Monthly Archives: April 2019

  • Red Joan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Trevor Nunn (2018)

    Red Joan is an adaptation of Jennie Rooney’s 2014 novel of the same name.  Rooney’s title character, Joan Stanley, is based on Melita Norwood (1912-2005), a British civil servant who, from 1937 until her retirement in 1972, supplied state secrets to the KGB.  Norwood’s parents were both active in socialist organisations and in 1935 she married Hilary Nussbaum, a chemistry teacher and lifelong communist (he later changed his name to Norwood).  The couple had one child, a daughter born in 1943, and lived unremarkably in Bexleyheath for many years.  Norwood had been a member of the British Communist Party in the 1930s and seems never to have concealed her left-wing beliefs.  Her espionage was revealed in 1999.  Interviewed for a BBC documentary The Spying Game in the same year, she said that ‘In general I do not agree with spying against one’s country’ but that she had done so ‘to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had at great cost given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, good education and a health service’.

    Described as ‘the most important female agent ever recruited by the USSR’ (by what her Wikipedia entry acknowledges as a ‘resolutely unattributed’ source), Norwood was never prosecuted.  Trevor Nunn’s film, with a screenplay by Lindsay Shapero, begins with Joan (Judi Dench) working in the garden of her semi-detached home; a screen minute later (and against distracting opening titles), there are police officers on her doorstep and she’s hustled into a car.  Her questioning by the powers-that-be contrasts Joan’s geriatric frailty with the look and manner of her two interrogators (including a seriously miscast Nina Sosanya).  They’re so relentless and unsmiling they might be – irony! – the representatives of a totalitarian regime.  Joan is allowed to return home but only with an electronic tag for company.   The sinister force of her treatment by the authorities is one of several major differences between the story of Red Joan and the facts of Melita Norwood’s life, none of them surprising.

    Norwood abandoned her arts degree course at Southampton University and got a secretarial job with the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BNF) but it’s de rigueur in popular literature and drama for a British communist spy of her generation to have been at Cambridge in the 1930s, so young Joan (Sophie Cookson) studies there.  She gets involved with student politics by accident rather than through personal conviction; she falls not under the political spell of Karl Marx but the romantic spell of the supposedly charismatic young communist Leo Galich (Tom Hughes).  Instead of dropping out, she graduates in natural sciences so that, when she goes to work at BNF, the film can get mileage out of her being assumed to be an inferior being on the basis of sex.  In spite of her academic qualifications, Joan is still a secretary.  During World War II, BNF is engaged (to a greater extent than was actually the case) in crucial research into the development of nuclear weapons.  When government ministers visit the centre and introductions are made, one of the party says to Joan, ‘And I assume you’re in charge of the tea’.  The one person who appreciates and makes positive use of her excellent scientific brain is Joan’s BNF boss Professor Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore), who also falls in love with her.  She reciprocates with divided loyalties until Leo hangs himself – an event that gives a flavour of Red Joan’s regular injections of melodrama into the narrative.

    Joan passes classified information to the Soviets only for a short time and for a more specific reason than Melita Norwood gave the BBC.  The secrets she shares enable the USSR to develop an atom bomb; when they do so, it’s Max who’s accused of treachery and imprisoned.  Joan’s spying activities come to light in 2000 following the death of a senior foreign office mandarin, Sir William Mitchell, who is posthumously exposed as a traitor too.  William is precociously senior in the civil service by the immediate post-war years (though it’s hard to see why from the way Freddie Gaminara plays him).  Joan, who knew him at Cambridge, makes use of a photograph she acquires of him snogging another man, to blackmail William into arranging a deal whereby she and Max emigrate to Australia under new identities.  (It’s not clear exactly when they marry or return to live in the London suburbs.)  Joan justifies what she did – to her and Max’s lawyer son Nick (Ben Miles), finally to the obligatory pack of newshounds and flash bulbs that gathers in her front garden – on the grounds that she thought it imperative that the great powers were on an equal footing in terms of nuclear capability, in order to reduce the chances of nuclear war.  No one, of course, can say that the intervening half century has proved her wrong.  The film can therefore present Joan as not only a moral heroine but also, since it’s largely ignored the detail of her own politics, a virtually apolitical one.

