Monthly Archives: July 2018

  • The Finest Hours

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Craig Gillespie (2016)

    Craig Gillespie’s drama begins with a leisurely description of a young couple’s first date, followed by a briefer summary of their courting, and a rush into the coastguard mission that occupies virtually the rest of The Finest Hours.  This is the true story of a coastguard rescue – the ‘US Coast Guard’s Most Daring Rescue’, according to the subtitle of the book by Michael J Tougias on which the film is based.  In February 1952, the oil tanker SS Pendleton sheared in two in a gale south of Cape Cod.  Four men from the coastguard station at Chatham, Massachusetts braved appalling weather and sea conditions to go to the tanker’s aid.  Their motor lifeboat, designed to carry a maximum of twelve people, brought thirty-two crew of the Pendleton safely to shore.

    Gillespie, working with a screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, aims to do more than simply reconstruct events of more than sixty years ago.  He also wants to reanimate action-packed Hollywood human drama of a bygone age – a tale of heroism featuring familiar types, dilemmas and the discovery in adversity of who-you-really-are.  But the SS Pendleton isn’t the only thing in The Finest Hours split down the middle; so is the film itself.  CGI visual effects that soon dominate and Gillespie’s attempts to revive old-style moral certainties operate mostly in parallel, in spite of a resourceful score by Carter Burwell that tries to bridge the gap.

    Until the rescue vessel reaches the Pendleton, the narrative switches between the crisis on board the tanker and events at the coastguard station and on the lifeboat during its journey out.  In charge of the lifeboat is the young man at the centre of that slow-moving romantic prologue.  Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) reports for work expecting his major challenge on the shift to be securing the station commander’s approval of the date on which Bernie plans to marry.  Commander Cluff (Eric Bana) hasn’t time for that:  with most of the Chatham station’s crew already involved in another rescue attempt, Cluff assigns Bernie to the Pendleton mission.  His three volunteer companions on the lifeboat are bolshy, unsmiling Richard Livesey (Ben Foster), eager rookie Ervin Maske (John Magaro) and Andrew Fitzgerald (Kyle Gallner).  (I’m afraid the last-named didn’t register strongly enough to earn a descriptor.)  The immediate loss of life caused by the accident to the tanker leaves engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) the surviving senior officer.  Despite repeated opposition from other crew, Sybert organises them to steer the Pendleton‘s sinking stern onto a reef, where it can lodge until help arrives.  A subplot involves Bernie’s fiancée Miriam Pentinen (Holliday Grainger) who, when she discovers Bernie has been dispatched on what she considers a suicide mission, marches into the coastguard station and demands unavailingly that Cluff instruct the lifeboat to return to base.

    He makes Bernie excessively unassuming at first but Chris Pine is competent and likeable.  Those adjectives apply even more to Holliday Grainger in what is essentially the familiar action-picture role of the woman who waits back home fearfully but feistily.  Miriam’s visit to the coastguard station goes on too long but Grainger gets excellent variety into her repeated ‘Please call them back’ appeal to Cluff.   What’s detectable in Pine’s and Grainger’s playing, however, is an attempt to recreate stock characters from old movies while breathing some kind of new life into them.  As a result, both actors sometimes come across as over-deliberate.  The same thing happens in some of the minor parts – though not in the case of Ben Foster.  Although Livesey seems excessively grim in the early stages, Foster makes increasingly expressive use of his eyes to build a richer characterisation.  But it’s Casey Affleck’s performance that’s outstanding in more ways than one.

    The man Affleck incarnates – and he physically inhabits the role so thoroughly – is credibly of the period yet effortlessly modern.  At first, Ray Sybert is, as he himself says, unpopular with most of the crew:  he’s a lone wolf and, as such, mistrusted.  On board, he keeps himself to himself; on land, unlike most of the others, he has no wife or family.  Affleck is reliably good at giving the viewer clues to his thoughts and feelings that go unnoticed by others on the screen and just the right actor to play, with an occasional flash of quiet sardonic wit, a solitary, low-key hero.  Sybert knows what needs to be done and gets on with doing it – urgently and with undemonstrative authority.  When the lifeboat has made it back home, Sybert takes his leave of Bernie with a laconic ‘Good job, captain’.   Casey Affleck seems to have a gift for making you want to know how his character fared after the film ended – especially in Manchester by the Sea but in Lonesome Jim too and again here.  Both the other films mentioned benefited from fine, individual screenplays.  It’s remarkable that Affleck achieves something similar in a smaller part and in generic material like The Finest Hours.

