Monthly Archives: September 2018

  • The Miseducation of Cameron Post

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Desiree Akhavan (2018)

    This is the first of two high-profile 2018 films about a young American forced into gay conversion therapy.  The other film, Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, which is due for release in the US in November, is based on Gareth Conley’s memoir of his own experiences.  The Miseducation of Cameron Post is adapted from a 2012 novel by Emily M Danforth, whose book was inspired by a real-life case from a few years previously.  Chloë Grace Moretz, who plays the title character, has talked in interview of how two of her elder brothers underwent gay conversion therapy, which still goes on – in a less explicitly aggressive form, Moretz says, than in 1993, when the movie is set.  These ‘try to pray the gay away’ films are nothing if not relevant.  It’s a pity that Cameron Post is nothing but relevant.

    Montana teenager Cameron is an orphan, whose parents died in a car crash.  Although she doesn’t share the strong Christian beliefs of her aunt and guardian Ruth (Kerry Butler), Cameron dutifully attends Bible study classes with her school friend Coley (Quinn Shephard).  The two girls have also developed a physical relationship; on high-school prom night they’re discovered making love in a car.  Ruth dispatches Cameron to ‘God’s Promise’, a singular form of summer camp, run by Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr) and his therapist sister Lydia (Jennifer Ehle), where young gay people are ‘educated’ to overcome same-sex attraction – ‘SSA’.  As Rick tells new arrivals, he is himself a successful graduate of the God’s Promise training programme:  he now has a girlfriend (Marin Ireland) to prove it.  The rest of the film illustrates life at the camp and Cameron’s defiance of its regime – a defiance that increases in tandem with the friendships she forms with two other prisoners, Jane Fonda [sic] (Sasha Lane, from American Honey) and Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck).

    Desiree Akhavan, who wrote the screenplay with Cecilia Frugiuele, loses no time in making Cameron’s sexuality clear, even before she’s outed.  She and Coley hurry home from Bible group, shut the bedroom door behind them and get to it.  When the girls are posing for photographs with the two boys partnering them to the prom, Chloë Grace Moretz’s face expresses nothing more complex than Cameron’s discomfort at the falsity of what she’s doing.  These early sequences are only anticipatory, though.  Both director and lead actress are marking time before Cameron goes to the camp and the film’s real action can get underway.

    Akhavan’s descriptions of the God’s Promise curriculum – and though there’s leisure time, nothing is extra-curricular – have a grim fascination.  Entrants to the camp, known as ‘disciples’, are issued on arrival with a drawing of an iceberg, representing their sexuality, and told to write on the submerged part what they see as the factors causing their SSA.  (It’s considered an important sign of growing trust when two disciples are ready to share with each other their iceberg details.)  Confident, chilling Dr Lydia interprets the feelings Cameron had (still has) for Coley:  Cameron didn’t really desire Coley; rather, she desired to be Coley.  The doctor invokes a charming analogy.  It’s been said, she explains, that human cannibals always like to eat the choicest specimens available.  At ‘social’ events, a band combines evangelical words and dreary rock music to soul-destroying effect; one of the disciples, Helen (Melanie Ehrlich), performs a kind of pious karaoke.  Attempts to modernise hymns by turning them into pop ballads are always worrying, with their simple substitution of Christ for a human lover in otherwise clichéd lyrics.  The preoccupation at God’s Promise with getting disciples’ sexuality straight gives Helen’s number an extra creepiness.

    There’s a grotesque comedy about the number too and the film is at its best showing the absurd consequences of the God’s Promise set-up.  When Cameron has an erotic dream about Dr Lydia, her moans excite her room-mate Erin (Emily Skeggs), an especially conscientious disciple, enough for her to climb into bed and have sex with Cameron.  But episodes like this are few and far between, and the small cast of significant characters is too schematic.  To underline the breadth of its commitment to diversity, The Miseducation of Cameron Post gives Jane Fonda an artificial leg (in which she stashes pot) and Adam, as his full name suggests, Native American lineage.  (Jane, raised in a commune, has a new, zealously Christian stepfather to thank for her exile to God’s Promise.  Adam’s politically ambitious father fears a gay son may prove to be an electoral liability.  Their monstrous parents make the right-on youngsters all the more admirable.)  Reverend Rick and Dr Lydia operate as a good cop/bad cop combo – perhaps that should be pathetic cop in Rick’s case, though John Gallagher Jr plays him sensitively.