    Lindsay Shapero’s screenplay is an unfortunate concoction of dull predictability, florid improbability and, at least in the use Trevor Nunn has made of the script, carelessness.  (An example:  Joan at Cambridge is characterised as demurely self-effacing – when she takes issue with Leo et al at a political meeting there, her confident candour comes out of nowhere then goes back into cold storage.)  Nunn is now in his eightieth year but this is only his fourth cinema film (the first, probably still the best-known, was his Ibsen adaptation Hedda, back in 1975).  To judge from Red Joan, we can be grateful he’s been kept so fruitfully occupied doing theatre.  Two moments that both involve tea sum up his tame, clumsy direction.  Back at home from her police grilling, Joan brews up; as she carries her drink from kitchen into living room, an emphatic close-up on the old radical’s tea mug reveals the image of Che Guevara.  (This is pretty well the level on which the protagonist’s political views are explored.)  Back in the 1940s, young Joan meets with another key Cambridge associate, Leo’s sister Sonya (Teresa Srbova):  the scene is introduced by the camera underlining a ‘Tea Rooms’ sign and Glen Miller-ish music on the soundtrack.  Nunn seems to think this must be the way to do it in a movie because he’s seen and heard as much often before.

    If the Wikipedia article on Melita Norwood is to be believed, Red Joan may not be wrong in showing Joan as single-handedly responsible for enabling the Soviet Union quickly to copy the British recipe for an atom bomb – but it does this so crudely that it renders the idea ludicrous.  At the same time, the film is often pedestrian.  George Fenton has tried to be helpful and suggest otherwise with a dramatic score (albeit a conventional one).  Trevor Nunn makes liberal use of it, as if to convince himself he’s delivering an intensely exciting story.

    I bought a ticket only because of Judi Dench – feeling again that it’s irresponsibly ungrateful not to take advantage of seeing her while she’s still working, feeling guilty too that I didn’t see her in Kenneth Branagh’s recent All is True because it looked naff in the trailer.  I’m glad to that extent that I saw Red Joan (in spite of its naff trailer).  As usual, Dench inhabits her character completely.  Her sight is failing now but she manages to use even this to expressive advantage:  her cloudy eyes give a sense of Joan’s shrouded past.  She has less screen time here than Sophie Cookson, whom I don’t recall seeing before and liked.  It’s not easy to take on a role knowing the person you’re playing will turn into Judi Dench:  Cookson’s blend of modesty, strong will and distinctive intelligence make her a very credible forerunner.  It’s not her fault that she’s eventually defeated by the mechanical crises that the screenplay imposes.

    In their scenes together on a wartime ocean journey to Canada, Cookson and Stephen Campbell Moore have a chance, and take it, to get some kind of rhythm between them going.  It gives a grounding to Joan’s relationship with Max that only exposes the falsity of their later, melodramatic exchanges – again, not the actors’ fault.  Some of the younger players are pretty ropy, though:  if attention-grabbing Teresa Srbova and stiff, weak Freddie Gaminara combined their histrionic energy and split it down the middle, they might both be rather better.  The cast member I felt sorriest for was Ben Miles, a fine actor saddled with a succession of clichés meant to dramatise Nick Stanley’s shocked discovery of his mother’s past.  At one point, Nick asks Joan how much his father knew and she replies, ‘Enough’.  Assuming that everything revealed to the viewer about Joan and Max’s personal history is revealed to Nick too, it’s unforgivable that Ben Miles is denied the opportunity to react to this.  Instead, in the final scene, he’s simply forgiven his mother and literally stands beside her, to tell the assembled press, ‘I am her lawyer – and her son’.

    23 April 2019

  • The Miracle Worker

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Arthur Penn (1962)

    William Gibson’s biographical drama about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller began life in the Playhouse 90 television slot in 1957, became a Tony award-winning Broadway play in 1959 and was adapted for cinema three years later.   All four chief contributors to the stage play – Gibson, Arthur Penn, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke – worked on the big-screen version too.  Its earlier incarnations can be detected in the surfeit of speeches but The Miracle Worker as a film is unusual and tough to watch.  Its treatment of disability must have been startling in a Hollywood picture of 1962.  Watching it again at this long distance in time – I’d seen it once before, maybe forty years ago – I think it compares favourably with plenty of later high-profile movies whose heroes rise above physical or mental handicap.  Its sometimes brutal rawness anticipates the excellent My Left Foot  (1989).

    Penn’s distinctive approach is apparent from the start though not seen to advantage in the opening scene.  In early 1882, Helen Keller, nineteen months old, has just come through a serious illness.  The relief of her parents instantly turns to horror when Helen’s mother Kate realises her daughter can no longer see.  Kate’s distraught reaction is, in terms of screen time, unexpectedly and strikingly prolonged but, as played by Inga Swenson, it’s decidedly histrionic too:  we’re watching an actress giving everything she’s got more than a woman in shocked distress.  Swenson and Victor Jory, as Helen’s dogmatic, ex-military father, are the most problematic members of the cast throughout The Miracle Worker.   Their performances are strongly felt but she overdoes the ardent mother love, he’s excessively shouty (and Captain Keller has more than his fair share of the speeches.)  Yet the no-holds-barred emotionality that feels false in the prologue takes on new and more authentic meaning in the film’s central relationship.