    Snow is thick on the ground and so are the clichés.  There are repeated references to an earlier rescue mission that went wrong and left its mark on all concerned.  Commander Cluff invites suspicion because he’s not a local man.  (Eric Bana can’t do much with the part.)  Despite the freezing weather, Miriam, when she storms out of coastguard HQ, is too angry to remember to put her coat back on.  It’s a surefire bet, as the men of the Pendleton jump off the tanker and into the arms of the rescue party on the lifeboat, that the one who won’t make it will be good-hearted, fearless ‘Tiny’ Myers (Abraham Benrubi), his reward for singing ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’ and encouraging a timorous younger seaman (Beau Knapp).  I sighed in exasperation when Miriam’s car crashed on a dark and icy road but at least this didn’t generate a subsidiary will-she-be-reached-in-time suspense element.  Miriam soon gets a lift from a hard-bitten, good-hearted young mother (well played by Rachel Brosnahan).  It would take a heart stonier than mine not to be emotionally stirred by the climactic rescue and journey back to safety.  Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography includes some splendid images of winter landscape and lights in darkness.

    10 July 2018

  • Mary Shelley

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Haifaa al-Mansour (2017)

    It’s a journalistic cliché to describe the leaders of an historical movement as ‘the rock stars of their day’ – the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, say.  Or the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century.  There are moments when Haifaa al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley goes in for cultural updating to comic effect.  Mary (Elle Fanning) first claps eyes on Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth) across-a-crowded-room and asks her friend (Maisie Williams) who he is; the other girl, groupie-like, answers, ‘That’s Shelley – beautiful, isn’t he?’  In due course, Mary and Percy get to know each other better and she tells him she’s pregnant.  ‘Hey!’ he replies, ‘a baby …’   Douglas Booth suggests a boy-band member with lucrative modelling contracts but Shelley strikes a more prosaically careerist note when Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) invites him, Mary and the latter’s stepsister Claire Claremont (Bel Powley) to Geneva:  the younger poet describes this as ‘an unmissable opportunity’.  After Percy first reads Mary’s Frankenstein, he tells her the manuscript has ‘so much potential’.  His words have the ring of the literary agent who doesn’t want to crush their client’s hopes quite yet.

    The verbal anachronisms in Emma Jensen’s screenplay (with ‘additional writing’ by al-Mansour, according to the credits) might be thought designed to reinforce an interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s life as a feminist parable with twenty-first century implications.  In that case, Haifaa al-Mansour would seem exceptionally well qualified for the project.  The publisher that eventually accepts Frankenstein, after many others have rejected it, does so on condition that the author’s identity remains anonymous and that the published volume includes an introduction by Percy – to create the impression, in other words, that he, rather than Mary, wrote the novel.  When she filmed Wadjda (2012) in Saudi Arabia, al-Mansour was obliged to direct under cover in order not to break the law by appearing in public with her male crew.  But Mary Shelley is nothing like single-mindedly feminist.  The injustice of obscuring Mary’s authorship is made to seem the consequence of her lack of celebrity as much as of her gender, as the similarly thwarted Dr John Polidori (Ben Hardy) reminds her.  (Echoing Polydor, his name inevitably contributes to the rock-stars-of-their-day stuff.)  Polidori says he wrote The Vampyre as an attack on the ‘devouring bloodsucker’ Byron – now (in 1819, that is) assumed to be the author of the short story of which he was the target.

