Monthly Archives: May 2019

  • Rocketman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dexter Fletcher (2019)

    Proximity of release consigns the Elton John biopic Rocketman to inevitable comparison with the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.  Will Elton languish in the commercial shadow of the phenomenally successful Freddie or benefit from arriving in his slipstream?  It’s likely the answer to both questions will be yes.  (Worldwide box-office receipts for Bohemian Rhapsody currently stand at $903.2m.)  Will Rocketman emulate its forerunner in the awards stakes when the time comes?   That seems improbable, though no more improbable than the fact that Bohemian Rhapsody won more Oscars this year than any other film.  Watching Rocketman reminded me how much I liked some of Elton John’s songs in the 1970s – and made me suspect I was unfair to Dexter Fletcher in blaming the bad direction of Bohemian Rhapsody as much on him as on the discredited (yet still officially credited!) Bryan Singer.  Nobody is going to claim that Rocketman is a work of great depth or imagination – let’s hope not, anyway.  But thanks to its combination of songs and story, it delivers emotionally and is wonderfully entertaining.

    Lee Hall’s screenplay frames the narrative in Elton John’s participation in an Alcoholics Anonymous group, with longer flashbacks charting the first forty or so years of his life.  The closing legends tell us that John has now been sober for nearly thirty years, which means the AA session is happening circa 1990.  The decision not to go beyond this point in time means that twenty-nine-year-old Taron Egerton, in the lead role, doesn’t need major aging make-up.  For this viewer, the cut-off point had other benefits too – no ‘Goodbye, England’s Rose’, for a start.  John’s humanitarian work has benefited many but his public pronouncements are often pompous nowadays:  it’s a relief that reference to his AIDS Foundation’s fund-raising achievements is limited to another few words of text on the screen at the end.  Rocketman, though it clearly means audiences to like and admire its leading man, is far from a hagiography.  Elton John and his husband David Furnish have been trying to make this film happen for approaching two decades, and are credited among the executive producers and producers respectively.  But the result is noticeably less pussyfooting about, for example, its subject’s sex life than was Brian May’s and Roger Taylor’s posthumous tribute to Freddie Mercury. 

    The framing device is clumsy but serviceable.  Elton joins the circle wearing one of his outrageous stage outfits.  Introducing himself to the group, he says ‘…and I’m an alcoholic’ only for starters:  he goes on to list his other hang-ups and obsessions – narcotics, bulimia, shopping, and more.  (The shopping addiction, according to the final captions, still isn’t cured.)   In the culminating AA sequence, the protagonist sees key figures in his life – among them, his self-centred, belittling mother Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard), his loving, loyal grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones) and his ophidian manager John Reid (Richard Madden) – materialise in the room.  Elton’s now able to speak his mind to them and not before time.  He becomes a star quite early in the film; once he does, his tale reduces to repeated, often garish illustrations of the gulf between professional success and personal torments.  The story is going nowhere except towards its inevitable happy ending but the high energy level is sustained by the performances and the music.  Dexter Fletcher and Lee Hall, well aware that they’re telling a remarkable individual history through an essentially hackneyed medium, harness the two elements effectively.   It’s as if they accept that the form of the material is pre-ordained, that their job is to colour this particular example of the form as vividly as they can.

    Rocketman is so flamboyantly shallow that things like chronological clarity and tidiness soon cease to matter.  Fletcher mixes biopic conventions with fantasy sequences justified by the hero’s frequently experiencing life through the prism of mind-altering substances.  Some of the famous songs are sung by Elton onstage, others take the form of numbers as in an integrated (or a jukebox) musical.  While the great ‘Space Oddity’ outdistances ‘Rocket Man’ as the definitive solitary astronaut ballad, the staging of the title track is enough to make one realise once again how distinctive and touching it is.  Chords from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, my favourite Elton John song, are heard tantalisingly at several points.  When the song proper finally arrives, it’s sung consecutively by its authors:  the lyricist Bernie Taupin[1] (Jamie Bell) goes first, Elton reprises, and the result is affecting.  In the early stages, Adam Murray’s choreography suggests plenty of Mamma Mia!­-esque dance chaos in store but the crowd(ed) routines turn out to be more rationed than one fears.

