Monthly Archives: September 2018

  • 12 Angry Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet (1957)

    Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men began life as a teleplay, broadcast in 1954.  Three years later, it became a cinema film – Sidney Lumet’s first – with a screenplay by Rose, who also produced, in partnership with the movie’s star, Henry Fonda.  Photographed in black and white by Boris Kaufman, 12 Angry Men fared poorly at the box office but was critically acclaimed from the word go, and its reputation has grown over the years.   It ranks second in the American Film Institute’s all-time top ten of courtroom dramas.  Nearly the whole film takes place in a single room in a New York courthouse, where an all-male jury considers their verdict at the end of a murder trial.  (If you didn’t know better, you’d think the source material was a stage play, which the piece did become in the 1960s.)  A guilty verdict will mean an automatic death sentence for the trial defendant, a teenager accused of fatally stabbing his father.  The men on whom his life depends are referred to by juror number only, until the very end, when two of the jury, as they leave the courthouse, exchange surnames.

    12 Angry Men has a good title and a nifty dramatic structure, both of which are phony.  Far from all the men are angry.   Juror number 1 (Martin Balsam), who’s also the jury foreman, shows remarkable patience throughout – his one outbreak of huffiness lasts about five seconds.  Juror 2 (John Fielder), a meek bank clerk, eventually raises his voice to speak his mind but is never cross.  Juror 12 (Robert Webber), an advertising executive, is too shallow and fickle to be up to anger.  At the start of the jury’s deliberations, only juror 8 (Fonda), an architect, votes not guilty.  He does so, to the exasperation of others, on the grounds of ‘reasonable doubt’.  At first, the outlier’s objections are remarkably woolly.  Can we be 100% sure, he asks; isn’t it possible that witnesses could be wrong?  Rather than telling him he’s confusing reasonable doubt with complete certainty, his fiercest antagonists mostly bluster – so as to contrast their benighted views with his educated liberality.  The structure is phony because the opening vague arguments are just a delaying tactic on Reginald Rose’s part.  In due course, juror 8 refines them into bit-by-bit, forensic dismantling of the prosecution’s evidence.  His increasingly persuasive case doesn’t consist of issues that occur to him during the discussion; rather, he keeps them up his sleeve until the dramatic time is right.  (There’s no disputing his claim that the defence lawyer was negligent in his cross-examination of prosecution witnesses:  it’s incredible that some of the points raised in the jury room weren’t raised in court.)  He wins over one bigot after another until the jury votes unanimously to acquit the defendant.

    When he first moves into the main arena, Sidney Lumet shows his talent for building realistic context and claustrophobic atmosphere.  The weather is hot, the window in the airless jury room is jammed, sweat patches soon appear on the shirts of some of the jurors.  It’s not long either, though, before the direction is emphasising significant details in an obvious way.  Juror 3 (Lee J Cobb), who runs some kind of business (and who really is angry), mentions that he has one son, whom he’s not seen for two years, adds with feeling, ‘Kids – you work your heart out …’, and looks furtively at the photograph he takes from his pocket:  Lumet is announcing this is going to matter in a big way.   We wait nearly the whole film for the payoff.  Juror 3 is the last to give in, breaking down as he rages:

    ‘You lousy bunch of bleeding hearts. You’re not gonna intimidate me. I’m entitled to my opinion. Rotten kids …  You work your life out!  … Not guilty.’

    Juror 10 (Ed Begley), a garage owner, is the most aggressively bigoted of the twelve.  Thanks to his racial and social prejudice, he knows what ‘sort of person’ the boy on trial is:  Hispanic and a slum-dweller.  ‘I don’t think the kind of boy he is has anything to do with it,’ counters juror 9 (Joseph Sweeney), an elderly man who’s the first to join juror 8 on the not guilty side.   Yet the kind of boy the defendant is counts for a lot with Lumet.  There’s only a single shot of the teenager in the dock, at the very start, but he (John Savoca) looks pathetically young and innocuous.  His brief appearance is accompanied by a burst of elegiac music that isn’t typical of Kenyon Hopkins’s score.

    There are five other jurors not so far mentioned.  Juror 4 (E G Marshall) is a stockbroker, who is super-analytical and has a pair of spectacles to prove it, though they prove his undoing at the business end of the arguments.  Juror 6 (Edward Binns) is a reasonably fair-minded house painter.  Juror 7 (Jack Warden) cares only that a verdict is reached in time for him to get to an evening baseball game.  Numbers 5 and 11 are, in effect, a pair, in that they have common ground with the defendant.  Mild-mannered Juror 5 (Jack Klugman) grew up in a slum.  Juror 11 (George Voskovec who, along with Joseph Sweeney, was the only member of the teleplay cast to reprise his role in the film) is a watchmaker and a European immigrant to America.  Perhaps the sweatiest and certainly the best performance comes from Martin Balsam as the jury foreman, a high-school football coach in the outside world.  Balsam manages to hint at a personality that’s more than the sum of the few characteristics supplied by the script.

