Monthly Archives: January 2019

  • The House That Jack Built

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lars von Trier (2018)

    Widely read and highly intelligent, Jack trained as an architect before he became a serial killer.  He considers himself an artist and the murder victims his medium of self-expression.  Some critics have interpreted The House That Jack Built as a kind of self-portrait of a writer-director whose previous work has led to accusations of sadism.  Although it would be characteristic of Lars von Trier to make a moral leap big enough to draw a parallel between his épatant creations for cinema and actual crimes against humanity, I felt, within a few minutes of the film’s start, that he was more concerned with asking questions of the viewer than with examining his own conscience.

    The most basic of these questions is how much of this can you take?   The answer in my case was forty minutes.  I gave up on The House That Jack Built aware that the same thing happened a few years ago with von Trier’s Antichrist.  (That involved a cinema walkout; this time it was just a matter of aborting a rental viewing on Curzon home cinema.)   What I didn’t consciously realise until I looked at my Antichrist note was that the clock stopped at the same point each time.  If you can’t stand seeing a serial killer in action, von Trier is also asking, why is that – assuming you’re accustomed to watching his like on screen?   As with Antichrist, a main reason was boredom and the prospect of more of it to come.  The extra length of Jack (155 minutes compared with the 108 of the earlier film) made seeing it through all the more impossible.  But fear, anger and revulsion were factors too and it’s worth interrogating those reactions.

    The House That Jack Built is divided into five ‘incidents’, each describing a murder committed by Jack (Matt Dillon), followed by an epilogue entitled ‘Katabasis’.  (As its name suggests, the epilogue takes place in Hell, through which a hitherto heard but unseen character Verge (Bruno Ganz) is the Virgil figure guiding Jack.)  In the first episode, Jack is driving down a road when a woman (Uma Thurman) hails him to stop:  her car has broken down and her jack is broken too.  In the climax to this incident, Jack suddenly slams the jack into her face, killing her instantly.

    The build-up to this begins when the arrogant, entitled woman asks Jack for a lift to the nearby garage he’s recommended and he reluctantly agrees.  The moment she gets into the car, she starts speculating about the possibility that he’s a serial killer and she doesn’t stop soon.  For anyone who knows the film’s subject in advance this is a meta monologue and, as such, a distancing device.  At the same time, the woman is so infuriating that part of you is surprised someone hasn’t murdered her before.  Both these feelings intensify the shock of the killing when it happens – it’s a smack in the chops for the audience too.  Von Trier stresses the horrible reality of the murder through repeated shots of the woman’s destroyed face.  That it’s the face of the beautiful Uma Thurman adds to the effect – though we know that it shouldn’t and perhaps feel ashamed that it does.  Once he’s pulled this stunt, you wonder, with annoyance and apprehension (the two things work in synergy), how von Trier is going to top it – as dramatic imperative requires him to do.

    The immediate solution, in the second incident, is to create a sharp contrast with the first – in terms of the kind of victim involved and the tempo of her murder.  Jack knocks on the door of Claire Miller (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), a woman with everyday rather than movie-star looks.  Jack pretends to be a police officer.  Claire refuses him entry without seeing evidence of his police ID.  After several failed attempts to change her mind and finding out that she is recently widowed, he tells her he’s not a cop but an insurance agent who can get her a better pension deal.  Claire lets him in.  After complaining how humiliated she made him feel by refusing to admit him, he strangles her.  She still shows signs of life so he tries to get her to drink water with pieces of doughnut crumbled in it, to make her choke.  This doesn’t work so he strangles her again, then stabs her through the heart.  Von Trier follows this with a long, tedious description of Jack’s hyper-meticulous clean-up of the bloody crime scene and virtually every other surface in the house.

    The unnamed woman in the first incident is right when she tells Jack he looks like a serial killer.  Matt Dillon is a good actor but he’s instantly and intensely creepy – to an extent that no one who crossed Jack’s path and who had seen a (bad) serial-killer movie at some time in their lives could ignore.  The viewer’s attention is deflected from this for a few minutes only because Uma Thurman is even more insistently vexing than Dillon is relentlessly unnerving.  There’s no such complication when Jack is on Claire Miller’s doorstep – and Siobhan Fallon Hogan’s fine naturalistic acting intensifies the ordeal of waiting for her character to be murdered.

    Fallon Hogan’s truthfulness also underlines how improbable the narrative is.  As a hard-up widow, Claire might have let Jack in if he’d pretended to be an insurance agent from the start.  The viewer knows that his incredible change of tack, after increasing her suspicions throughout the previous five minutes of screen time, would be enough for this woman to shut the door in his face.  This isn’t the only thing to suggest that von Trier, like his protagonist, has been stringing the audience along with a nasty ulterior motive.  Jack’s clean-up operation may or may not convince us that he has obsessive compulsive disorder (announced by a zany inserted shot of him holding, Bob Dylan-style, a card that reads ‘OCD’) but his if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed slaying of Claire Miller isn’t the work of a homicidal artist.  Perhaps von Trier intends Jack’s ineptitude as an ironic sick joke but, if so, it’s a weak one.  It has a charge only because the idea of making this a joke is objectionable.  For some, resonances between the protagonist’s tactics and his creator’s are evidence that the film is searching self-portraiture.  For others, they’re a warning to get out of The House That Jack Built.

