Monthly Archives: October 2019

  • Hitsville: The Making of Motown

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Benjamin Turner and Gabe Turner (2019)

    Motown was sixty years old in January 2019.  This documentary by the British brothers Benjamin and Gabe Turner is a birthday celebration and the production companies behind it include Motown.  You don’t therefore go to Hitsville expecting a searching critical examination of Berry Gordy’s cultural game-changer.  The film doesn’t defy expectations but it’s very enjoyable – and genuinely celebratory.  Sally and I went to a preview screening at Curzon Richmond, a few days before the UK release date of 4 October.   This meant, alas, that Hitsville was prefaced by at least five minutes’ worth of supposedly appetising on-the-red-carpet footage from the film’s European premiere in London.  This curtain-raiser included a surprising amount of James Corden, just because (it seemed) he’s a friend of the Turner brothers.   It also featured interviews with Smokey Robinson and Gordy, who joked the film should have been called ‘Berry and Smokey’.  It isn’t as simple as that but these two, the pioneers-in-chief in the Motown story, are the Turners’ main interviewees in what follows.

    They’re an engaging double act.  Gordy looks and sounds amazing for a man who’ll be ninety in a few weeks’ time.  Robinson (a decade or so younger) is consistently good-humoured and likeable.  One exchange between them comes over as an amusing illustration of Gordy’s business acumen.  They disagree about who first had a hit with ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’.   Gordy says Marvin Gaye; Robinson insists it was Gladys Knight and the Pips.  The latter, up-tempo version, which I’d never heard before, is a bit naff:  you feel Gordy certainly should be right.  Robinson is sure enough, though, to put $100 where his mouth is.  Gordy phones a Motown colleague, Brenda Boyce (who also appears briefly in the film) and asks who sang the song first.  Boyce says Gaye. Robinson pays up and Gordy pockets his winnings.  It’s true that Gaye recorded the song before Knight, in spring 1967, but it wasn’t released as a single then.  Knight’s version was, in September 1967, and reached number 2 in the charts.  Gaye’s version was included on his album ‘In the Groove’, released in August 1968, and came out as a single that October, reaching number 1 before the year was out.  Berry Gordy shows how to make a profit by asking the right question.

    In the closing stages of Hitsville, Gordy acknowledges that, when he started up, his main objectives weren’t to put the Motor City on the cultural map or transmit black American music into the national and international mainstream as never before.  He was looking, he says, to make some money and some music, and to meet some girls.  He’d worked in the car industry in Michigan before founding Tamla Records (as the company was originally called).  He understood the workings of a production line and used it as an organising principle in a creative context.  But it wouldn’t be fair to characterise Gordy only as an entrepreneur and executive.  He wrote good songs too – though not nearly as many as Smokey Robinson.  He was more than an exceptional talent-spotter.  He created an unprecedented environment into which to attract African-American musical talent.

    Although the singers featured in Hitsville are more than familiar, you keep marvelling at how many greatly gifted people converged on Motown.  Men, women and children:  footage of early performances by the pre-adolescent Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson is an elating reminder of the last.  Watching these artists at this distance in time, you can read their futures in their pasts – or not, as the case may be.   It’s plain to see Diana Ross’s prima donna potential as well as her phenomenal abilities.  There could be no guessing what the exuberant child Michael Jackson would become.

    The archive footage available to the Turner brothers is, of course, pure gold.  As usual in this kind of film, it’s sometimes frustrating not to hear more complete songs but the Turners may well have been anxious to avoid accusations of letting the music do their work for them.  Their large cast of interviewees includes not only singers but also writers (including all three of the Holland-Dozier-Holland combo) and others on the Motown staff, dead and living.  The company’s etiquette teacher Maxine Powell (1915-2013), dressed for the occasion in a huge hat, is a particular highlight.  It was quite possible to move from one job in the set-up to another.  Martha Reeves worked as a secretary in A&R until the day Mary Wells couldn’t get to a session and Reeves took her place in the studio.  Reeves’s description of what happened is one of the many and-the-rest-is-history moments in Hitsville.

    In the early stages, the narrative is too elaborate.  I’m often grateful for subtitles nowadays but the animated script that appears on the screen to accompany words on the soundtrack, arrows pointing to and identifying people in photographs, and other explanatory details amount to information overload.  After a while, the Turners drop the eccentric subtitling.  The film settles down and becomes gradually gripping – not least in various contributors’ memories of being on the receiving end of racism.   Motown’s ahead-of-the-game use of music videos is striking.  There’s remarkable film of the Supremes lip-syncing ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ as they walk towards camera down a Paris street, flanked by a gendarme and passers-by who look beautifully unprepared for what’s happening.