    Polidori compares his own fate to that of Mary, who has written the tale of a creature’s betrayal by an ‘irresponsible narcissist’ and seen Percy, who answers to that description, take credit for it.  Mary Shelley has, if nothing else, presented both Shelley and Byron as consistently egocentric and exploitative in their personal relationships.  This dominates at the expense of virtually any suggestion they might have been gifted writers.  Both like the sound of their own voice.  You get the sense that Shelley’s pretensions as a poet and philosopher are, like his professions of love and loyalty, all talk.  What’s in effect the appropriation of Mary’s work is the culmination of this theme but an eleventh-hour U-turn then occurs.  William Godwin (Stephen Dillane) – Mary’s political philosopher and publisher father, from whom she’s been estranged, thanks to her relationship with Shelley – organises a literary salon to mark the publication of Frankenstein.  Godwin invites Percy and Mary separately to the event – by now, they too are estranged.  It’s here that Percy suddenly comes good.  He publicly names Mary as the author of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and she emerges into the gathering from behind a curtain (geddit?).  The happy couple embrace and everything’s OK.  They get married and have another child to replace the one that died earlier.  (That’s honestly how it comes across[1].) The closing legends stress the happiness of their union, note Percy’s ‘tragic death at the age of 29’, and that Mary never remarried.  The scenarist Emma Jensen is also executive producer of the film.  She seems to have written the script glancing nervously over her shoulder at different prospective audiences.

    Although the screenplay is the fundamental problem, it has to be said that Haifaa al-Mansour’s direction is disappointing independently of that.  Until the closing stages, the tempo is pedestrian:  al-Mansour works her way through scenes with more duty than imagination.  Some negative reviews have likened Mary Shelley to a soap opera but it’s low on soap momentum.  After Mary, Percy and Claire have attended a stage demonstration of galvanism and the heroine is grieving the loss of her baby daughter and dreaming she may be restored to life, you expect Mary to get on with Frankenstein but the creation of the famous work is frustratingly delayed.  The overuse of an overwrought score (by Amelia Warner) is hardly unusual but al-Mansour’s lack of orchestration of the performances is a more serious and noticeable weakness.

    The youth of the cast is refreshing – Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth and Tom Sturridge are all actually close to the age that Mary, Shelley and Byron were at the time – but the results are disappointing.  Elle Fanning’s attempt at a posh-ish English accent is accomplished yet imprisoning.  It says something that, in the occasional moments when her American voice slips through, she’s more emotionally expressive.  Although his bright eyes indicate Shelley’s drug habits, that’s as iconoclastic as Douglas Booth gets.  His attempts to get seriously dramatic are effortful.  Tom Sturridge’s portrait of Byron could hardly be more obvious – smoulderingly dangerous-to-know at first, then a callous brute with a devilish cackle – though Sturridge at least has more vocal colour than Booth.  In the unrewarding role of Polidori, Ben Hardy wears a dark wig that’s perhaps the most disfiguring of its kind since the one Daniel Craig wore as Ted Hughes in Sylvia (2003).  The hairpiece makes Hardy look weird and a bit daft.

    The difference in age between Bel Powley and the actual Claire Claremont is relatively large but Powley’s performance is by some way the most effective of the younger actors’.   The tensions between Mary and her stepmother (one-note Joanne Froggatt) cause William Godwin to dispatch his daughter to Scotland, where she stays with her father’s friend (Derek Riddell) and his daughter (the Maisie Williams character) and first meets Shelley.  She returns posthaste to London on receipt of news that Claire has fallen into a catatonic state, which turns out to be faked, precisely in order to get Mary back.  The egocentric resolve this requires on Claire’s part nicely anticipates her longer-term determination not to miss out on any of the fun her elder stepsister is having, including a physical relationship with Percy.  Bel Powley gives Claire, who also sleeps with Byron and bears his child, an intense but amusing avidity.  Rather amazingly in the circumstances, she also makes a lot of her lines sound fresh – modern, if you like, yet not jarringly so.  In a different register, Stephen Dillane, as so often a cut above, does the same as Mary’s father.

    10 July 2018

    [1] In fact, the couple’s next two offspring also died very young.  The small boy we see near the end of the film must be Percy Florence Shelley (1819-1889), the only one of their children who survived into adulthood.

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