    The former Reginald Dwight is played as a child by Matthew Illesley and as a young teenager by Kit Connor, and both are expressive.  Reggie transforms from Connor into Taron Egerton midway through his performance of ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ at a local pub.  (In other words, dramatic aptness trumps chronological exactness in the placing of numbers in the narrative.)  Having deliberately avoided the Kingsman films and Eddie the Eagle (also directed by Dexter Fletcher) and having not got round to Testament of Youth, I haven’t seen Egerton before.  He’s terrific here, not least because he does his own singing and does it very well.   It’s a pity he’s not given the chance to do more of the numbers in their entirety.  No doubt the singing voice of Elton John isn’t as daunting a challenge for an actor as that of Freddie Mercury but lip-syncing, in a more or less sophisticated form, is such common practice in today’s musical biopics that Egerton’s achievement mustn’t be underestimated.  Whether singing, speaking or silent, he never gives the impression of trying to mimic Elton – there’s just the occasional look or intonation that evokes the real thing, and it’s enough.  The actor creates an independent character.

    Rocketman is too good to dismiss as a vanity project but there’s a strong whiff of physical vanity – or wishful thinking – in the casting of key roles (an impression reinforced by information in the Wikipedia article on the film that Elton John’s first choice to incarnate him was Justin Timberlake).  If the online images of John Reid are anything to go by, his younger self wasn’t exactly Richard Madden.  A Hollywood Reporter headline announces that Rocketman ‘Blazes Trail as First Major Studio Film to Depict Gay Male Sex’, an episode that reveals Taron Egerton as more trim and muscular than the real Elton has ever appeared to be.  Although cleverly costumed (by Julian Day, who also dressed Bohemian Rhapsody), Egerton is never quite the self-conscious ‘fat boy from Pinner’ but no matter.  He captures the varieties of Elton’s sexual anguish – shyness at first, fear and guilt to follow – convincingly.  (And casting Richard Madden does work – by showing us John Reid, for whom Elton falls hard, through the latter’s eyes.)  Whereas Rami Malek’s Mercury struggled to enlarge himself in onstage performance, Taron Egerton has almost the opposite problem:  he needs to work to be unprepossessing but the work pays off.   Egerton is likeable and makes you like Elton but his approach is never reverential.

    The only significant weakness in the supporting cast is Bryce Dallas Howard’s harsh, censorious lampoon of the hero’s mother.  Howard would have done better in this limited role to opt for more naturalistic playing, as Steven Mackintosh does in the part of Elton’s equally unsympathetic father.  Gemma Jones’s Ivy develops from salt-of-the-earth caricature, complete with old-woman walk, into something with warmth and emotional depth.  I loved the performances of Jamie Bell, Stephen Graham and Richard Madden.  Bell’s accent moves about a bit but he creates a very engaging portrait of Bernie Taupin, who loves Elton like a brother but is decidedly heterosexual.  Both actors convey a genuine, natural rapport in the scene in which Elton and Bernie, paired up to write by the music publisher and ‘handler’ Dick James (Graham), first meet.  A bit later, Bell conveys with real subtlety Bernie’s shocked reaction to first hearing that Elton is gay.

    The cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed Dick James is a standard-issue pop-industry mogul yet Stephen Graham, who scores with nearly every line he delivers, individualises him.  Seeing Rocketman midway through Channel 4’s screening of Shane Meadows’s four-part The Virtues, in which Graham stars and is altogether remarkable, makes one appreciate all the more his versatility.  Richard Madden portrays John Reid as callously manipulative, thoroughly professional and skilfully seductive.  Bell, Graham and Madden all perform like graduates of the Judi Dench school of acting, whose first rule is that you give of your best regardless of how crudely conceived your role may be, and never suggest it’s beneath you.  There’s nothing casual or dismissive in what these three actors do in Rocketman.  Their talent and passion have the magical effect of defining their characters with cartoon clarity and giving them human substance too.

    27 May 2019

    [1] The film reminded me that the first time I ever heard the names Elton John and Bernie Taupin was as the writers of ‘I Can’t Go on Living Without You’, one of the six competing numbers in the BBC’s A Song for Europe in 1969 – the winner to be performed by Lulu in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest.  The John-Taupin song came sixth in the public vote.  I can still remember the chorus, though.

