Monthly Archives: October 2019

  • A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marielle Heller (2019)

    Fred Rogers (1928-2003) – puppeteer, presenter, musician and moral inspiration – is a legendary name in the annals of American television.  His half-hour show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, aimed primarily at a pre-school audience, ran for more than thirty years and almost nine hundred episodes.  The show did more than entertain.  According to Wikipedia, it:

    ’emphasized the child’s developing psyche, feelings, sense of moral and ethical reasoning, civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth.  Difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into families, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce were also addressed.’

    Rogers, and his reputation for calm, kind, reassuring advice to children and their parents, became a national institution.  British audiences, though, are unlikely to be familiar with him – unless they’ve seen last year’s Morgan Neville documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?  Watching Tom Hanks as Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is rather like watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia (2009).  You’re impressed by the performance but you can’t see it, as an American viewer can, in relation to prolonged personal experience of the widely loved original.  (That must still be the case even if you check out YouTube clips beforehand.)

    The two films have something else in common.  The American TV icon isn’t the main role in terms of screen time.  Ephron told Julia Child’s story in parallel to that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who set out to cook every one of the hundreds of recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and wrote a highly successful blog about the project.  The protagonist in A Beautiful Day is the journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), assigned to profile Fred Rogers for Esquire magazine.  One definite advantage of this set-up over Julie and Julia’s is that the two principals interact – indeed, their interaction is the heart of Marielle Heller’s movie.  The problem is, it stops being distinctive whenever Hanks isn’t on screen – interest flags, as it did in the Childless sections of Julie and Julia.  That was hardly Amy Adams’s fault and Matthew Rhys plays the journalist well but, in Hanks’s absence, suspension of cynicism on the viewer’s part goes out the window.  We know too well that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, although based on true events, is going to be a clichéd Hollywood story of healing – of how a bitter, self-centred man, through the influence of Mister Rogers, becomes a considerate, compassionate one.

    The screenplay, by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, is based on an article, first published in Esquire in 1998, entitled ‘Can You Say … Hero?’[1] and written by Tom Junod, the inspiration for Lloyd Vogel.  According to Junod’s Wikipedia entry, he ‘is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards …, the most prestigious award in magazine writing’.  The first time Lloyd appears in the film, he’s giving an acceptance speech after winning a National Magazine Award.  Also according to Wikipedia, Junod has said that his encounter with Rogers ‘changed his perspective on life’.  But Lloyd, however much in common he may have with a real individual, is a generic character.  He has a wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), and they have a baby daughter but driven Lloyd is, in effect, married to his work – and driven largely because of unresolved parent issues.  He’s never stopped blaming his father Jerry (Chris Cooper) for the way he treated Lloyd’s late mother.

    Using source material with a ‘can you?’ question in its title isn’t the only resemblance between Marielle Heller’s second and third features.  The main theme of this new film is the very question that gave its immediate predecessor, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, its name.  Heller makes clear from the start, in the first of several simulations of Fred Rogers’s TV show, that her story will be a parable about forgiveness.  Tom Hanks comes through a door in the studio set and makes himself at home.  He takes off his jacket and outdoor shoes, and puts on the host’s trademark red cardigan and sneakers (complete with collar and tie, and light-coloured casual trousers).  Smiling to camera, he quietly introduces the topic of forgiving and Lloyd Vogel, whose face is revealed behind one of the windows on his picture board.  Heller’s effective opening not only states her theme but situates it within the TV world of Fred Rogers – a world that’s both an artificial creation and yet, it seems, an expression of its creator’s authentic values.

    Lloyd has been estranged from his father for years.   The old resentment flares up again at the wedding of Lloyd’s sister Lorraine (Tammy Blanchard), culminating in a fist fight involving Lloyd, Jerry and Lorraine’s latest new husband (played by the film’s co-writer Noah Harpster).  Lloyd’s hostility to Jerry intensifies when his father, in spite of what happened at the wedding, persists in trying to mend fences with him.  At the same time, Lloyd is commissioned by his editor Ellen (Christine Lahti) to write a short profile of Fred Rogers, one of a series of ‘American hero’ pieces that Esquire is running.  Mister Rogers isn’t acerbic Lloyd’s cup of tea.  He’s reluctant to take the job on until Ellen informs him that Rogers was the only one of Esquire’s prospective subjects willing to be grilled by him, the other heroes on the list all put off by Lloyd’s fearsome reputation.  When he gets round to doing the interviews, Lloyd is disturbed to find himself being asked, rather than asking, difficult questions.  He may have hoped to dent Fred’s too-good-to-be-true public reputation.  Instead, Lloyd’s on the receiving end of an infinitely benign psychotherapist.