    Juror 8, needless to say, is not one of the big sweaters – he only glows, although he might as well be wearing shining armour.  Henry Fonda’s outfit is the next best thing:  a suit whiter even than the one Gregory Peck wore five years later in To Kill a Mockingbird (number one in the AFI’s courtroom dramas top ten).  I’d watched 12 Angry Men twice before, decades ago; this viewing, on television, came the day after seeing The Miseducation of Cameron Post.    It made me feel I’d been unfair in implying that Chloë Grace Moretz, in playing a role to promote a worthy cause, was doing something distinctively de nos jours.  Henry Fonda, while demonstrating far superior acting skills, was essentially doing the same thing here, sixty years earlier.  The film has been widely admired as a ringing endorsement of the American justice system and it seems beyond reasonable doubt that it has affected many people deeply.  I find it cannily entertaining but schematic and manipulative to a vexing degree.   To say it made me angry would be an overstatement but I did feel increasingly embarrassed by the mechanics.  When Lee J Cobb eventually succumbs and buries his face in shame, I too wanted to cover my eyes.  The main consolation of revisiting 12 Angry Men comes in its reminder that Sidney Lumet went on to make Dog Day Afternoon – a much superior film in which a group of New Yorkers are stuck and swelter indoors as the result of a crime.

    12 September 2018

  • The Seagull

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Mayer (2018)

    This is the third film adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and the first for nearly half a century.  The interval between the other two – directed by Sidney Lumet and Yuli Karasik – was only four years (1968 to 1972).  It’s not taken much less time than that for Michael Mayer’s version, shot in the summer of 2015, to make it into cinemas.  I don’t know the cause of the delay or why Mayer, most of whose work has been in theatre, wanted to make the movie.  This isn’t a filmed record of a celebrated stage production.  It feels more like a realisation of idle after-dinner talk.  Who would be your dream screen cast for The Seagull?  Wouldn’t Annette Bening be a great Arkadina and Saoirse Ronan perfect as Nina?  (The answers to the last two questions turn out to be, respectively, ‘nearly’ and ‘not really’.)  Watching Mayer’s film is dispiriting, for reasons other than Chekhov’s multiply unhappy storyline.

    The setting of the play is the country estate of the elderly and ailing Piotr Sorin, a retired civil servant and brother of the actress Irina Arkadina, now in the twilight of her illustrious career.  The first three acts cover a period of a few days, during which Arkadina and her lover, the successful novelist Boris Trigorin, are staying on the estate.  The fourth and last act takes place two years later:  Arkadina goes back to Sorin’s estate, on receipt of a telegram advising that her brother is close to death.  Mayer and the screenplay writer Stephen Karam use Chekhov’s timeframe to create a familiar film structure.  They start with Arkadina’s curtain call at a Moscow theatre and receipt of the telegram; move to her return to the estate; go into an extended two-years-earlier flashback encompassing Acts I, II and III; reprise the opening and proceed to the remaining action of Act IV.  Chekhov’s first act, as well as including the disastrous performance at Sorin’s estate of a play-within-the-play, written by Arkadina’s son Konstantin, describes a pattern of unrequited love or frustrated romantic attachments between pairs of characters.  The estate steward Ilya has a wife, Polina, and a daughter, Masha.  Polina is having an affair with Dorn, Sorin’s doctor.  Masha, courted by the penniless schoolteacher Medvedenko, is in love with Konstantin, who is in love with Nina, the local girl who performs his play and who has set her heart on becoming an actress.  She is also in love with Trigorin.  Arkadina, already unnerved by Nina’s youth and talent, fears the girl’s passion for Trigorin may be reciprocated.

    The film opens with something that, in the play, happens offstage and this is a taste of things to come.  Mayer’s and Karam’s opening up repeatedly coarsens the material.  Konstantin (Billy Howle) dives naked into a lake; Masha (Elisabeth Moss) watches from a distance and the camera concentrates on her face.  Elisabeth Moss is a telegraphic performer at the best of times and her look of anguished longing kills the comedy of Masha’s famous line – when Medvedenko (Michael Zegen) appears and asks why she always wears black – ‘I am in mourning for my life’.   Later, on the same lake, Trigorin (Corey Stoll) and Nina are in a rowboat together; Arkadina watches them fretfully from her window.  Like Masha in the earlier scene, Arkadina is some way away but Mayer lets the audience see at closer quarters that the two people in the boat are enjoying each other’s company.  We no longer wonder if Trigorin’s interest in Nina is something that exists only in Arkadina’s anxious imagination.