    Just as I was thinking Jennifer Ehle’s interpretation of Lydia was indebted to Louise Fletcher’s portrait of Nurse Ratched, the plot of Cameron Post suddenly turned for a while into that of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Disciple Mark (Owen Campbell), upset by the news that his father considers him still too ‘feminine’ to return home, goes berserk in a group therapy session.  His increasing distress ruffles Lydia’s sinister, condescending calm; unable to reason with him as he lies on the ground, she forcibly restrains him.  That night, Mark goes to the bathroom and tries to castrate himself:  there are unmistakable echoes of the fate of Billy Bibbit and Nurse Ratched’s hand in it.  Appalled but even more united as a result of what happens to Mark, Cameron, Jane and Adam plan to escape – to Canada, as McMurphy and the Chief (also a Native American) planned to do.

    At this point, a big difference from Cuckoo’s Nest kicks in:  there’s no need in Cameron Post to break out using a hydrotherapy cart.  Disciples are encouraged, as part of a mens-sana-in-corpore-sano policy, to take physical exercise.  When Cameron, Jane and Adam tell Rick they’re going on a hike, he’s pleased to hear it and unsuspecting.  The three walk out of the camp’s grounds onto the adjoining highway.  They hitch a lift and the film ends with a shot of them smiling hopefully together in the back of a trailer.  If it’s this easy to leave God’s Promise, why didn’t they do it sooner?  Perhaps Desiree Akhavan means the viewer to see them as scared, vulnerable kids who’ve never fended for themselves but they’re at least close to being legally adult (the actors playing them are all at least twenty).  The real explanation for the delayed escape is that an appalling crisis had to take place first, to confirm the malignancy of God’s Promise – even though the audience sees and deplores this from the outset.

    This hints at another difference from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:  Cameron Post is short on humour.  The conversion therapees lack the confounding, often funny individuality of the inmates in Miloš Forman’s fine drama (nor is there much sense of tensions created by the internal hierarchy or rivalry of disciples).  It may well be that, as Adam Mars-Jones suggests in his (positive) TLS review of the film, Emily Danforth took her title from an album by the American singer-rapper, Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill).   As a movie title, however, it comes over as another recent example of a director’s announcing in advance a moral judgment on their subject – in the manner of, for example, A Fantastic Woman.

    In the interview in which she described her brothers’ ordeal, Chloë Grace Moretz also talked about ‘what I want to do with my platform [so that] the content I’m putting out isn’t just entertainment but is also some form of activism and social justice’.  It’s one thing for an actor to engage strongly with a project as a result of personal experience; another for her or him to adopt the determinedly political approach that Moretz describes.  It may be a different matter when a director and/or screenwriter does this but the actor’s essential job in naturalistic drama is to build a credible character.  Moretz’s attitude comes through clearly in her performance in The Miseducation of Cameron Post and is what makes it inadequate.  It’s true her role is underwritten.  We have no clue, for example, as to what further education or paid employment Cameron may be missing out on as a result of being sent to the camp.  To confirm the information that Cameron was a star athlete in school, Desiree Akhavan shows her doing a bit of running.  But Chloë Grace Moretz makes matters worse.  She presents an image of victimhood at the expense of creating a person.

    11 September 2018

  • Charlie Bubbles

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Albert Finney (1968)

    At the start of Charlie Bubbles, the title character (Albert Finney) parks his gold Rolls-Royce in a London street and goes into a posh restaurant for a business lunch with his agent (Nicholas Phipps) and tax accountant (Richard Pearson).  Charlie, a best-selling writer, is instantly bored by the financial jargon coming at him from across the table – it’s plain to see money doesn’t bring him happiness.  Once his attention has wandered to the other well-heeled diners, he looks even gloomier.  At the end of the film, Charlie goes to a bedroom window in the Derbyshire farmhouse where he’s just spent the night.  It’s the home of his ex-wife Lottie (Billie Whitelaw), a place bought by Charlie as part of their divorce settlement and where she now lives with their son Jack (Timothy Garland).  Charlie sees a hot air balloon standing in a nearby field.  He hurries out, climbs into the balloon basket, removes the sandbags and takes flight – he has to escape his life.  During the intervening eighty-odd minutes, we’ve not learned much more about Charlie than that he’s unhappy and dissatisfied.  Yet in spite of that and the glum theme, this is an engaging film.

