Monthly Archives: February 2020

  • Viva Zapata!

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1952)

    In the second half of the 1940s and well into the 1950s, Elia Kazan’s sustained creative output continued to include stage plays in addition to films.  Viva Zapata!’s immediate predecessor in Kazan’s filmography was A Streetcar Named Desire, which he’d had also directed when Tennessee Williams’s play first opened on Broadway four years earlier. In the year after Viva Zapata!’s release, Kazan was back there staging another Williams play, Camino Real, as well as preparing for On the Waterfront.

    Seven years and seven features on from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, his Hollywood directing debut, Kazan was a fully-fledged film-maker.  Viva Zapata!, which dramatises the rise to power of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, doesn’t strike you as the work of a man with his roots in theatre rather than cinema.  By now, Kazan was not only intent on location shooting (in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas) but eager to take on truly challenging landscape.  The large-scale scenes of mountain warfare are the most impressive element of this ambitious, uneven, dated film.

    Kazan was evidently keen too to use Hispanic locals in non-speaking parts.  In itself, this works well.  Throughout the climax, when Zapata (Marlon Brando) is lured into an ambush and shot dead, Kazan punctuates the progress of the ambush with repeated cuts to the faces of two groups of Mexicans – elderly women and elderly men – who are looking on.  Their impassive silence contrasts sharply with the frantic movement at the centre of the action and the fusillade of gunfire that kills Zapata.  But the authenticity of the extras also serves to emphasise the artificial appearance of Caucasian members of the cast – especially Brando, with his not very good black wig and moustache, darkening face make-up, and taped-up eyelids (a combination that sometimes gives Zapata a confusingly oriental look.)

    This isn’t an issue, of course, with Anthony Quinn, who was born in Chihuahua during the Mexican Revolution that the film depicts (his mother was Mexican and his father half-Mexican, half-Irish).  As the hero’s elder brother Eufemio, Quinn acts with a freedom that Brando has here only intermittently.  Quinn’s life force, which can be tiresome, is energising in Viva Zapata!   The impulsiveness and humour of the character he creates gives added poignancy to the heavy-drinking Eufemio’s eventual despair.  It would be unfair, though, not to give Brando his due.  To present-day audiences familiar with his full range of roles, his Mexican peasant freedom fighter can’t seem as remarkable as it must have been in 1952, when Brando had appeared in only two previous films (Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950) and Streetcar).  Yet his extraordinarily strong physical presence often gives Zapata a still startling immediacy.

    Brando sometimes deflates his lines, sometimes gives them the quality of real, spontaneous thoughts.  The former tactic is understandable and the latter achievement close to miraculous because John Steinbeck’s dialogue is Viva Zapata!‘s most glaring and insistent defect.  According to Steinbeck, early twentieth-century Mexicans, regardless of their social class and position, spoke in epigrams.  In the opening scene, the country’s longstanding dictator Porfirio Díaz (Fay Roope) receives a delegation of peasant farmers and is told, ‘My President, we make our tortillas out of corn, not patience; and patience will not cross an armed and guarded fence’.  From this point on, the adages rarely stop.  Perhaps Steinbeck thought bombast appropriate to a commemoration of Zapata’s mythic status – something Kazan illustrates more successfully by visual rather than verbal means.  The hero’s white horse, a true survivor, appears finally as an embodiment of his people’s quasi-religious belief that Zapata isn’t really dead, that he’s living in the mountains (on high), from where he continues to inspire their struggle for freedom.

    All the high-flown language is upstaged by the lines that conclude the scene of Zapata’s wedding night and provide the daftest moment of Viva Zapata!  His bride Josepa (Jean Peters) senses that something is troubling her husband and asks what it is.  He confesses that he’s illiterate and asks Josepa to teach him to read, starting right now.   Until this point, the two actors have played the bedroom scene admirably.  (Jean Peters, understandably awkward in a formal courtship sequence with Brando, is increasingly touching and credible in her limited role.)  Then Josepa gets down a Bible and reads aloud the opening verse of Genesis.  ‘In,’ says Zapata, without looking at the text.  ‘The,’ continues Josepa and he repeats the word.  This is an undeniably novel way of teaching someone to read but it’s a relief that Kazan cuts before Zapata gets to ‘beginning’.

