Monthly Archives: January 2020

  • Cyrano de Bergerac

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Paul Rappeneau (1990)

    Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was first staged in 1897.  Set in mid-seventeenth century France and spanning the last fifteen years of the life of its eponymous hero (the real Cyrano de Bergerac was born in 1619 and died in 1655), the play has been translated to film plenty of times – sometimes as straightforward adaptation, sometimes using Rostand’s set-up as the basis for a recasting of the story in a different time and place.  The best-known picture in the latter category is probably Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne, in which the equivalent of Renaissance man Cyrano is a fire chief (played by Steve Martin) in a small town in contemporary Washington.  Roxanne appeared in 1987, three years before Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac.  A major critical and commercial success internationally, Rappeneau’s film is widely considered the definitive screen realisation of the Rostand script.

    The 1950 Hollywood Cyrano de Bergerac (the first English-language film of the play), starring Jose Ferrer, was produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Michael Gordon, at least as well known for his work in theatre as in cinema (though he made Pillow Talk later in his career).  Gordon’s Cyrano was condemned by some critics as stagy and, even though it didn’t cost much, lost money at the time.  According to Wikipedia, Rappeneau’s version wasn’t made on a shoestring ($15m, equivalent to around twice that sum today); its box-office receipts were nearly three times its budget.  This Cyrano is a strikingly confident piece of work.  The confidence reflects Rappeneau’s ‘instinct that Rostand’s flexible couplets, leaping from one character to another in mid-line and maintaining their alexandrine rhythm by an unpredictable, boldly naturalistic scattering of words and exclamations, would work as well on film as on stage’[1].  I recall being very taken with the film on its original release.  A newly-restored print was showing this month at BFI and a second viewing seemed overdue.  It was a surprise and a disappointment to find it hard work.

    There’s no shortage of physical action.  In the early stages, at least, Rappeneau’s Cyrano is almost excessively boisterous – in the manner of films of classic plays at pains to establish their motion picture credentials (Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew is a more egregious example).    Jean-Claude Petit’s music is splendidly varied and Pierre Lhomme’s crystalline lighting very fine.   Much of the playing is decidedly theatrical – notably from Jacques Weber (as the arrogant Comte de Guiche) and Roland Bertin (the cook shop proprietor Ragueneau) – but there’s plenty in it to enjoy.  Rappeneau handles the crowd scenes with aplomb, though their often choreographed quality is sometimes odd, especially in the Siege of Arras conflict between the Gascon cadets and the invading Spanish army.  A more persistent problem, though, is the words.

    Cyrano de Bergerac is very much about words.  The poetically gifted hero uses them to express his passion for his beautiful cousin Roxane – a passion he thinks must be unrequited because his huge nose makes him ridiculous and unlovable by any woman.  The young cadet Christian de Neuvillette, also in love with Roxane, is, in contrast, just a pretty face – at any rate, he can’t write the love letters that Roxane expects.  Cyrano composes them on Christian’s behalf but also to speak his own mind.  In the play’s famous balcony scene, Cyrano stands literally in the shadows, feeding Christian lines to call out to Roxane in her chamber above.  Rappeneau involved some high-powered writers to transmit Rostand’s words to the screen.  Jean-Claude Carrière shares the screenplay credit with Rappeneau.  The English subtitles are supplied by Anthony Burgess’s rendering of Rostand:  Burgess’s rhyming couplets are both more ingenious and, largely as a consequence, more distracting than your average subtitles.  Watching the action, listening to the French cast’s delivery of lines, and reading the English translation all at the same time, is a challenge.

    Even without this complication, there’s another, inherent difficulty in turning Rostand’s verse play into cinema.  It’s easier in a theatre than it is on the screen for the verbal to dominate the physical.  When the inamorati are as nice-looking a pair as Anne Brochet’s Roxane and Vincent Perez’s Christian, it’s harder to believe that words are the lifeblood of their romance.  Both these young actors are good (though Brochet has a faintly self-satisfied air) but the acting honours go, as expected and as they must, to the star of the show.

    Jose Ferrer won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role of the 1950 Cyrano de Bergerac.  In 1991, I thought that Gérard Depardieu, who was nominated, should have done the same.   (The award that year went to Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune.)  I still do:  although I didn’t much like Rappeneau’s film on this return visit, I was no less impressed by the lead.   Depardieu, although still sylphlike compared with the man-mountain of more recent years, is physically very well cast:  he captures the hero’s vigorous, robust side effortlessly.   His unconventional good looks turn Cyrano’s disfiguring outsize snout into something more poignant than it would be on a thoroughly plain face.  He often speaks beautifully and passionately but he never pushes for sympathy.   He’s formidable and formidable.