    Charlie Bubbles is distinctive too, even though there are tropes and details familiar from British cinema of the 1960s.  Charlie’s whimsical (though supposedly real) surname has a whiff of the nickname of the eponymous hero of Billy Liar, a film also evoked when Charlie imagines shooting his querulous housekeeper (Margery Mason).  His only kindred spirit in the swanky restaurant is his old pal Smokey Pickles (Colin Blakely), who has in common with Charlie not just a vaguely comical name but also a zany sense of humour.  The subversive slapstick of the pair’s food fight, including items from the dessert trolley way upmarket from custard pies, is Morgan-atic.  Charlie and Smokey are in their thirties but the clownish parts of their heavy-drinking afternoon after leaving the restaurant echo the antics of younger characters in A Taste of Honey  and  The Knack … and How to Get It (as well as Richard Lester’s Beatles movies).  These things could be no more than derivative but it seems at least as likely that Albert Finney, directing his first feature film, and Shelagh Delaney, who wrote the screenplay, were making self-aware use of them.  Like Charlie, Finney and Delaney both hailed from working-class areas of Lancashire[1]; he had played the lead in Billy Liar on stage; she had made her name in theatre with A Taste of Honey.  Charlie Bubbles functions as a taking stock both of British New Wave pictures and of the price of fame for someone of Finney’s (and, to a lesser extent, Delaney’s) generation and background.  The faces of successful writers, however, tend to be much less well known than those of successful actors.  When complete strangers recognise Charlie on sight, Finney seems to be blurring, to improbable effect, the difference between the protagonist’s celebrity and his own[2].

    The timeframe covers less than forty-eight hours.  The business lunch and outing with Smokey take place on a Friday; Charlie goes up in the balloon on a Sunday morning.  An episodic structure is reinforced by characters making an impression then disappearing from the film, never to return – first Smokey, then Charlie’s personal assistant Eliza (Liza Minnelli), then Lottie and Jack (of whom there’s no sign when Charlie finally takes to the air).  Charlie also has several, more fleeting meetings with people in the course of his drive from London to Derbyshire and on his visit with Jack to a Manchester United match at Old Trafford on the Saturday afternoon.  These entrances and exits are one means whereby Finney conveys the inconsequentiality of Charlie’s world – or his perception of it.  The cinematography and the score are other means.  Pauline Kael, who disliked the film except for Billie Whitelaw’s performance and the ‘details’ of Delaney’s screenplay, noted that it was ‘photographed by Peter Suschitsky [sic] in an extremely complicated style that attempts to produce for us the artificiality and flat unreality of how things look to Charlie’.  The fairground flavour of Misha Donat’s sometimes discordant music suggests (as well as ‘Puppet on a String’, the chart-topping Eurovision winner of 1967) a roundabout ride.

    Despite its prevailing cynical perspective, I didn’t recognise in Charlie Bubbles the ‘painfully monotonous movie’ that Pauline Kael saw.  Each of Charlie’s brief encounters has a distinct mood.  At the start of his overnight drive north, even a brief non-encounter is peculiarly gripping:  as Charlie buys petrol for the journey and monopolises the garage attendant (George Innes), a disgruntled fellow driver (Arthur Pentelow) stands glowering a few feet away.  At a stop en route at a motorway services station café, Charlie has an almost dreamlike meeting with an old acquaintance, a fur-coated woman (Yootha Joyce) who, like him, seems as melancholy as she’s conspicuously wealthy.  While Charlie’s getting food in the café, an RAF man (Alan Lake) heading home on leave gets into conversation with Eliza.  He asks who Charlie is – he thinks he recognises his face – then if there’s any chance of a lift.  Eliza readily agrees on Charlie’s behalf.   You expect Charlie to be annoyed but he isn’t.  When the young man asks for an autograph for his wife, who’s a fan, Charlie obliges.  The airman even takes over driving the Rolls for a while.  Charlie and Eliza drop him outside the block of flats where he lives.  This episode is repeatedly surprising and refreshing by being good-humoured and by nothing untoward happening.

    At the Manchester hotel where Charlie and Eliza book in for a couple of hours, an elderly waiter (wonderfully played by Joe Gladwin) serves them breakfast.  The waiter, recognising the local boy made good, tells Charlie he knew his father well in the 1930s and reminisces.  ‘We’re all very proud of you’, the waiter concludes, ‘are you still working, sir, or do you just do your writing now?’  ‘Just the writing’, says Charlie, quietly amused.  The waiter is one of several menials who, in the course of the film, receive a sizeable tip from him.  It’s a way of keeping people at a safe distance, and Charlie’s conscience clearer than it might otherwise be.   Immediately after this scene are two sequences of Charlie and Eliza making love in his hotel room, scored by spot-the-difference bursts of piped Muzak.  At least part of the sex, perhaps all of it, is in Charlie’s dreams as he slumbers in bed.