    6 February 2020

  • Richard Jewell

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clint Eastwood (2019)

    In July 1996, thirty-three-year-old Richard Jewell was working as a security guard at the Atlanta Olympics.  He was stationed at the city’s Centennial Park, where a bomb exploded midway through the Games, resulting in two deaths and scores of injuries.  Jewell’s prompt action in moving spectators away from the suspect package that he’d discovered in the park saved lives and made him a media hero.  Until, that is, it emerged that the FBI suspected Jewell of planting the bomb himself.  Though never charged, he remained a suspect for several weeks – and in the glare of publicity – before the FBI declared him no longer a person of interest.  A man called Eric Rudolph was subsequently convicted for a series of acts of terrorism, including the one in Centennial Park.

    Trump-supporting Clint Eastwood’s dramatisation of Jewell’s story has a hero who’s a security fanatic with a firm belief in measures to enable good guys to deal with bad guys, and his own collection of firearms.  The villains are members of the press and the FBI.  It’s no wonder Richard Jewell has achieved the rare distinction of a positive review from Armond White and caused hand-wringing on the part of some of the liberal critics who normally bend over backwards to praise Eastwood’s ‘craftsmanship’ and ‘humanism’.  Some but not all:  Richard Brody, nothing if not resourceful, reckons that ‘Eastwood’s artistry, his cinematic unconscious, imbues this pugnacious drama with urgent present-day observations that outleap its historical context – and maybe even his intentions’.  In his ingeniously silly reading of the film, Brody perceives in Richard Jewell the unintended but unignorable presence of another media-FBI victim – Hillary Clinton[1].

    The early scenes are promising.  In a prologue set in 1986, Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) is working as an office supplies clerk in a law firm.  He’s grateful to one of the lawyers there, Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), for amiable conversation that he doesn’t get from anyone else.  Jewell really wants to work in law enforcement.  His next job, as a college campus security guard, seems a step in the right direction but he’s fired by the principal (Charles Green) after repeated complaints of overzealous discharge of his duties.  Jewell then gets recruited to the Olympics security team and moves into the Atlanta home of his widowed mother Barbara, known as Bobi (Kathy Bates).  Eastwood introduces, without overstressing, the aspects of Jewell’s personality and circumstances that will, in due course, fit the familiar profile of a lone-wolf terrorist – wannabe law officer, socially and emotionally isolated single man living with his mother, and so on.

    Doubts about Richard Jewell soon set in, though.  As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist Kathy Scruggs, Olivia Wilde overacts from the moment she appears on the screen.  With the help of screenwriter Billy Ray’s dialogue and probably with Eastwood’s encouragement, Wilde delivers such an exaggerated picture of an ambitious, unscrupulous newshound that it’s hard to see Kathy Scruggs – an all-stops-out bitch in a newsroom of mousy colleagues she despises – as representative of the fourth estate.  Jon Hamm, who plays FBI Agent Tom Shaw, is, also from the outset, ponderous with weary cynicism.  As soon as these two get into conversation, Eastwood telegraphs that they’re made for each other.  In exchange for sex with Scruggs, Shaw reveals to her that the FBI have their sights on Richard Jewell.

    I lost belief in this true story thanks to Eastwood’s handling and sequencing of events around the point at which Jewell is publicly revealed to be under suspicion.  This is the headline story not just in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution but also on TV news.   Up to now in the film, the television in the Jewells’ apartment has hardly been off – especially not since Richard became a hero-celebrity, making himself and his mother proud.  Yet he’s wholly unaware that Scruggs’s story has spread like wildfire.  The FBI men also assume he’s in the dark:  haven’t they seen the news either?  They lure Jewell to an interview, claiming it’s to take part in the making of some kind of training video.  It’s not until he gets dubious enough to insist on speaking to a lawyer and contacts Watson Bryant, the only one he knows, that Jewell learns he’s a prime suspect for the bombing.  It may be arguable as to whether Eastwood distorts this part of the plot for politically partisan reasons – that is, to stress the FBI’s shabby, deceitful treatment of Jewell.  It’s unarguable that the result is cack-handed storytelling.

    A telephone warning about the bomb is made from a booth shortly before Jewell’s discovery of the device.  The distance between the phone box and the bomb’s location obviously dictates whether he could have made the call but Watson Bryant (who really did defend Jewell) takes a surprisingly long time to bother checking how long it takes to walk from one place to the other.  When he does so, of course, he proves his client couldn’t have phoned before discovering the suspect package, according to the recorded timings of both events.  (Shaw and Scruggs, working improbably as a team, subsequently do the same check with the same results – enough for the FBI to start suggesting that Jewell had an accomplice.)

