Monthly Archives: January 2020

  • Waves

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Trey Edward Shults (2019)

    The young writer-director Trey Edward Shults’s third feature (the first of his I’ve seen) has a promising set-up.   The central characters are a middle-class African-American family in present-day Florida.  Tyler Williams (Kelvin Harrison Jr) is a star of his high-school wrestling team, expected to progress to higher education in the near future.  As well as training and studying, he likes partying, with his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie).  She and Tyler’s younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell) are students at the same high school.  The Williams parents, Ronald (Sterling K Brown) and Catherine (Renée Elise Goldsberry), run their own business.  Ronald is a proud, sternly competitive father – and the main reason why Tyler conceals a serious shoulder problem that he’s developed.  He ignores a doctor’s advice to have immediate surgery.  Tyler prefers to wait until the current school wrestling season is over, to run the risk of aggravating the injury in the meantime.

    This tense scenario emerges clearly enough but has to fight with Shults’s technique to do so.  Waves is visually and sonically hyperactive from the word go – handheld camerawork, percussive editing, a score from specialists in strong-arming movie music (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).  Is the combination of these things meant to reflect Tyler’s non-stop, work-hard-play-hard life?   You’d like to think so; you therefore give Shults’s too-conspicuous direction the benefit of the doubt.  Not for long, though.   When Tyler is thrown onto his shoulder in a wrestling match, the damage is irreparable.  His world starts to unravel yet the flash and tempo of the narrative are unchanged.

    It takes a while but Shults then piles on enough melodramatic events for the story to match the hectic overdrive of the telling of it.  Alexis discovers she’s pregnant.  She and Tyler go to an abortion clinic, where Alexis is unnerved by pro-life demonstrators and can’t go through with the termination.  She decides to keep the baby and, because Tyler refuses to accept this, breaks up with him.  He turns to drugs and heavy drinking.  On the night of a high-school dance, Tyler turns up there drunk, sees Alexis being photographed with another boy, and confronts her.   She explains the boy concerned is a childhood friend and gay but she fails to pacify Tyler.  Their argument gets physical.  He knocks Alexis to the ground.  She hits her head on the concrete floor and dies.

    Ronald and Catherine are in the audience when Tyler suffers the fateful wrestling injury.  The next time they watch him at a public event is in court, where Tyler receives a life sentence for second-degree murder (with the possibility of parole after thirty years).   At the wrestling match, it’s (oddly) Catherine, rather than a member of school or medical staff, who takes charge and cradles the stricken Tyler in her arms.  From this point on, until the evening that ends with Tyler killing Alexis, the parents are absent from the film.  In other words, there’s no indication of how the demanding Ronald, in particular, has reacted to the consequences of his son’s injury.  Have Ronald and/or Catherine sought to console and counsel Tyler, or find someone else to do so?  Have they noticed, before the night of the high-school dance, that Tyler’s habits have changed or that he’s no longer seeing Alexis?

    The trio has evidently had words of some kind – when Tyler tries to leave the house to go the dance, Catherine reminds him he’s grounded – but we’ve no idea beyond that of how the parents are feeling.  Shults’s ignoring this is frustrating in light of the family dynamic he illustrated in the early stages but it’s entirely symptomatic of his real priority in Waves.  Tyler’s response to being told he’s grounded is to remind Catherine he’s eighteen and that she’s only his stepmother (a revelation, unless I missed it in earlier dialogue) and a ‘condescending bitch’.  When Ronald intervenes, Tyler floors him with a punch.  The moment is effective in suggesting a decisive shift in the balance of power between father and son, and anticipating the lethal blow Tyler will strike once he gets to the dance.  It’s also a good example of Shults’s essential approach.  He’s after instant, shallow impact, masquerading as emotional truth.

    Once Tyler goes inside, he disappears from Waves, along with Shults’s interest in him.  Instant impact again:  the sudden removal of the dominant character startles the viewer but jettisoning Tyler reflects nothing more than the film’s superficiality (though it’s a relief to be spared what would likely have been the clichés of his remorseful life behind bars).  Up to this point, Emily has been a quietly engaging presence in the story.  That, at least, is good forward planning by Shults for her taking over from her brother as the focus of attention.  As that happens, the movie’s hyperkinetic style starts to ease off, though Shults keeps on deflecting attention from people to art-for-art’s-sake image-making (the often striking cinematography is by Drew Daniels).

    Emily’s developing relationship with Luke (Lucas Hedges), who was glimpsed briefly early on as a lesser light of the wrestling team, is the best part of Waves and the first scene between emotionally fine-tuned Taylor Russell and Lucas Hedges a particular highlight.  Hedges is truthful and funny in capturing Luke’s awkwardness.  Trying to summon up the nerve to ask Emily out, he keeps the conversation going by uttering words like ‘awesome’ and ‘cool’ as a kind of halting incantation.  Shults’s simplistic writing means, that, just about as soon as Emily accepts Luke’s invitation, he is magically transformed into a more self-confident person, until they first sleep together – ie until the next opportunity for Luke’s diffidence to have a payoff.  But Lucas Hedges doesn’t forget Luke’s original personality, even if the script does.