    The ‘Making of Motown’ subtitle reflects the shrewd decision to limit the timeframe of the story the Turners tell.  Hitsville may be a sixtieth birthday party but its focus is on the period between the company’s inception in the late 1950s and the early 1970s, when the centre of operations moved from Detroit to Los Angeles.  Although the narrative gets chronologically shaky here (the relocation seems to happen before late-1960s developments like the Black Panthers and psychedelic funk), it’s a smart move to draw the story to a conclusion at the point at which Gordy was pushing to expand Motown into other entertainment fields, especially motion pictures – a move that wasn’t entirely successful.   It’s not surprising there’s a reference to, and a brief clip from, Lady Sings the Blues, even less surprising there’s no reference to Diana Ross’s subsequent movie vehicles.

    This hardly matters, though.  The music keeps playing and confirming Motown’s greatness.  It’s amusing that the very last number on the soundtrack is the company song, whose lyrics several of its former employees try and sometimes fail to remember over the closing credits.  Claudette Robinson, Smokey’s first wife, is the most appealing amnesiac.  Her ex-husband and Gordy haven’t forgotten, though.  They laugh their way through the verse and even reprise the chorus.  It’s a cross between the Mickey Mouse Club song and a Communist Youth League anthem.   It’s also an oddly apt way of ending Hitsville, which confirms Motown as itself a concoction – a surpassing fusion of commerce and art.

    30 September 2019

  • The Laundromat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Soderbergh (2019)

    Money is what gets laundered in Steven Soderbergh’s satirical comedy-drama, which also takes filthy lucre to the cleaners.  Scott Z Burns’s screenplay is based on the journalist Jake Bernstein’s 2017 book, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite.  Burns and Soderbergh use the Panama City law firm partners Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca as representatives of the many unacceptable faces of capitalism.  The Laundromat makes clear that the Mossack and Fonseca operations at the heart of the Panama Papers scandal that broke in April 2016 are the tip of the iceberg of off-shore tax schemes.  The film, on limited theatrical release before it starts streaming on Netflix in mid-October, hasn’t received great reviews and it’s not hard to see why.  The tone is unstable but The Laundromat often evinces a smug cynicism that gets in the way of righteous anger.  Its structure is a mess.  The failed enterprise involves a high-powered cast, one of whom makes the film more frustrating by suggesting how much better it could have been.

    The persisting presences – narrators to camera and usually in fantasy settings – are Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Fonseca (Antonio Banderas), with whom we’re on first name terms throughout.  At the start, Jürgen and Ramón appear in desert sands, dressed in evening suits, cocktails in hand.  They embark on a potted history – they share the screen with a bunch of cavemen at one point – of money, credit and avarice.  In the first part of The Laundromat, Soderbergh switches back and forth between the Jürgen-Ramón double act and the more naturalistic story of Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), a Michigan grandmother, whose holiday with her husband Joe (James Cromwell) on Lake George, New York is cut short by tragedy.  The tour boat taking the Martins and others on a lake trip capsizes.  Joe is one of around twenty passengers drowned.  His widow’s lawyer files a settlement claim with the boat firm’s insurance company, only to discover that company doesn’t really exist.  It’s been subsumed in a larger outfi and that outfit in a still larger one – these are what are termed ‘shell companies’.   Ellen, like me and probably many other viewers of The Laundromat, knows nothing of such arrangements but she does know she’s being cheated.  She determines to do something about it.

    Ellen finds out that one of the shells is registered on the Caribbean island of Nevis, a tax haven, and that a businessman there called Irvin Boncamper is connected with the set-up.  She travels to Nevis, armed only with Boncamper’s address – though, for a couple of screen minutes, Ellen is armed with something more.  We watch her stride purposefully into an office building in Nevis and start firing a rifle, demanding attention as a prelude to justice.  She then wakes in her seat on the plane flying her to the Caribbean.  In reality, she approaches the same office building more diffidently.  As she does so, a man (Jeffrey Wright) emerges from it.  She asks if he can point her in the direction of Boncamper and his business premises.  ‘I don’t know him,’ replies the man, whom we already know to be Boncamper.

    Even in the short time she’s on screen with James Cromwell, Meryl Streep is able to create a substantial sense of a long, happy marriage.  In a later, more extended sequence with her daughter (Melissa Rauch) and grandchildren in the Las Vegas apartment she’s hoping to buy with her insurance settlement, Ellen recalls the early days of her relationship with Joe – how he bought tickets for them to see Diana Ross at Caesar’s Palace.  It’s a well-written monologue, to which Streep brings vivid, enriching detail.  Ellen’s recollections are brutally interrupted by the arrival of an estate agent (Sharon Stone), who informs her the apartment has now been bought by Russians offering a much bigger price.  Although the Ellen episodes are very different in form and style from the Jürgen and Ramón ones, the contrast might have developed traction and synergy if Soderbergh had followed through the impact on a typical life of the moneymen’s blithe malpractice.  That’s not what happens, though.  Once she fails to make headway in Nevis, the script is very short of ideas of where Ellen can go next.  For too long, she’s absent from the film, replaced by a succession of transient characters.