    The casting of Tom Hanks seems boringly obvious but works very well.  Hanks’s own nice-guy persona, on screen and off, enriches the riddle of how Fred Rogers can possibly be for real.  Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in his mid-thirties and subsequently enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh’s child development graduate studies programme, he and his wife Joanne were married for more than fifty years and had two sons.  According to Tom Junod’s profile, Rogers went swimming nearly every morning of his life.  He seems to have been a prime example of mens sana in corpore sano.  While his worldview was shaped and sustained by Christian faith, he exudes, in Tom Hanks’s interpretation, a Zen-like calm.  Hanks’s small eyes and smile give him the look of a (trim) Buddha:  he makes Rogers almost spookily inscrutable.  Although he doesn’t closely mimic Rogers’s voice (I have looked at YouTube clips, since seeing the film), you always have the sense that he’s doing an impersonation.  At the same time, you admire the integrity of Hanks’s engagement with the character – and his seemingly easy mastery of screen acting.  He realises quite brilliantly here someone performing to camera but who, in doing so, is not pretending.  Watching Tom Hanks act can be greatly reassuring:  like Fred Rogers’s young audience, you feel you’re in very safe hands.

    Matthew Rhys is very good at showing how his character is both frustrated and impressed by Fred’s unfathomable, acute decency but the writing of Lloyd is simplistic and unfair.  (The other roles are even thinner.)  When Lloyd and Fred are on a subway train together, all their fellow passengers, regardless of age, start up a chorus of the TV show’s ‘It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood’ song.  The sequence has impact, all right, but it’s an excessive illustration of Lloyd’s isolation from the human race.  It’s a long time before he’s given the chance even to explain why he hates his father so much.  When Lloyd eventually speaks his mind, the consequences are immediate and tritely melodramatic.  Jerry promptly collapses and is confined to bed for the rest of his time on screen.  He dies surrounded by his whole, loving family, Lloyd included; the group is joined by Fred, who makes a surprise call.  By this point, even the appearance of Tom Hanks can’t conceal that the film has dwindled to a tame set of tropes and requirements.

    In the cultural and political climate of America today, this happy-ending story of making peace with sworn enemies, with the figure of Fred Rogers at its centre, is bound to give rise to yearning and nostalgia (all the stronger if Rogers was part of your actual childhood).  Marielle Heller sometimes does a good job of avoiding sentimental pitfalls.  Fred and his wife (Maryann Plunkett) regularly play the piano together.  He tells Lloyd that he occasionally feels the need, to release the tensions inside him, to bang down hard on the low notes.  Heller does well to have Fred briefly pounding a piano before he exits the studio at the end of the film.  The whole is unsatisfying, though, because the screenplay just isn’t good enough.  Heller’s was the twelfth and last film that I saw at the 2019 London Film Festival.  I enjoyed several of them, including this one, but nothing came close to my  Festival highlights of each of the three previous years – Manchester by the Sea (2016), 120 BPM (2017) and Roma (2018).  In nearly all cases, the main weakness of this year’s offerings was the screenplay.  As I came out of the Embankment Garden Cinema after seeing A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I couldn’t help thinking of Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum that ‘To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script, and the script’.

    13 October 2019

    [1] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/

     

  • The Personal History of David Copperfield

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Armando Iannucci (2019)

    The ‘Personal History’ in the title may be unexpected but it derives from Dickens’s original one – The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery.   Even so, it seems to promise David-Copperfield-as-you’ve-never-seen-him-before – a promise on which Armando Iannucci delivers.  The film, written by him and Simon Blackwell, opens on an eagerly expectant theatre audience.  David (Dev Patel) comes on stage and begins to tell his story – a nod both to Dickens’s own theatre readings and to the autobiographical aspect of his favourite among his novels.  At the start of David’s account, his adult self appears on the screen to observe his birth and early infancy.  It’s a neat bridge to the main narrative – and a nice acknowledgement of the impossibility of telling one’s life story from the very beginning.  Once the boy David (Jairaj Varsani) is old enough to have conscious memory, the grown-up version is surplus to requirements and disappears from sight until some years down the line.