    30 January 2020

    [1] Philip Strick, Monthly  Film Bulletin, January 1991

  • Just Mercy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Destin Daniel Cretton (2019)

    Based on the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson’s memoir of the same name, Just Mercy is often pedestrian and pious.  Thanks to its subject matter – racial discrimination and injustice in Alabama, in the late 1980s and early 1990s – it’s also often gripping and enraging.  Stevenson, an African-American born in rural Delaware in 1959, won a scholarship to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1985.  Four years later, he was appointed to run the Alabama operation of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a death-penalty defence organisation.  When the US Congress discontinued funding for death-penalty defence, Stevenson converted the center into the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organisation based in Montgomery.

    One of his first cases in Alabama was appealing the murder conviction of Walter McMillian, a middle-aged black timber worker from Monroeville.  McMillian was convicted in 1988 for the killing of a white teenager, Ronda Morrison, at the dry cleaners where she worked.  In imposing the death penalty on McMillian, the trial judge overruled the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence.  The chief prosecution witness was Ralph Myers, a convicted felon, who admitted to Stevenson that his testimony incriminating McMillian was false and the result of police pressure.  The Alabama court concerned turned down four appeals before ruling, in March 1993, to reverse McMillian’s conviction and grant him a new trial.  Stevenson pressed successfully for all charges to be dropped without the case going to retrial.

    Since then, some dozens of prisoners have been saved from the death penalty with the help of Bryan Stevenson but it’s understandable that Just Mercy, which Destin Daniel Cretton wrote with Andrew Lanham, concerns itself almost exclusively with a single case – Walter McMillian’s.  The key events in the case (according to the Wikipedia description of it) are also simplified and streamlined – without being seriously distorted – for the sake of dramatic licence.  Cretton and Lanham are no less single-minded in deciding to concentrate entirely on Stevenson’s work.  They make this virtually explicit when one of his colleagues asks another if he’s married and is told ‘to his work’.  Just before Stevenson (Michael B Jordan) goes to Alabama, he visits his mother[1], who warns him, ‘What you’re doing is going to make a lot of people upset’.   In a conversation with McMillian (Jamie Foxx), Stevenson talks briefly of his upbringing and assures the prisoner that ‘I know what it’s like to be in the shadows’.  That’s about as much as Just Mercy shows of the hero’s personal life.

    It’s not a good decision, for two reasons.  First, it’s frustrating that a good actor like Michael B Jordan is denied the scope for creating a larger portrait of the man he’s playing.  (I haven’t read Stevenson’s memoir but it’s hard to believe that it’s as emotionally reticent as this screen account of him.)  Second, it exposes Just Mercy more baldly as a polemic and, at times, a sermon.  One of Bryan Stevenson’s best-known quotes is, ‘Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done’.  That’s not something you’d infer from the film’s treatment of significant white characters, other than Stevenson’s loyal, tireless co-worker Eva Ansley (Brie Larson) and, when he eventually tells the truth in court, Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson).

    This is fair enough.  The sheriff (Michael Harding) who originally arrests McMillian, the Monroe County DA Thomas Chapman (Rafe Spall) and the appeal court judge (Lindsay Ayliffe) are representatives of a pernicious system and mindset.  We see them in the act of committing among (it’s to be hoped) the worst things they’ve ever done.  What can only be called the film’s morally black-and-white approach is seen to greater disadvantage in the African-American characters.  Except for Stevenson and McMillian, the blacks in Just Mercy are decent and/or wronged, and that’s all they are.  This applies to McMillian’s family, headed by his wife (Karan Kendrick) and eldest son (C J LeBlanc).  It also applies, more strikingly and without meaningful exception, to his fellow prisoners on Alabama’s death row.

    When Stevenson first visits Chapman’s office, both his secretary and the DA himself recommend a visit to the local Mockingbird Museum.  Maycomb County in Harper Lee’s novel is a fictional name for Monroe County, where the author grew up.  The references to the museum are ironic, given the continuing systematised racism of Alabama, sixty years after the Depression era in which To Kill a Mockingbird is set.  A second, presumably inadvertent, irony is that the racial characterisations in Just Mercy, sixty years after Robert Mulligan’s screen version of Harper Lee’s novel, haven’t advanced either.