    Blind and deaf as a result of her illness in infancy (which was probably either scarlet fever or meningitis), Helen Keller lived her early years, as she later wrote, ‘at sea in a dense fog’.  Frustration at her inability to communicate resulted in furiously aggressive behaviour in the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  In 1886, her desperate parents made contact with the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Massachusetts.  A few months before Helen’s seventh birthday, twenty-year-old Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and a former Perkins student, was sent to the Kellers to work with Helen.  It was the start of a partnership that extended nearly half a century, until Sullivan’s death.  She taught Helen a system of spelling the letters of words into the palm of her hand.  The child learned to imitate her teacher’s gestures but a much greater breakthrough occurred when Helen realised these gestures signified the things or people she could touch and smell.  In May 1888, she enrolled at Perkins.  Six years later, she and Anne, now her companion, moved to New York so that Helen could attend schools for the deaf there.  In 1904, she graduated from Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa, the first deaf and blind recipient of a university degree.

    The film concentrates on the early, turbulent months between Helen and her tutor.  It climaxes in the moment when, at the pump in the grounds of the family home, the girl understands the significance of the motions Anne makes on the palm of one hand while running water over the other – that w-a-t-e-r is water.  Soon after Anne joins the household, Kate Keller tells her that Helen, shortly before her ruinous illness took hold, was starting to get the hang of words:  she knew, says Kate, what water was and could nearly pronounce the word.  In her epiphany at the pump and with enormous effort, Helen now says ‘water’ again[1].  It’s a genuinely powerful scene, even if Arthur Penn somewhat dilutes its effect by extending the triumphant ending for a few minutes more.

    In many other respects, the direction is admirable.  The film may have inherited too much dialogue but Penn exploits to great effect another legacy of the stage play:  the claustrophobic nature of the characters’ situation and of Helen’s locked world.  This is especially so in the relentless ‘battle’ scenes between the two principals, as Anne tries both to subdue and to teach the child – episodes that also show the film at its most remarkably dynamic.   Laurence Rosenthal’s score is full on (and eager to move the audience to tears) but Penn knows when to use it and when not to use it:  there’s no music during the big confrontations between Anne and Helen.  The black-and-white cinematography (by Ernesto Caparrós) reinforces the narrative’s stark urgency.  Anne’s flashback memories of her childhood years in a Massachusetts almshouse are imaginatively shot to suggest the serious eye disease from which she suffered in childhood.

    Penn’s outstanding achievement is the performance he gets from Patty Duke as Helen.  In the talky context of the piece, she’s bound to stand out but her physicality is extraordinary – not just because she’s so young but because she’s young and had already played Helen throughout the nearly two years of the Broadway run yet there’s nothing practiced about her acting.  Duke was fifteen when the film was in production, twice the age that Helen Keller was when Anne Sullivan entered her life, but it scarcely matters – for two reasons.  Helen’s parents, unable to control or get through to her, treat her like a baby; since she’s made no progress – emotional, social or educational – she exists virtually outside time.  And casting a significantly older and stronger child makes good dramatic sense:  it helps express the exceptional, animal ferocity of this pinafore-wearing little girl, makes her physically harder for Anne to handle.  Helen reconnects with language at the pump but in this moment of illumination she remains the dervish she’s been throughout.  And there’s nothing falsely spiritual about the way Patty Duke struggles to enounce ‘water’.  The two syllables come from deep inside her, issue as if she’s retching, sound monstrously distorted.

    Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke both received the Academy Award for The Miracle Worker – Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively – in what was a competitive year in both categories.  Did they deserve the prize?  In later years, Duke (who died in 2016) told a television interviewer that it was the role rather than the performance that won her the Oscar.  There’s clearly something in that:  in retrospect, it seems surprising that she was at the time a surprise winner.  The favourite was Angela Lansbury for her brilliant work in The Manchurian Candidate (in which she played a seriously frightening character – rarely an advantage for a nominated actor).  All in all, though, I think Duke merited her Oscar more than Bancroft.  The latter’s combination of athleticism, empathy and timing is impressive but I wish she’d not bothered with the Oirish accent (particularly since Anne Sullivan’s parents emigrated to America after the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s and Anne was born in Massachusetts, in 1866).  Holding onto the accent causes Bancroft occasionally to lose the sense of her lines.  A more persistent difficulty is that the brogue  gives too many of those lines the same lilting yearning.  In the Academy Awards for 1962, Anne Bancroft was up against Bette Davis (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?), Katharine Hepburn (Long Day’s Journey into Night), Geraldine Page (Sweet Bird of Youth) and Lee Remick (Days of Wine and Roses).  Over the course of the next two decades, Hepburn would receive three Best Actress Oscars, each of them undeserved (for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond).  But 1962 was the year she really should have won.

    18 April 2019

    [1] In her autobiography, Keller described the moment:  ‘I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of [Anne’s] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me’.

     

     

     

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