    It makes sense that, once he arrives at the small farm in the Derbyshire hills, the world becomes more solid:  Lottie represents a past with more substance than Charlie’s present.   When he kicks a football with Jack in the farmhouse garden, Charlie, who has seemed an observer of his life more than a participant in it, is dynamic for the first time in the film.  While she scolds him persistently, you always believe from Billie Whitelaw’s playing of Lottie – and from Albert Finney’s reactions – that these two people go back a way and were, perhaps still are, attracted to each other.  At Old Trafford, Charlie has a private viewing suite, in which he and Jack are sealed off from the crowds in the stands.  If this were all that the scene showed, it would be tiresome.  Finney takes it further not just by describing Jack’s dissatisfaction at being cooped up with his father but also by hinting at the child’s increasing inclination to mess up the afternoon.  He spills some of his lemonade on the counter and, after eating his hot dog, wipes his hands on his seat.  He presses his nose to the glass to stress his boredom.  Gerry (John Ronane), an old school friend who now works on a Manchester newspaper, pops into the suite to talk with Charlie.  Jack pops out and disappears.  Charlie’s unavailing search for his son – in and out of the quickly emptying stadium, on a canal towpath – blends documentary description of locale with anxious drama.  There’s nothing artificial or unreal about the moment when Charlie throws up, in fear of what’s happened to Jack and what Lottie will say.

    Charlie returns to the farmhouse to find the boy watching television and in no mood for interruptions.  Lottie is blasé as she assures Charlie that Jack usually makes his own way home.   The relationship between mother and son is a clever element of Shelagh Delaney’s script.   Lottie spoils Jack and he makes the most of it.   This gives Charlie ammunition in a convincing row with Lottie; she, of course, can remind Charlie he’s a far from dutiful father.  The accumulating weight of Billie Whitelaw’s bad-tempered Lottie is in striking contrast to the domestic whingeing routines in Billy Liar, which I saw just a week before Charlie Bubbles.  The acting is generally strong.  Whatever Eliza’s relationship with Charlie actually amounts to, Liza Minnelli, in her (adult) debut in cinema, fuses the girl’s gee-whizz over-eagerness with a hard streak of possessiveness for her employer.  None of these other performances would work quite so well, however, without Albert Finney as the film’s mostly taciturn centre.  His face is often impassive as far as other characters are concerned.  Finney shows the viewer more of Charlie’s thoughts and feelings.

    As a director, Finney varies the tempo admirably, except when he occasionally seems so fascinated by what he’s filming that he lingers on it too long.  The obvious example is the monitors in Charlie’s house in London.  A bank of CCTV screens is certainly different from, and an advance on, the split-screen effects that had become a cliché of 1960s cinema but they overstay their welcome.  A couple of more broadly comic bits don’t work, for example when two local reporters (Bryan Moseley and Ted Norris) turn up at the farmhouse, trying to get an interview with Charlie and Lottie.  The balloon finale sticks out as a bit of altogether high-flown symbolism and as a cop out.  For the most part, though, you come out of Charlie Bubbles full of admiration for Albert Finney in front of the camera and behind it – and sorry that he has never directed for cinema again.

    8 September 2018

    [1] Afternote:  On reflection, this phrase needs a good bit of clarifying.  Finney and Delaney were both born and raised in Salford.   His father was a bookmaker, hers a bus inspector.  Finney’s incarnation of Arthur Seaton casts a long shadow.  Some of his obituaries in 2019 placed him in the first generation of ‘working-class actors’.  In one of his rare interviews, on the BBC’s Face to Face with John Freeman, Finney described his family background as lower middle class.

    [2] While it’s never made explicit what kind of stuff Charlie writes, there are hints of a Len Deighton type.  A few years older than Finney, Deighton was also a working-class, grammar school boy.  Charlie’s work has been regularly adapted for the screen:  more than one person he meets hasn’t read his books but has seen films of them.  By the time Charlie Bubbles was in production, the movies of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin had already appeared and Billion Dollar Brain was about to follow.

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