    The film is proving controversial chiefly because the sex-for-secrets element is an invention and Kathy Scruggs isn’t alive to answer back:  she died of a prescription drugs overdose in 2001.  (Tom Shaw may be based on one or more of the actual FBI agents involved but he doesn’t share his name with them.)  This seemingly despicable travesty on Eastwood’s part is tending to obscure how banal his film-making is (as it often has been before).  As Bryant and his secretary Nadya (Nina Arianda) do their walk from the phone booth, Eastwood cross-cuts between this and footage of Michael Johnson’s world-record-breaking run in the 200m, the outstanding achievement of the Atlanta Olympics track-and-field programme.  This piece of cinematic ‘artistry’ succeeds only in distracting attention from Bryant’s crucial experiment.  It also, incidentally, reduces the impact of Johnson’s 19.32-second sprint by repeatedly interrupting it.

    Richard Jewell works best in the bits of black humour – particularly Watson Bryant’s exasperated attempts to defend Jewell, whose response to the lawyer’s dismay at the sight of his supply of guns is, ‘This is Georgia’.   That’s a rare laconic statement on Jewell’s part:  more usually, Bryant is thwarted by his client’s incorrigible tendency to say more than is good for his case.  Paul Walter Hauser, who impressed in spite of his crude role in I, Tonya, has a comedy background.  That helps here but Hauser also conveys his character’s unappealing qualities.  Clint Eastwood may want Jewell to be simply an oddball victim.  Hauser, though empathetic, also makes him a recognisable law-and-order bore.  In his best moments, he suggests that Jewell keeps putting his foot in it through stubborn conceit as well as naivety.

    Here’s an odd thing.  I was never keen on Sam Rockwell, up to and including his awards-laden turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.  Since then, I’ve found him consistently worth watching, whether intermittently elevating films I felt negatively about – Vice, Jojo Rabbit, now Richard Jewell – or as Bob Fosse in the TV miniseries Fosse Verdon.  That portrait wasn’t an unqualified success:  Rockwell took Fosse’s depressive side literally – he was too often too gloomy.  But his wrestling with the challenge of the role was always fascinating.  I now look forward to seeing Rockwell whatever he’s in.  By the time Richard Jewell phones him in desperation, Watson Bryant has left the law firm where their paths first crossed:  working independently and struggling to find clients, Bryant is suddenly landed with one who, as Rockwell makes engagingly clear, drives him mad but gives him a new lease of professional life and sense of moral purpose.  Sam Rockwell supports and partners Paul Walter Hauser splendidly.

    Nina Arianda is too talented for her small role as Nadya and tries to make too much of it.  Besides, this is the second film running in which her main job seems to be to do a semi-comical Russian accent.  That worked well enough in Stan & Ollie but it’s distracting here.  The only strong female performance in Richard Jewell comes from Kathy Bates.  She gives Bobi Jewell enough vivid, individual credibility to muffle Eastwood’s determination to reduce the  character to American salt-of-the-earth generality.  Bates stays true even in her big set piece – managed as blatantly by Eastwood as by Watson Bryant – when Bobi makes a tearful public appeal on her son’s behalf to ‘Mr President’ (so Bill Clinton does get a mention).

    As might be expected in a Clint Eastwood movie, right wins out and order is finally restored mechanically.  The closing legends say nothing about Kathy Scruggs but do note that Richard Jewell died in 2007, at the age of forty-four.  Complications from diabetes and heart failure were the official cause of death.  Perhaps we’re meant to think his mistreatment by the FBI and consequent trial by media had a part to play too, though that’s easier said than done:  Paul Walter Hauser’s Richard looks a case of morbid obesity if ever there was one.  Otherwise, the good end happily.  Watson Bryant married Nadya; they have two sons; Bobi Jewell babysits them every Saturday night.  The film is describing events of nearly a quarter-century ago.  This last bit of information sends you out of the cinema with an unexpected question in your mind.  Do these kids really still need a babysitter?

    6 February 2020

    [1] Not unlike Jewell, says Brody, Clinton found her ‘trivial missteps … inflated by the FBI and other government (ie, Congressional) officials – and amplified by the press – into an issue that threatened to have grave legal consequences for her … [Clinton] was the subject of an announcement by the director of the FBI, days before the [presidential] election, regarding a new investigation of her, which suddenly became the dominant theme of a race in which a real miscreant was hiding in plain sight’.

     

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