    Although Emily and Luke are a change for the better, Shults’s evasion of the human reality of the situations he creates now becomes even more blatant.  Emily’s ostracisation by her high-school peers once Tyler’s gone down is just about plausible.  Her father’s and stepmother’s apparent lack of interest in how she’s doing in such challenging circumstances is not.  The whole story takes place in a world that hardly includes friends, let alone professional welfare counsellors.  The Williamses don’t, for example, know anyone from the church that they regularly attend:  they can’t, of course, because such people might get in Shults’s way.   The concluding part of Waves is dominated by a road trip that Emily and Luke make to Missouri, at her insistence, to visit Luke’s estranged father (Neal Huff), who’s dying of cancer in a hospital there.

    On the drive back to Florida, Luke weeps – in relief that he’s made peace with his father; or regret that he didn’t do so sooner; or gratitude to Emily, who urged him to go to Missouri; or anxiety about what he’ll tell his mother, with whom he lives, that he’s secretly spent time with the man who made her and the child Luke’s life a misery?   Perhaps a bit of all these things (as Lucas Hedges is able to suggest) but Shults doesn’t really care.  He just wants Luke to have a crying jag.  Everyone is given her or his breakdown, which is reliably cathartic.  Ronald and Catherine have a row (overheard by Emily) in which she accuses him of putting too much pressure on Tyler and he accuses her of ‘not being there’ for himself and Emily.  Ronald cries as he tells Emily how much he loves both her and Tyler.  She cries back, expressing her guilt at not trying to stop Tyler going after Alexis at the high-school dance.

    Some of these exchanges, like earlier ones between Tyler and Alexis, reek of strenuous improvisation.  They converge in a climactic soppy montage of resignation and reconciliation moments.  Catherine visits Tyler in jail (though no sign of Ronald), Alexis’s parents (Clifton Collins Jr and Vivi Pineda) make a dignified visit to their daughter’s grave, and so on.  When she vanishes from home, Ronald shows unaccustomed interest in what Emily’s up to, sending texts to her.  She sends don’t-worry-I’ll-be-back-soon-and-explain-everything replies.  She does return but we never learn what her parents think – or even if they know – about her relationship with Luke.

    Committed as Kelvin Harrison Jr’s performance is, I spent the first half of Waves wanting less of Tyler and more of Sterling K Brown as his father.  The most interesting speech in the film comes early, when Ronald tells his son:

    ‘We are not afforded the luxury of being average – got to work ten times as hard just to get anywhere. I don’t push you because I want to. I push you because I have to. Do you hear what I’m saying, son?’

    By ‘we’, Ronald means African-American.   The most exasperating thing about Waves (among many) is that Trey Edward Shults, who is white, squanders the opportunity to explore this anxious, driven, black middle-class mindset – and track the effects on it of what happens to Ronald’s son.

    25 January 2020

  • Seberg

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Benedict Andrews (2019)

    As Renee Zellweger racks up awards for Judy, it’s not easy even to find a central London cinema showing Seberg, in which Kristen Stewart plays another ill-fated Hollywood star, though of a different generation from Judy Garland, and differently abused.  Once you’ve seen Benedict Andrews’s film, its low profile is understandable.  Wikipedia describes it as a ‘political thriller’ rather than a biographical drama but, if so, the thrills are in short supply (in spite of a score by Jed Kurzel that repeatedly insists the action is exciting).  In fact, Seberg struggles along in a no man’s land between the two genres.

    The screenplay, by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, conforms to the current biopic fashion of concentrating on a short, crucial period in the subject’s life rather than working through the whole of it.  In the late 1960s, Jean Seberg made financial donations to various civil rights and political organisations, including the Black Panthers, and had a short-lived relationship with Hakim Jamal, co-founder of the black nationalist ‘US’ group.  As a result, she became a person of interest to the FBI and a target of its counter intelligence programme (COINTELPRO).   This is the main focus of the film, which starts with Seberg returning to America from Paris – it seems at the height of May 68 – where she’s been living with her second husband, the novelist Romain Gary (Yvan Attal), and their young son (Gabriel Sky).  The narrative climaxes a couple of years later with her return to France, the first of Seberg’s attempts to take her own life, and the death of a two-day-old daughter:  Seberg insists that her premature labour was triggered by the FBI-generated fake news that the baby’s father was a Black Panther[1].  Closing titles summarise the circumstances of how Seberg died – in 1979, at the age of forty.  The French authorities deemed this probable suicide, though with ‘unresolved issues’.

