Monthly Archives: July 2020

  • The Vast of Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrew Patterson (2019)

    This science-fiction mystery was made quickly and relatively cheaply, which could explain why its several unusual features include not including a director’s name in the credits.  Andrew Patterson appears there only pseudonymously – as James Montague, who shares the screenplay credit with Craig W Sanger (not a pseudonym!).  Patterson, whose first feature this is, uses a television screen-within-the-screen:  he presents his story as an episode of a TV show called ‘Paradox Theater’, which has its own credits.  Maybe that complication proved distracting and caused the omission.  If this rookie director’s self-effacement is intentional, though, it’s unnecessary.  The Vast of Night is irritating at the start and, in one way, anti-climactic at the end but it delivers a fine middle and plenty of other good things (including a splendid title).

    Paradox Theater is clearly inspired by The Twilight Zone.  Rod Serling’s introduction to the latter situated his creations in ‘the middle ground between light and shadow, science and superstition’.  The corresponding voiceover for Paradox Theater describes its territory as ‘caught between logic and myth’.  The Twilight Zone started life on CBS in 1959, which looks to be around the time The Vast of Night is set (it’s certainly post-October 1957 – there’s a reference to Sputnik).  The story is introduced, as a Paradox Theater piece, in flickering black-and-white.  The screen then expands, the images turn to colour and the film’s narrative gets underway.

    Perhaps Paradox Theater nods secondarily to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, responsible for the notorious 1938 radio dramatisation of H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds.  For the first fifteen minutes or so, The Vast of Night is a bit like a radio play.  The talk comes thick and fast, its hectic quality reinforced by a difficulty in matching voices to characters on screen.  The action takes place in nearly real time one dark evening in the (fictional) small town of Cayuga, New Mexico.  Miguel Ioann Littin Menz’s lighting is aptly crepuscular but it’s hard at first to tell who’s who.  Even when the two main characters emerge to dominate proceedings, you’re initially conscious of them as a pair of voices – or, at least, a pair of voices and two pairs of dark-framed spectacles that overcome the gloom.  These belong to sixteen-year-old telephone switchboard operator Fay Crocker (Sienna McCormick) and local radio DJ Everett ‘The Maverick’ Sloan (Jake Horowitz).  His near namesake, Everett Sloane, was a member of Mercury Theatre and starred in a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone.

    Fay has just become the proud owner of a tape-recorder; Everett shows her how to use it.  As they move around the environs of a gymnasium before a basketball game there, Everett records a pretend interview with Fay and vox pops in the car park, where folks are arriving to watch the game.  Andrew Patterson (according to Wikipedia) self-financed hispicture with earnings from work producing promotional films for an Oklahoma City basketball team.  They may or may not have supplied the players used in The Vast of Night (which was shot in Whitney, Texas) but the basketball game plays a doubly important role, even though we see little of what happens in it.  This major local event means the town outside the gymnasium is largely empty.  That suits Patterson’s low-budget purposes and links to a theme of the drama that develops.

    Although it’s wearing and disorienting, the opening talk has a dual payoff.  Tape-recordings, and other disembodied voices, will matter in what follows.  The incessant chat will contrast with more extraordinary noises, and with passages of virtual silence.  (The ingenious sound designers are Johnny Marshall and David Rosenblad.)  When she starts her stint at the telephone exchange, Fay gets calls which, when she answers them, consist of a spooky unnerving buzz on the line.  One call that does have a human voice on the other end comes from a terrified woman who’s seen something scary arrive on her land.  This conversation, and others that Fay starts with members of her family, are interrupted by the buzz.  Fay contacts the local police station but the officers are at the basketball.  She then phones Everett and plays him the extraordinary sound.  When he records and broadcasts it on his radio show, calls come in from two people who claim they’ve heard it before.