  • Full Metal Jacket

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kubrick (1987)

    By the time Full Metal Jacket opened in mid-1987, there’d been many Vietnam War films.  A few months previously, Oliver Stone’s Platoon had won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, repeating the success of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter in 1979 – a year that also saw the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the publication of The Short-Timers, a semi-autobiographical novel by former US marine Gustav Hasford, on which Full Metal Jacket is based.  Even though Vietnam was far from virgin territory, the prospect of Kubrick’s entering it was eagerly anticipated, thanks both to his reputation and to the increasing intervals between films that marked the later stages of his career.  It had been seven years since Kubrick’s previous feature, The Shining.  (It would be twelve more before the next and last, Eyes Wide Shut.)  Full Metal Jacket did well at the box office but wasn’t an overwhelming critical success on initial release.  Although ‘with time its reputation has solidified’ (Rodney Hill, The Stanley Kubrick Archives (Taschen, 2004)), I found it as disappointing on this second viewing – in BFI’s Kubrick retrospective – as when I first saw it in the early 1990s.

    Gustav Hasford worked on the screenplay with Kubrick, as did Michael Herr, author of the much-admired memoir Dispatches (published in 1977) and the narration in Apocalypse Now.  The script has been described as largely faithful to Hasford’s novel but, if so, the faithfulness is incidental.  One gets the sense that Kubrick was interested in, and is concentrating on, particular bits of Harford’s novel.  Both book and film open with an account of marines in training at Parris Island, South Carolina prior to service in Vietnam.  This doesn’t occupy much of the novel;  Kubrick greatly expands it because he thinks (and proves) he can make something major of it.  In the Vietnam part of the film, he devotes himself almost exclusively to staging set pieces of mayhem – the start of the Tet Offensive, attacks during the Siege of Huế.  He does this with aplomb but without any thematic underpinning.  Kubrick uses narrative voiceover – by one of the marines, ‘Joker’ Davis (Matthew Modine) – so sparingly that it’s almost a surprise each time the voiceover returns.   It provides no more than a semblance of centre and continuity, otherwise lacking in the film.

    The boot camp section, while it doesn’t exactly eclipse the gruelling warfare episodes that follow, has a distinctive rhythm and relentlessness:  it’s almost a self-contained story.  Maintaining his record of strong opening sequences, Kubrick begins with a montage of the marines-to-be having their hair razored off.  This is riveting but predicts a difficulty.  In reality, shearing soldiers’ heads may be integral to the process of moulding them into a fighting unit.  De-individualising actors in a film drama has different consequences.  While it makes sense that the Parris Island scenes are dominated by the abusive martinet Sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey), the trainees’ drill instructor, his young charges, with only two exceptions, barely register as screen presences.  These exceptions are the wiseguy Davis and Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio), aka ‘Pyle’.  Both owe their nicknames to Hartman:  Davis becomes Joker after his John Wayne impression interrupts one of the instructor’s tirades.  Pyle is named for ‘Gomer Pyle’, a naïve (to put it kindly) character in The Andy Griffith Show, a television sitcom[1].  Pyle is especially inept at basic training and especially victimised by Hartman.  He improves gradually after being paired with and encouraged by the capable Joker.  Pyle develops a particular aptitude for marksmanship.

    Lee Ermey had served as a US marine corps drill instructor and, though he’d played minor roles in Apocalypse Now and a few other movies, Kubrick intended to use him purely as a technical adviser on Full Metal Jacket until he decided that Ermey was the ideal choice for the role of Hartman.  (Ermey wrote plenty of his own lines and ad-libbed others.)  The instructor is racist, misogynist and homophobic yet egalitarian – as he tells the recruits, ‘Here you are all equally worthless!’  His brutal, profane wit and ramrod bearing, the jogging chants, the sharp editing – these combine to define and stylise the opening forty or so minutes of the film.  The first thing that annoys Hartman about Pyle is the young man’s face – one of those that is set in a vague, unintentional smile that its owner can’t remove, however hard he tries.  Hartman does his sustained best to wipe the smile off Pyle’s face but it’s only when the latter develops a relationship with his rifle that this happens.  The film’s tempo slows as his features settle into a dead-eyed, menacing mask.  Kubrick builds lugubriously to Pyle’s lethal revenge on Hartman and suicide.