    These devices also signal the confident, extensive artificiality of The Personal History of David Copperfield, and a meta aspect that comes increasingly to the fore.  David soon develops the habit of making notes of what he hears around him, from the sayings of Clara Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper) onwards.  He and Dora Spenlow (Morfydd Clark) are parted not by death but by his writing her out of his life story – at Dora’s insistence.  Standing beside David as he works on his manuscript and worried she doesn’t really fit in his world, airhead Dora still wants to be helpful.  She suggests that, while David writes, she could hold the thing that holds his pens.  After doing so for a few seconds, she reiterates that she doesn’t really fit and takes her leave of the film.  Its happy finale is a garden party:  David’s guests are the people he’s known who became the people in the book that’s made his name.

    Dora’s exit is a good example of how blithely Iannucci and Blackwell depart from Dickens’s storyline whenever it suits them – and how they minimise the extent and the weight of mortality in it.  When Murdstone (Darren Boyd) and his sister (Gwendoline Christie) bring David news of his mother’s death, their announcement is a kind of variation on the Dead Parrot sketch (David’s mother is not well, not at all well, seriously ill, in fact she’s dead – and already buried).  The privileged rotter James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) drowns but the decent, wronged Ham Peggotty (Anthony Welsh) survives, instead of, as in Dickens, dying in an attempt to save the life of the man who ruined his own.  In other words, the film has both get their just desserts.

    Early on, there’s a shot of David’s father’s gravestone.  It shows his date of death as 1841 but the stone is weathered, as if being observed from a time much closer to the present day.  That detail reflects Iannucci’s treatment more generally.  He has said (to the Daily Telegraph) that he aimed:

    ‘to make a film that doesn’t feel hidebound by the conventions of a costume drama or a period drama. … I want it to feel real and present, even though it’s set in 1840 [sic] in London.  I want it to feel immediate and current.  And therefore I want the cast to be much more representative of what London looks like now, and I want a lot of the behaviour in the film to feel current and contemporary.’

    This David Copperfield is certainly a modernisation of Dickens but it doesn’t ‘feel real’ – it almost exults in putting on a show.  Scenes involving more than a couple of characters often have a pantomime quality.  Shot by Zac Nicolson and with a production design/art direction team headed by Cristina Casali and Nick Dent, the film is often pleasing to look at.  But the rural images seem deliberately to suggest contemporary landscape paintings rather than real country roads and meadows.  The decor in the study of the Charles-the-First-obsessed Mr Dick (Hugh Laurie) looks what it is:  a witty piece of set dressing (by Charlotte Dirickx).  Staying in Dan Peggotty (Paul Whitehouse)’s Yarmouth boat-house, the boy David makes a drawing of the place; as he does so, a huge fist comes through the roof of the actual house and Iannucci cuts back to Blunderstone Rookery, where Murdstone confiscates his stepson’s drawing.  It’s a visually and dramatically effective moment but also typical of Iannucci’s conscious playfulness, which builds up to the self-referential closing stages.  Christopher Willis’s pleasant, conventional score often seems to be suggesting what we might have been feeling had the story been told with a straighter face.

    The colour-blind casting is another important part of the modernisation (although Iannucci, while wanting ‘the cast to be much more representative of what London looks like now’, has also stressed in interview the ethnic diversity of Victorian London).  The cast includes, as well as Dev Patel, Jairaj Varsani and Anthony Welsh, Rosalind Eleazar (Agnes Wickfield), Benedict Wong (her father), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Steerforth’s mother) and Divian Ladwa (the doctor who delivers the baby David).  The colour blindness doesn’t extend to letting these non-white actors, with the qualified exception of Amuka-Bird, play disagreeable characters.  It’s a pity Iannucci wasn’t bold enough to go for a black Murdstone or Steerforth (more of a pity when the white actors playing them are unsatisfactory); even so, the diversity here is a big advance on the insulting arrangements in Mary Poppins Returns.  But colour-blind casting also (inevitably) reinforces the film’s unreality.  It’s just about possible that the Asian-looking Mr Wickfield might have fathered mixed-race Agnes.  There’s no way that Mrs Steerforth and James could really be mother and son.  This lack of realism isn’t a weakness but it confirms the film as artifice – a reinterpretation of Dickens through a twenty-first-century lens, producing a view congenial and ‘relevant’ to present-day liberal sensibilities.