    A man introducing himself as Billy tells Everett of how, on military detail some years ago, he was involved in helping build a bunker to house a large, unidentified craft.  Travelling back from the isolated facility where the work took place, Billy heard on a plane radio the same mysterious noise that Everett has played over the air.  Billy later developed a lung condition, as did a colleague with whom he worked on the project.  Another of his friends recorded the signal and sent a copy to, among others, a now-deceased air force officer resident in Cayuga.  The well-informed Fay happens to know this man’s collection of tapes was bequeathed to the local library.  Even though her work shift isn’t over, she dashes to the library and steals them.

    When Everett tries to broadcast this further recording, the radio station’s power is knocked out.  Back at the telephone exchange, the switchboard is now flooded with calls reporting ‘something in the sky’.  A woman called Mabel Blanche, as well as recognising the sound, says she has plenty more to tell Everett but insists on meeting him to do so.  When he and Fay go to see her, Mabel (Gail Cronauer) doesn’t disappoint although her monologue isn’t as compelling as the sound-only contribution of Billy (Bruce Davis).  Mabel’s account is almost comically lengthy, especially given that Everett has prefaced their meeting with a warning that he and Fay don’t have a lot of time.

    Still, Mabel does impart plenty of relevant information.  Her visitors arrive to hear her chanting words in an incomprehensible language – it’s the same chant, she goes on to explain, she’s heard certain other people utter.  They include her only son, shortly before his unexplained disappearance, never to be seen again – on a night, Mabel says, like the present one.  She has a theory that aliens, from whose spacecraft the weird chant seems to be some kind of communication, abduct humans from especially isolated places.  Cayuga on the night of a big game for the local basketball team evidently fits the bill (even if it’s not sufficiently isolated to prevent numerous alarmed calls to Fay’s switchboard) …

    UFO sightings go back a long way but their frequency and popular appeal seem to have peaked in the years following World War II.  The premise of C G Jung’s late essay Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky is characteristically complex, both high flown and down to earth.  Jung describes UFOs as a ‘projection-creating fantasy [that] soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets’.  He nevertheless roots the emergence of such fantasy in ‘the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake’.  In retrospect, the UFO craze of the time looks like a strand of Cold War paranoia.  Everett, a young man who doesn’t strike you as a natural Red-alert type, is convinced the unnerving goings-on are the Soviets at work.

    During the first half-hour, Andrew Patterson punctuates the narrative two or three times with cuts back to the crackly black-and-white television screen, which tend to break your involvement with the main story.  At least for as long as these continue, The Vast of Night looks set to be no more than a stylish pastiche of various examples of 1950s screen product (with echoes of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers sub-genre of sci-fi horror as well as The Twilight Zone).  Yet Patterson has surprises in store.  The camera movement – often at high speed and ground level – is persistently confounding and there are striking, unstressed resonances with present-day preoccupations.  These go beyond Fay’s enthusiastic chatter in the early stages about technological advances on the way (according to a magazine she reads, by the year 2000 you’ll have ‘a miniature television screen and you’ll keep it in your pocket’).  After telling Everett he’s black, Billy goes on to reveal that all his fellow workers on the military detail were African-American or Mexican – were people, in other words, whose voices, should they decide to speak up about their experiences, were relatively unlikely to be heard.  Even as Everett’s diagnosis illustrates American anxieties of six decades back, a present-day audience can relate to his suspecting the nefarious hand of Russia in the high-tech incursions that destabilise Cayuga.

    Patterson doesn’t take the easy way out of the film by leaving things an atmospheric unsolved mystery – it’s a commendable decision albeit the effect is almost inevitably reductive.  The alien craft, when they appear on screen, aren’t fully visible.  Even in the near-darkness, though, they suggest low-budget relatives of the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The protagonists (along with Fay’s baby sister, who enters the picture late in the day) are at last nowhere to be seen.  All that remains in the field where they were stood confronting the craft are their footprints – which (like the footprints of Mabel Blanche’s son years ago) suddenly stop – and Fay’s tape-recorder.  The Vast of Night’s conventionalising direction sets in a while before that.  You don’t expect a piece like this to be primarily a relationships drama but the two leads are good enough, and the interactions of Fay and Everett engaging enough, to make you feel something’s been lost once they’re engaged almost exclusively in detective work.