    The simplistic screenplay also means that, on the rare occasions when a character has a change of heart, the change occurs immediately and obviously.  In their opening interview, McMillian cynically and angrily dismisses the possibility of Stevenson being able to empathise with, let alone help, him.  The next time Stevenson visits, after going to see his family, McMillian is a changed man:  ‘I can’t believe you talked to all my people, said you’re going to fight for me’.  When Stevenson first comes to death row, a young prison guard (Hayes Mercure) insists on strip-searching the lawyer, in order to humiliate him.  After the guard has experienced the shock of witnessing an execution, he switches from nasty to mutely sheepish.

    The acting in Just Mercy, though often strong, isn’t well orchestrated.  Michael B Jordan’s resistance to grandstanding is admirable.  He’s keen to honour Bryan Stevenson by delivering his words with the minimum of histrionics and intrusive character detail.   Thanks to Jordan’s natural charisma, this works well enough – though less well in the courtroom scenes.  Stevenson is evidently a highly effective defence lawyer; that must entail an element of performance in court that Jordan seems reluctant to allow.  Brie Larson, the star of each of Destin Daniel Cretton’s last two features, has come a long way in terms of public profile since the first of those (Short Term 12).  She has a supporting role this time, and is also playing a real-life hero.  This combination of factors probably explains why Larson follows Jordan’s lead in underplaying.  The modesty of her approach is, like his, commendable but the result is too downbeat and opaque.  Since much of their dialogue is weakly cliched, the self-discipline that Jordan and Larson show in de-dramatising their lines amounts to wasted effort.

    In contrast, Cretton has encouraged the death row inmates and a couple of others to act their socks off.  In the case of Jamie Foxx, this pays dividends.  Even in the scene describing Walter McMillian’s abrupt switch to welcoming Stevenson’s help, Foxx combines gratitude with suggestions of McMillian’s guilty conscience towards his wife and family.   Where the role is smaller and more concentrated, the playing can seem OTT.  Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan) is a PTSD-afflicted military veteran and long-serving prisoner on death row.  Richardson admits to the murder for which he’s been convicted but it was mental illness that drove him to kill.  Rob Morgan shakes and stammers to make this clear.  Tim Blake Nelson’s overacting tendencies are more conspicuous than ever in his interpretation of the variously damaged Ralph Myers.  Rafe Spall twitches and averts his eyes so frantically that psychological instability looks to be the morally benighted DA’s basic problem too.

    Destin Daniel Cretton does, however, keep one minor character as an emotional ace up his sleeve.  One of the other death row inmates is played by the heavy-set O’Shea Jackson Jr.  He’s so naturally engaging and expressive (he made a very good impression in Ingrid Goes West a couple of years back) that you want to know more about his character here than Cretton is prepared to give you.  The film ends, as might be expected, with photographs of the actual people concerned and titles that summarise their afterlife.  O’Shea Jackson Jr’s character is revealed to be Anthony Ray Hinton, convicted of the murders of two fast-food restaurant managers in 1985.  Walter McMillian spent more than four years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he didn’t commit.  Hinton spent twenty-eight years in the same place.  In 2015, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction on appeal, and the state dropped all charges against him.

    As a piece of drama, Just Mercy is no great shakes.  In the early stages, the tempo is leisurely and the storytelling almost desultory.  The focus on the McMillian case and on Stevenson’s actions at the expense of his reactions is repeatedly vexing.  EJI seems to start life in the back room of Eva Ansley’s home.  By the business end of the film, she and Stevenson work in a purpose-built office with several other staff but it’s not clear how the operation has been able to expand, or how Stevenson and Ansley have made this happen.  Cretton keeps on pushing his message too to the very last of the closing titles.  This tells us that, since 1976, for every nine Americans executed by the state, one is exonerated and released from death row.  The statistic speaks for itself:  Cretton doesn’t need to editorialise by adding that this is an appalling rate of error.

    Yet the film is moving – especially in Jamie Foxx’s reaction in court, when Walter McMillian is exonerated – and involving in ways that last year’s other death row drama Clemency never is.  There’s a strong argument for saying that Just Mercy would have been better as a screen documentary.  There’s an irresistible argument for insisting that it had to be dramatised, with high-profile names in the cast, in order for the work of Bryan Stevenson, and the outrageous legal corruption that he’s spent decades trying to break down, to get the publicity they demand.

    28 January 2020

    [1] Uncredited on IMDb, as far as I can see – along with the woman playing the district attorney’s secretary, who is mentioned later in this note.

Posts navigation