Lillian Mayhew.  (The Gishy connections extend beyond a shared first name:  the movie currently playing is called ‘Daughter of the Storm’.)  When Rose reads in a magazine that Lillian (Julianne Moore) is appearing in a Broadway play, she resolves to seek her out in New York.  Ben, meanwhile, has found a marker in one of his mother’s books, on which a message to her is inscribed and signed, Ben feels sure, by his father.  The marker bears the address of Kincaid’s, a Manhattan bookshop.  Ben embarks on a much longer journey to the same destination as Rose.

    For the next hour or so, the narrative moves between the two children’s experiences in New York, accumulating points of similarity between them.  Rose is congenitally deaf; Ben, in the time between Elaine’s death and his departure for the Big Apple, loses his hearing, thanks to a freak accident during an electrical storm.  Ben’s on a quest for his father.  Rose, it’s soon revealed, is mad about Lillian Mayhew because she’s actually her mother.  (When Rose arrives to interrupt her play rehearsal, Lillian falls well short of the maternal devotion that seems to be her speciality on screen.)  Both children make their way to the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park, where they touch a meteorite, Ben makes friends with another boy (Jaden Michael) and Rose finds her kindly elder brother Walter (Cory Michael Smith, who, as in his small part in Carol, is engagingly animated).  But although the twin stories rhyme they don’t ramify or deepen.  You just sit waiting for the connection between the children to be explained and so it is eventually – and unsurprisingly.  The proprietor of Kincaid’s bookshop in 1977 is the elderly Walter (Tom Noonan).  Rose is Ben’s grandmother.  His mystery father was her son, who died young of a heart condition.   In the course of the half-century between her childhood and Ben’s, Rose has become the spitting image of her mother:  unlike Michelle Williams, Julianne Moore is in the film for more than a cameo.

    Wonderstruck has a screenplay by Brian Selznick, adapted from his own 2011 young adult novel.  (Selznick also wrote the book on which Martin Scorsese’s Hugo was based.)  The screenplay eschews voiceover.  With two deaf protagonists, Todd Haynes may have liked the idea of extending the silent movie aspect beyond ‘Daughter of the Storm’ – there’s barely any dialogue for a long stretch of the film.  This puts a lot of responsibility, however,  on Haynes’s two young leads and on Carter Burwell’s score.  The Rose sequences work better than the Ben ones because the silence is more thoroughgoing (Rose is deaf and mute, Ben can’t hear but can speak) and because Millicent Simmonds (who‘s herself deaf) is more appealing and expressive than Oakes Fegley.   You seem to see in her features the lineaments of a much older woman’s face.  Julianne Moore is eloquent as the older Rose – her signing has something of the urgency that Sally Hawkins brought to The Shape of Water.  Yet it’s disappointing that Millicent Simmonds’s unusual looks turn into a face as familiar as Moore’s.

    Carter Burwell’s music is pleasant but, since there’s a lot of it, a bit tedious – which is a fair description of Wonderstruck as a whole.  The soundtrack also includes ‘Space Oddity’ and Deodato’s arrangement of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ aka 2001 though it turns out Ben’s father wasn’t an astronaut.  All too aptly for this film, he was a designer – a talent inherited from Rose, who graduated from paper yachts to an amazingly detailed miniature model of New York City, which she hand-made for the World’s Fair there in 1964.  Admirers of the film have found much more in it than this viewer was able to.   David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, for example, experienced ‘an uncommonly grownup film about children, communication, connection and memory’.  For me, Selznick’s story shares Hugo‘s self-conscious magic-of-childhood quality and Todd Haynes’s ambitions don’t seem to extend beyond wrapping it up neatly and tying it with ribbon.  He shows more curiosity in objects – books, museum objects, dioramas – than people.  Ben’s sudden loss of hearing means he hasn’t had time to learn sign language.  This necessitates plenty of handwritten notes.  Rather than adding suspense to Wonderstruck, they slow things up.

    11 April 2018

Posts navigation