    Yet the finale has ambiguous facets too, which the effective score (by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer) seems to have been predicting.  Although the principals’ disappearance is sinister, the extra-terrestrials aren’t confirmed as malevolent (or benevolent) – and the vanishing strikes a different note in chiming with another element of the story.  Again without overstressing, Patterson, in his creation of local texture, hints at the claustrophobic side of small-town life.  Fay would love to go to college but can’t afford to do so.  Everett has ambitions of a bigger-time broadcasting career than local radio.  The pair’s encounter with out-of-this-world visitors distances them further from their fellow residents who are merely enjoying basketball.  It’s somehow fitting that Fay and Everett get out of Cayuga.  The only way is up.

    16 July 2020

  • The Last Tree

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shola Amoo (2019)

    Another film missed on its release last year that I was keen to catch up with (on Amazon Prime Video via BFI Player) …

    The Last Tree, Shola Amoo’s second feature, has received plenty of critical praise (and has won prizes).  Both the praise and the terms of its expression are unsurprising, thanks to the subject matter and the film’s prevailing style.  The protagonist of this coming-of-age tale is Femi, a young black Briton of Nigerian descent.  Raised by a white foster mother in rural Lincolnshire, he’s reclaimed by his birth mother and moves with her to inner-city London, where he struggles to come to terms with his new environment.  (The piece is semi-autobiographical.  Shola Amoo is now in his thirties so the action is set shortly after the turn of the century.)  Femi is played at different ages by different actors:  that and his ethnicity are enough for a Guardian piece to introduce Amoo as ‘the man behind the British Moonlight’, although Femi’s challenges don’t include being gay.  The Last Tree opens with eleven-year-old Femi and his (white) Lincolnshire friends playing in idyllic countryside:  the sequence is filmed in slow motion, accompanied by the swelling chords of Segun Akinola’s score.  This combination of elements – childhood games in sunlit meadows, slo-mo, consecrative music – tends to get described as ‘lyrical’ and Sight & Sound doesn’t disappoint.  Kate Stables’s review of Amoo’s film on the BFI website is headlined ‘a lyrical story of British identity pains’.

    The overused adjective is actually fair enough, to the extent that The Last Tree operates, and is effective, on a predominantly visual and purely emotive level.  Writer-director Amoo tells his story chiefly through the faces of the two young actors playing Femi, both of them highly expressive.  Tai Golding is the pre-adolescent boy and Sam Adewunmi the sixteen-plus version.  The countryside locale of the early scenes is obviously designed to maximise the contrast with the later London ones.  Using a ‘”monochromatic” small town’ – Amoo’s description, in the Guardian interview with Danny Leigh, of where he spent his own early years in foster care – wouldn’t have had the same paradise lost effect.  For a time, the narrative’s lack of context raises questions in your mind.  His birth mother Yinka (Gbemisola Ikumelo) pays a rare visit to Lincolnshire and tells Femi’s foster carer Mary (Denise Black) she wants to take her son back.  You wonder:  is it really as simple as that, even if the fostering is done through a private agency rather than social services?   (There’s never a mention of either.)   Five or so years later in London, Femi is being groomed by Mace (Demmy Ladipo), a local gangster.  It’s not evident why Femi is especially liable to this kind of exploitation – far more so, it seems, than his black school contemporaries[1].

    After a while, you realise you’re not going to get this kind of clarification.  It simply doesn’t matter to Shola Amoo, who’s after dramatising the highlights of Femi’s rites of passage to the exclusion of virtually everything and everyone else.  The dialogue is sometimes sharp, as when Yinka yells at her son, ‘I didn’t raise you to behave like this!’, and he calmly replies, ‘You didn’t raise me’.  More often, the script is omissive.  After surviving one of his crises, Femi makes a brief visit to Mary’s home, where he meets the young black boy she’s currently fostering.  (It’s not clear if this is Femi’s first trip back to Lincolnshire since he left it as an eleven-year-old.)   Talking of those she’s cared for over the years, Mary says to Femi, ‘In a way, you’re all my boys’.  He replies, ‘We’re not, though’.  In real life, Mary might well come back with, ‘I said “in a way”…’ and explain more of what she means.  In the film, Femi’s rejoinder strikes her dumb, as if the racial implications of her fostering hadn’t occurred to Mary before – even though the visual evidence suggests she always looks after black kids, despite living in a nearly mono-racial white community.