    There’s been a foretaste of this in a couple of superfluous scenes of Boncamper’s home life but Soderbergh now sets to work in earnest to illustrate the geographical scope of the chicanery The Laundromat means to censure and the ethnic range of its beneficiaries.  He and Scott Burns do this through sarcastic sketches.  The first is set in a Los Angeles mansion, the home of Charles (Nonso Alonzie), a philandering African plutocrat, his wife (Nikki Amuka-Bird), their daughter (Jessica Allain) and, some of the time, the daughter’s college friend, with whom Charles is having an affair.  The second sketch takes place in China, where a British accountant (Matthias Schoenaerts) does business with, and is duped by, a politician’s wife (Rosalind Chao).  She displays the devilish cunning associated with Hollywood Chinese characters of many decades ago.

    The shift into portmanteau storytelling is a big mistake.  Except for Nikki Amuka-Bird’s, the acting in these sections is as shallow as the writing of them.  Matthias Schoenaerts, struggling to cope with a posh English accent, is bizarrely miscast.  Soderbergh expects the audience to share his loathing for all concerned but his attitude towards them is so dismissive they’re merely boring.   You feel relief when these people go as suddenly as they came – until they’re followed by something even worse.

    The narrative framework includes, as well as Mossack and Fonseca, bits of animation and chapter headings in the form of ‘Secrets’ of the workings of the capitalist world:  ‘The Meek Are Screwed’, and so on.  The combination feels like a pinch from the techniques and use of the Ryan Gosling character in Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) – a more thoroughly cynical and superficial film than The Laundromat but also a more adroit and focused one.   (It was at its weakest in the closing stages, when it began to insist it had a heart.)   In a skilful balancing act, Ryan Gosling made The Big Short’s narrator repellent and seductive at the same time.  As a result, you took notice of what he said.  Jürgen and Ramón, blatantly and utterly contemptible, are too easy to ignore – and the two men playing them induce the wrong kind of discomfort.  Gary Oldman, rattling off his lines in an extravagant cod-German accent, is an annoying showoff.  Antonio Banderas isn’t but he’s the wrong kind of actor for this kind of role.  He seems ill at ease, anxious to try and match Oldman’s sardonic verve.

    The dream sequence on the plane to Nevis is the closest Ellen comes to getting her own back on the villains of the piece but it’s a different matter for the actress who plays her.  The sudden death of a colleague results in a promotion for a bulky, bespectacled woman on the Mossack Fonseca staff, who takes over as signatory of countless dodgy documents on behalf of the company.   She turns out to be the (actually still unidentified) ‘John Doe’ who blew the whistle on Mossack Fonseca by handing documents to the German journalist who broke the Panama Papers story.  She also turns out to be Meryl Streep, who, at the very end of The Laundromat, removes her glasses and dark wig, followed by her grey Ellen wig.  Streep then speaks to camera, voicing on behalf of Soderbergh, Scott Burns and presumably herself, outrage at the corrupt systems the film has laid bare.

    This final flourish makes for a multiply awkward conclusion.  It’s one thing for an actor to take on a role in a film whose political message s/he strongly supports.  When an actor, especially one of this eminence, articulates the message in person, it isn’t just the fourth wall that’s broken in the process.  The show of undisguised sincerity violates our sense of the actor as medium.  It sits uneasily with the fun that Streep has had – and given us – in her undercover role.  It’s also an exploitation of star status, encouraging us to take The Laundromat more seriously because Meryl Streep, rather than either of the ordinary people she was pretending to be, is voicing its manifesto.

    This connects to another problematic aspect of the film – how Streep’s Panamanian office worker got her new job.  Her predecessor in it was a character called Mia Beltran (Brenda Zamora).  On her way home from work one day, Mia is killed in a freak accident.  Mia has to die in order for Soderbergh to give Streep something more to do, since the role of Ellen, wonderfully though she plays it, isn’t enough.  In other words, it’s Brenda Zamora, as much as Mia, who’s disposable:  another kind of systemic elitism is operating here.  The potentially happier evidence of Steven Soderbergh’s feeling he’s under-served Meryl Streep in The Laundromat is that they’ve already completed another film together.  Let Them All Talk, a comedy featuring Lucas Hedges and Dianne Wiest among others, is due for release in 2020.

    27 September 2019

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