    That’s the governing principle here.  It means that some elements of the story – such as people sleeping on the streets – are to be taken straight.   At the same time, it allows Iannucci and Simon Blackwell to write comedy dialogue that (they think) slips down more easily than Dickens’s.  (‘Let’s leave Charles the First’s head to one side for a while’, says Betsey Trotwood (Tilda Swinton) to Mr Dick.  ‘Yes, pick it up later,’ he replies.)  Some of the plot changes are amusing reminders of what felt awkward in the original.  It’s not only meta considerations that dictate Dora’s departure from the story:  David doesn’t really love her and she’s too silly to bear the weight of being killed off.  That’s how Dora seemed in the book too.  The removal of Barkis (and his catchphrase) is a relief.  Sometimes, though, Iannucci and Blackwell perpetuate Dickens’s tendency to flog a joke to death, though their choices may be different.  It’s a shame, for example, that Mr Wickfield’s partiality to drink has been turned into a laborious running gag.

    Iannucci’s approach yields very variable results in terms of performances.  Ben Whishaw is the best Uriah Heep I’ve seen.  He makes Heep’s anxiety to impress grotesquely funny and, to a greater extent than is usual with the character, roots his despicable behaviour in bitter resentment at being despised.  Hugh Laurie plays Mr Dick with wit, charm and empathy.  Here’s an instance of a more enlightened attitude reaping dividends.  (It’s not that Dickens treated Mr Dick’s mental disorder unsympathetically; rather, that screen portrayals of yesteryear have tended to present him too simply.  The Oxford Companion to English Literature, as recently as its 1985 version edited by Margaret Drabble, termed Mr Dick ‘an amiable lunatic’ – and that’s how he has usually appeared.)   Rosalind Eleazar (excellent in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger on the West End stage this summer) gives a deft, good-humoured performance as Agnes.  Gwendoline Christie is a superb Jane Murdstone, ridiculous but richly intimidating.

    As her brother, Darren Boyd is, alas, feeble.  His Murdstone has the look of a mature male model and is a distinctly ineffectual tyrant:  if this is what Iannucci wanted, it’s hard to see why.  Aneurin Barnard’s narrow playing of Steerforth is more probably the result of the direction he received.  Steerforth’s charisma is always invisible and his moral flaws are evident from the moment he appears.  As Micawber, Peter Capaldi has some hard acts to follow:  not just W C Fields in the 1935 Hollywood movie but also Arthur Lowe in the strong BBC television adaptation in 1974.  I soon got bored with Capaldi’s different accents and busy theatricality.

    Dev Patel is, as usual, eager and likeable.  When David takes the stage at the start, there are tears in his eyes and his voice is choked with emotion.  These suggest an intensity of feeling that rarely materialises in what follows.  Patel does some skilful, amusing mimicry but he’s thoroughly lightweight – again, perhaps as intended.  Iannucci doesn’t, for example, allow David even to react to Steerforth’s misdeeds.  In the scheme of the film, he doesn’t need to:  Steerforth’s entitlement, part and parcel of his social position, marks him out as a bad lot; his appeal to David and their mutual affection have to be subordinate to that.  There is a convincing kinship between Patel’s David and Jairaj Varsani’s younger version of him.  Varsani, who anticipates Patel’s humour, gives David a somewhat distracted quality.  The sense he conveys of the little boy’s mind being on other things is an effective way of suggesting his inner world and imaginative potential.

    The Personal History of David Copperfield has so far been well received by critics – and was very well received throughout by the audience in the Embankment Garden Cinema for this London Film Festival (LFF) screening.  (The film had its European premiere as the LFF Opening Night Gala offering the previous evening.)  Like Armando Iannucci’s last picture, The Death of Stalin (2017), this one is variously clever.  Also like The Death of Stalin, it’s a cunning mixture of jocose and but-seriously.  I find this vexingly manipulative but it clearly goes down a storm with many and the result looks bound to be a hit.  Though I can’t help thinking something’s not quite right with a David Copperfield that makes you dread Micawber’s next appearance and root for Uriah Heep.

    3 October 2019

     

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