    By the time The Last Tree had reached its third and final ‘act’, I was rather grateful for Amoo’s never-mind-the-cogency-feel-the-moment approach.  As a piece of dramatic construction, the film is weak and clichéd – in, for example, the juxtaposition of Mace and Femi’s schoolteacher, Mr Williams (Nicholas Pinnock).  Well groomed and well spoken, Williams insists that he can help Femi pass his exams; he also says that he was brought up on the estate where Femi now lives with Yinka.  The teacher and the professional criminal are local black boys made good and bad respectively:  Femi must choose which of their paths to follow.   In a climactic confrontation with Williams, Femi loses his temper and lashes out; after a struggle, he breaks down and sobs in his teacher’s arms.  What happens subsequently – whether Femi passes the exams, and so on – isn’t made clear.   His comforting embrace of Femi is the last we see of Williams.  Since he’s too good to be true, this is no great loss.

    Another plot strand concerns Femi’s relationship with Tope (Ruthxjiah Bellenea), a girl at his school.  With her remarkably dark skin and blue braids, Tope is ridiculed by Femi’s male pals.  The point is to show Femi initially constrained by, then overcoming, peer pressure:  he takes the other boys to task, and grows closer to Tope.  This too is left in mid-air – more of a pity than it is with the Mr Williams subplot:  the unusually beautiful Ruthxjiah Bellenea is a supple emotional presence and there’s a connection between her and Sam Adewunmi.  Even so, it’s hard to feel that, if he had pursued the Tope strand, Amoo would have been interested enough to give it substance or originality.

    The finale sees Femi and Yinka in Lagos, paying a call on Femi’s biological father.   We don’t know how much time has passed since Femi (presumably) chose the right path; whether he or his mother was the prime mover in going to Nigeria; or how long they’re planning to stay there.  We do know the journey to Africa is the remaining necessary stage in Femi’s exploration of his identity.  The scene in which he goes to see his father, at the latter’s palatial home, is, as a cultural insight, the most arresting and amusing in the whole film.  The literally gilded vestibule where Femi waits is bigger than the entire area of his mother’s flat in London.  Femi keeps settling back into the sofa’s plush upholstery.  He gets up to look at an elephant tusk on display nearby.  A maid comes in.  She tenaciously tries but fails to interest Femi (‘sir’) in various things to eat or drink.  Ushered in to meet his father, a pastor (!), Femi also makes the acquaintance of half-siblings he didn’t know he had.

    Femi doesn’t react much to all this.  All that counts from the encounter with his father is that it makes him sympathise with, and appreciate as never before, his birth mother, with whom he’s had a mostly combative relationship.  Out on the streets of Lagos, he’s relaxed and smiling as he has a kickabout with some young local kids – making clear he’s really come home.  The closing sequence is Femi on a Lagos beach:  the seashore setting might seem to connect with The 400 Blows (and its numerous descendants) but proves to be a means of tying Amoo’s end to his beginning, with a reprise of the younger Femi in Lincolnshire.  Even though the characters are consistently underwritten, the film is persuasively acted throughout.  Gbemisola Ikumelo develops Yinka from a shrill termagant into a more nuanced personality.  Denise Black’s Mary has real maternal warmth (or perhaps grandmotherly warmth:  Femi calls her Nan).  The physical contrasts and spiritual continuity between the slender, evidently sensitive Tai Golding and Sam Adewunmi’s imposing yet vulnerable version of Femi work well.   On its own, limited terms, The Last Tree is highly successful.

    12 July 2020

    [1] I can’t identify them, or several other characters, from the IMDb cast list, hence the missing actors’ names in this note.

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