    The lack of further biographical context here is a mistake, deriving from the film-makers’ shaky assumption that plenty of the audience will know plenty about Jean Seberg’s life, forty years after her death.  Back in Hollywood, she argues with her agent (Stephen Root) about what her next movie should be.   She wants something left field.  He insists she’s ‘America’s sweetheart’, that the public wants to see her in conventional roles.   Even if that was the case, it doesn’t square with the impression the film has immediately created – an impression that builds on what prior knowledge of Seberg the moderately well-informed viewer is likely to have.  She’s best remembered nowadays for A bout de souffle – as a ‘French New Wave icon’ (IMDb), even though the character she plays in Godard’s classic is an American.  Benedict Andrews introduces her in Seberg in Paris, with a husband who’s twenty-five years her senior and a French cultural heavyweight.    Kristen Stewart’s chic beauty and tense economy of gesture and expression further disguise Seberg’s identity as a Midwest girl made good.

    Andrews does include, by way of a brief prologue, mock-up footage of Seberg as Jeanne d’Arc – in chains, about to be consumed by flames.  This obviously prefigures the ‘martyrdom’ of Jean rather than Jeanne that Seberg will describe.  Even members of the audience already aware that Seberg made her movie debut in the title role of Otto Preminger’s 1957 version of Shaw’s Saint Joan may not know the circumstances of her casting.  Preminger wanted an unknown.  A nationwide talent search attracted 18,000 hopefuls.  Jean Dorothy Seberg’s name was entered in the contest by a neighbour in Marshalltown, Iowa.  If Andrews and the screenwriters had given some idea of their heroine’s unassuming origins it might have made her targeting by the FBI, barely a decade later, seem more dramatically bizarre.

    Seberg’s casting in Preminger’s picture was confirmed a few days before her eighteenth birthday.  Kristen Stewart, although now approaching thirty, can easily pass for younger but, once the prologue is done, Seberg presents an already cosmopolitan figure.  Stewart is such a sophisticated presence that it’s no surprise at all that Jean Seberg is engagée.  There’s nothing in the film to make her politicisation unexpected or remarkable.  Stewart’s own cinema trajectory – from the Twilight franchise to success in French films (Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016)) – might seem to resonate with Jean Seberg’s.  She’s physically very suitable for the role and wears her late-1960s wardrobe well (the often amusing costumes are by Michael Wilkinson).  But Stewart has no scope for showing the development of Jean Seberg’s personality.  This seriously reduces the interest and impact of her performance.

    This is more frustrating because Seberg devotes – or, rather, wastes – plenty of time on a clichéd plot worked up around a fictional FBI operative called Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell).  He becomes disillusioned with his surveillance work on Seberg pari passu with a somewhat muffled infatuation with her, gazing at her (that is, Kristen Stewart’s) face on the screen in A bout de souffle.  Jack’s wife Linette (Margaret Qualley), who wants to be a doctor but is stuck with being a homemaker, is horrified to discover a cache of photographs of Seberg lying around the kitchen.  So, presumably, would J Edgar Hoover have been horrified to know one of his men was taking work home in this way – yet Jack refuses to discuss it further with Linette on the grounds that his assignment is top secret!  The conception and writing of the role leave no doubt that it’s a makeweight but Jack’s on screen a lot, even so.  Jack O’Connell’s low-key playing might have been more effective in a smaller part; as it is, he comes over as colourless.  As a more straightforward FBI brute, Vince Vaughn is more vivid.  Colm Meaney overdoes the nastiness as his and Jack’s boss.

    The attention give to COINTELPRO goings-on obscures two other linked, semi-comical aspects of the material – Seberg’s affair with Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), and the disjuncture between the kind of movies roles she wanted, and those she actually got to play, at this stage of her career.  Born Allen Donaldson (and a cousin of Malcolm X), Jamal was a pin-up of the Black Power movement.  There’s a hint of his and Seberg’s being attracted to each other as stars in their respective spheres – but no more than a hint. Anthony Mackie plays Jamal well but the part is underwritten.  Seberg seems more interested in showing him, like Jack Solomon, wronging a loving wife (Zazie Beetz).  Jamal also seems a realisation of Seberg’s desire to make an interracial love story picture.  Instead, she ends up in Paint Your Wagon, Airport and, more fatefully, Diego Callahan.  It’s bad enough that she was roped into projects like these.  It’s verging on adding insult to injury that Jean Seberg is now commemorated by Benedict Andrews’s wasted opportunity of a film.

    23 January 2020

    [1] While filming the Western Diego Callahan, Seberg had a fling with a Mexican student revolutionary.  Although Gary, with whom she split soon afterwards, publicly insisted that the baby girl who died so shortly after birth was his, she was actually the Mexican student’s.

     

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