    6 January 2019

  • The Private Life of Henry VIII

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Korda (1933)

    I expected great things from Charles Laughton in the title role (and wasn’t disappointed).  I didn’t expect Alexander Korda’s film to be so good in other departments too.  An opening title card explains waggishly that Catherine of Aragon won’t put in an appearance – ‘her story is of no particular interest – she was a respectable woman’.  Besides, the huge political significance of the end of Henry’s marriage to Catherine doesn’t accord with the film’s prevailing jaunty spirit; and it’s important to the structure of the screenplay, by Korda’s fellow Hungarian Lajos Bíró and Arthur Wimperis, that The Private Life of Henry VIII is bookended by the beheadings of the two Henry queens to meet that fate, Anne Boleyn and Katherine [sic] Howard.  On both occasions, the crowds are out in force and include a spectator on whom Korda focuses.  Even though this character is unnamed and the actress who plays her (Toni Edgar-Bruce) was uncredited, she’s a telling illustration of the overall approach.

    As the stage is set for Anne’s execution, this well-spoken Tudor lady tells her husband how sorry she feels for the queen then perks up to ask the woman in front of her, ‘Would you mind removing your hat?  We can’t see the block’.   After the deed is done, she enthuses about Anne’s choice of dress.  The spectator’s social manner and turn of phrase are contemporary with 1933.  Her high-speed switches from sentimentality to ghoulish curiosity to frock appreciation mean she’s still recognisable as a particular breed of royalty fanatic.   I noticed at the start that the film originally received an ‘A’ (children to be accompanied by an adult) certificate from the BBFC and that seems right.  There’s some enjoyable broad comedy but Bíró’s and Wimperis’s dialogue is often sophisticated and there are plenty of double entendres.  It’s remarkable how comfortably the film accommodates the events of the story within a consistently comic frame – how it also manages to deploy anachronism and caricature without merely deriding the historical personages on the screen.  By coincidence, I watched the eighty-six-year-old The Private Life of Henry VIII in the same week that Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite opened in British cinemas.  The Korda treatment of historical royal court shenanigans strikes me as the more sophisticated as well as the more likeable of the two.

    The modest timeframe of the film – from 1536 to the mid-1540s – draws attention to how back-loaded Henry’s matrimonial history was.  His marriage to Catherine of Aragon lasted twenty-four years (1509-33); the subsequent five marriages added up to fourteen.   The last of them, to Catherine Parr, began in 1543 and ended with Henry’s death in early 1547.  Charles Laughton is playing Henry from his mid-forties to his mid-fifties.  It no doubt helps that Laughton, thirty-three at the time, was prematurely heavy and the ageing make-up is good.  But this great actor ages beneath the make-up too.  Laughton rings the changes on the sustained childishness of Henry’s boundless egotism to persuasive and brilliantly entertaining effect.  In the early scenes, he’s insolently clever.  Later on, as he declines physically, he’s almost touchingly dependent and vulnerable.  Korda contrasts the king’s responses to the firing of the cannon that confirms his queen’s execution has taken place:  Henry is callously relieved that the wait for Anne Boleyn’s end is over, desolate and upset at the death of Katherine Howard.  Laughton’s development of character in the interim ensures this latter reaction is natural and credible.  His command of voice and gesture are a wonder.  This performance is famous for exuberant gluttonous demolition of roast fowl but watch Laughton too in his last, furtive encounter with a chicken leg when the scolding Catherine Parr has left the room.  The appetite is willing but the digestive apparatus by now pretty weak.   Charles Laughton won the Best Actor Oscar for his work in this film.  There can have been few wittier or more deserving recipients of the award.

    The project originally developed as a joint starring vehicle for Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester, who plays Anne of Cleves.  Then other queens were added to the recipe.  Lanchester is appealing and amusing:  the scene in which Henry and Anne play cards for money and move on to discussing terms of a divorce settlement is a real highlight.  (Anne comes out of both contests ahead.)  Merle Oberon has a nice combination of poise and fear in her brief appearance as Anne Boleyn.  Everley Gregg (best remembered for playing Dolly Messiter in Brief Encounter) is amusing in her even briefer turn as Catherine Parr.  It hardly matters that Wendy Barrie’s Jane Seymour makes little impression – she too isn’t around for long – but Katherine Howard is the queen with the most screen time and Binnie Barnes, though competent, is somewhat bland.  The affair between Katherine and Henry’s adviser Thomas Culpeper sits less comfortably than other parts of the narrative in the tonal scheme and Robert Donat seems uneasy as Culpeper.  The other key Thomases of the court manage to be distinctively amusing without camping things up – Franklin Dyall (Cromwell), Miles Mander (Wriothesley), Laurence Hanray (Cranmer).   John Loder is Anne of Cleves’s inamorato Peynell (yet another Thomas).   The film’s antiquity is reflected in the presence, as the king’s nurse, of the widow of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.  She’s even credited as Lady Tree.

    4 January 2019

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