    Karam has trimmed the text considerably (the film runs less than a hundred minutes) without disguising the fact that The Seagull is still predominantly a dialogue piece.  As tends to happen when a film director is technically unsure and nervous that viewers will get bored with ‘static’ and ‘talky’ stage material, Mayer is intent on keeping the visuals on the move.  He favours extreme close-ups; as it lurches in on a face, the camera likes to judder.  It’s also sometimes in the wrong place at the wrong time.  When Konstantin aborts the performance of his play because Arkadina keeps making jokes about it to Trigorin, seated beside her in the little audience, her son angrily quotes Hamlet’s lines to Gertrude at her:  ‘ … at your age/The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble’.  Mayer inexplicably doesn’t show Annette Bening’s reaction.  Some of the dialogue cuts are puzzling too, not least concerning the title character – the bird that Konstantin shoots and kills.  All that happens in the film is that he lays it at Nina’s feet; she, not surprisingly is upset and baffled.  In the play, when Trigorin sees the dead creature, he muses on how he might put it to literary use, imagining a story in which:

    ‘A young girl lives all her life on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake, like a seagull, and she’s happy and free, like a seagull.  But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom.  Like this seagull.’

    Mayer and Karam omit this as if ashamed of the obvious symbolism, even though it’s Trigorin’s symbolism rather than Chekhov’s.  The latter uses the seagull, rather, to illustrate Konstantin’s penchant for morbid, self-dramatising gestures and that Trigorin is more concerned with what he writes than how he behaves to people.

    There are two tautologies at work in Mayer’s movie and the second raises a more intractable problem of filming Chekhov.   The director and scenarist can be blamed for the de trop and weakening effect of representing on screen events that don’t occur on stage.  Even without these and the close-ups, though, there’s a difficulty in putting self-revealing words into the mouths of actors we’re used to watching express a character’s thoughts and feelings through non-verbal as well as verbal means.  (I don’t mean to suggest that stage acting is just a matter of reading lines but a theatre audience, unless their long sight is excellent, doesn’t expect to read a performer’s face and gestures in the way that a film audience does.)  Even so, the best reason for making this Seagull was giving us the chance to watch Annette Bening as Arkadina.   Playing an actress in decline, Bening shows not the slightest evidence that she herself is heading over the hill.  Here is a performer whose gifts resolve the enduring debate over whether Chekhov should be played straight or for laughs. Konstantin correctly predicts his mother will keep interrupting the performance of his play because she’s not in it:  Bening makes Arkadina’s deflating asides to Trigorin as funny as they’re infuriating.  (It’s unfortunate Mayer stages the sequence in a way that makes Konstantin seem too far away from his mother to hear her vexing remarks.)  In physical terms, Bening is protean. Arkadina’s age keeps changing before our eyes – she’s youthfully vivid then poignantly weary.

    Saoirse Ronan’s skills aren’t in doubt and she’s absorbing to watch but you feel she’s needing to suppress part of her natural personality on screen in order to be the naïve Nina of the early stages of the story.  Ronan is more expressive in a single shot of the disillusioned Nina two years on – now deserted by Trigorin and an unsuccessful actress – than in most of her playing.  It’s hard to put a finger on what’s wrong with Corey Stoll’s Trigorin but he comes across as fatuous, nearly innocuous.  As Sorin, Brian Dennehy is second only to Bening in natural, rhythmical delivery of his lines, although he’s more imposing and charismatic than you expect  this ailing bureaucrat, whose list of failures includes never getting married, to be.  Billy Howle isn’t bad as Konstantin, though he’s evidently trying hard.  A bigger problem is that he looks so boyish – you don’t feel the die is cast for this Konstantin to carry on failing.  Jon Tenney’s Dr Dorn and Glenn Fleshler’s Ilya are adequate but the women in the cast, except for Elisabeth Moss, have an edge on the men.  Mare Winningham as Polina is particularly good.

    The superfluous on-screen action includes Konstantin’s first attempt on his own life and we also see him preparing for the second attempt that ends The Seagull.  The play’s closing line is Dorn’s confidential aside to Trigorin, ‘The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself …’ – this time, we assume, fatally.  Mayer and Karam don’t show the moment of suicide or include Dorn’s line.  Instead, there’s a resounding gunshot, Dorn’s uneasy explanation of it to Arkadina as something exploding in his medical case, then Saiorse Ronan’s voiceover, reading words that Nina spoke earlier when she performed Konstantin’s play:  ‘all living things, all, all living things, having completed their sad cycle, are no more …’.   Striving to create a new theatrical form, the aspiring playwright Konstantin is the polar opposite of the much-published, exploitative novelist Trigorin.  The younger man’s ambition may be admirable but the result isn’t:  the play that Arkadina makes fun of is ridiculous, a pretentious, apocalyptic piece in which Nina plays ‘the soul of the world’.   By, in effect, giving him the last word, Michael Mayer implies that Konstantin’s hopeless drama was truly insightful.  It’s a weird end to this very unsatisfying film.

    12 September 2018

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