    The action then switches to South Vietnam in 1968.  The film might as well start again from this point because next to nothing carries forward from what’s gone before.  Joker witnessed in horror Pyle’s killing of Hartman and himself but the experience has no emotional residue.  Now a sergeant and a war correspondent for the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes (effectively a public relations role), Joker meets up again with Cowboy (Arliss Howard), whom he was friendly with during training, and who is now a platoon sergeant.  Since Cowboy made little impression in the Parris Island part of the story, the reunion counts for little.  In theory, the pathologically disciplined life at boot camp might contrast powerfully with the frightening chaos of Vietnam but Hartman’s rampant rule is so memorably demented that the actual effect is very different:  one kind of madness is exchanged for another.

    The straitjacketed training camp dialogue is bizarrely expressive.  In the more realistic, less confined setting of Vietnam, the characters’ lines often have a more artificial ring.  A montage of Stars and Stripes mini-interviews with soldiers is mechanical and the political satire leaden when, for example, a US colonel (Bruce Boa) tells Joker:  ‘We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out’.  Joker has ‘Born to Kill’ painted on his helmet and wears a peace badge on his combat jacket.  The combination has instant ironic impact (and supplied the image on the film’s striking theatrical release poster) but it also prepares the viewer for the inevitable moral dilemma that Joker will eventually face – and which takes its time coming.  Joker and his combat photographer sidekick Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) accompany Cowboy’s squad during the Battle of Huế.  Joker’s dilemma is whether or not to finish off a female Vietcong sniper (Ngoc Le) after Rafterman has severely wounded her and she begs for death.

    Matthew Modine plays this moment very well but it’s the only moment when Joker is an involving character.  At boot camp, he’s already sceptical about the American war effort so is clearly not going to be disillusioned in the crudely melodramatic way that Tom Cruise’s Ron Kovic would be disillusioned in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), another Oliver Stone Vietnam drama (that resulted, unbelievably, in another Best Director Oscar).   A smart alec who thinks his cynicism makes him shockproof but discovers he’s not when exposed to the reality of war is a potentially interesting protagonist but Kubrick doesn’t trouble to have Joker develop in this way.   The other marines – the cast also includes Adam Baldwin, Tim Colceri, Peter Edmund and Dorian Harewood – are competently played but to no real effect.   (Colceri, as he explains in the documentary Filmworker, was expecting to play Hartman until Kubrick changed his mind and gave the part to Lee Ermey.)  In later Kubrick, war isn’t hell (as it was in, say, the trench sequences in Paths of Glory) or crazy horror (as in Dr Strangelove).  It’s more a matter of cinematic craft (Barry Lyndon is another example).

    One of the more vivid bits in Vietnam comes right at the very end of the film, when, after Joker has killed the girl sniper, the soldiers return to camp, singing the ‘Mickey Mouse March’:  the all-American satire isn’t exactly subtle but at least the chorus of voices and the formation movement rhyme with the trainees jogging on Parris Island – in other words, they link where the marines started to where they’ve ended up.  The film’s title phrase, referring to a type of bullet encased in a shell of harder metal, is spoken once, by Pyle, in the last minutes of his (and Hartman’s) life.   As he watches him load a magazine for his rifle, an incredulous but apprehensive Joker asks, ‘Are those live rounds?’   Pyle answers in the affirmative:  ‘Seven-six-two millimeter, full metal jacket’.  Although the efficacy of the dialogue declines as Full Metal Jacket goes on, there are potent verbal elements at work here.  Expletives, especially excremental ones, are the only means the soldiers have of describing their situation.  The word ‘wasted’ is used, consistently and resonantly, to indicate ‘killed’.

    24 May 2019

    [1] According to the Wikipedia article on The Andy Griffith Show:  ‘In the last episode of the fourth season, Gomer tells Andy he has joined the Marines, because he realized he would eventually be drafted into military service. … Gomer’s Mayberry [North Carolina] roots were evident in the spin-off series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., where his countrified, backward nature served as the mainstay for the show’s humor, making him a comic foil to the hard-nosed drill instructor …’

     

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