Monthly Archives: May 2021

  • My Favorite Year

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Benjamin (1982)

    This was the third time I’d seen My Favorite Year, the viewings coming at roughly twenty-year intervals since the film’s original release.  Though it’s no great shakes in other ways, Richard Benjamin’s first feature as director boasts a strongly appealing setting and a splendid star turn from Peter O’Toole.  The titular year is 1954; the person whose favourite year it is, is Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker), a junior writer on ‘Comedy Cavalcade’, a hit weekly NBC show, built around Stan ‘King’ Kaiser (Joseph Bologna).  The programme and its leading man are based on Your Show of Shows, in which Sid Caesar starred.   The character of Benjy is supposedly inspired by Mel Brooks (executive producer on My Favorite Year) and Woody Allen, both members of the team on which Caesar, who never wrote himself, depended.  King Kaiser’s guest star for the week in which the film’s action takes place is Alan Swann (O’Toole), an aging, alcoholic, womanising Hollywood swashbuckler, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn.

    Alan Swann’s dipso reputation precedes him and he quickly confirms it, turning up at the studios dead drunk for the first rehearsal.  King wants to cancel the booking; Benjy, a fervent Swann fan, pleads for mercy; King relents, on condition that Benjy takes responsibility for keeping Swann sober in the days ahead, until the show goes out live in its primetime Saturday evening slot.  The ensuing narrative majors on the near-impossibility of Benjy’s assignment.  There are subplots concerning Benjy’s mostly clumsy attempts to woo KC Downing (Jessica Harper), assistant to the show’s producer (Adolph Green), and the efforts of gangster Karl Rojeck (Cameron Mitchell), equally cack-handed though rather more menacing, to ‘persuade’ King to stop parodying him.  The ‘Comedy Cavalcade’ in question will feature two headline sketches for King – the latest ‘Boss Hijack’ lampoon and a musketeer number with Swann that sends up his heroic big-screen persona.

    The screenplay, by Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo, has plenty of good lines but seems itself conceived on TV sketch show lines:  if something doesn’t work, at least it’s not for long.  Benjy’s exchanges with KC drag because he’s not much more than annoying in them, though Mark Linn-Baker is elsewhere likeable and amusing.  The after-hours takeaway they share in the office breaks the ice (‘Jews know two things’, he tells her, ‘suffering and where to find great Chinese food’).  Steinberg and Palumbo’s script doesn’t know what to do next with the uneasy romance so it’s promptly dropped – without even a suggestion that Benjy’s hero worship of Swann eclipses his feelings for KC.  In contrast, his and Swann’s dinner at Benjy’s mother’s home in Brooklyn is an almost complete success – partly because it’s self-contained.

    Richard Benjamin’s direction is also at its best in this episode.  Aside from Benjy and the guest of honour, the other people at the dinner table are broadly drawn, to put it mildly:  Benjy’s immoderately flirtatious mother (Lainie Kazan), who rejoices in the name of Belle Steinberg Carroca; her current husband Rookie (Ramon Sison), a Filipino ex-boxer, who cooks a meatloaf with a secret ingredient (parrot); Benjy’s autograph-hungry Uncle Morty (Lou Jacobi); Morty’s wife Sadie (Annette Robyns), who tries to upstage Belle by wearing a wedding dress (‘I only wore it once before’).  Benjamin strikes a satisfying balance here:  he lets the enthusiastic performers make the most of their cartoonish characters but also gets a lovely variation of pace into proceedings.  The element that really lifts, and integrates, the scene is Alan Swann’s complaisant understanding of what’s expected of him in this company.  He returns Belle’s flagrancy with courtly good humour.  He doesn’t lose his temper when Morty grills him about ‘that paternity rap a couple of years ago’.

    Most of the TV studio sequences, though enjoyable enough, aren’t handled so well.  The pressure-cooker atmosphere of the writers’ room derives almost exclusively from the senior scriptwriter, Sy Benson.  Bill Macy expertly captures Sy’s mixture of exasperation with King’s demands and kneejerk compliance with them but it seems to exist in a vacuum; as a result, the hectic anxiety feels overdone.  Joseph Bologna plays the volatile, insecure King very deliberately.  You can almost see him working out how to be funny; the result, needless to say, is that he rarely is.  Bologna’s acting tends to slow things down, not least because Benjamin showcases it.  The other members of the writing team – Alice (Anne DeSalvo) and Herb (Basil Hoffman) – each have just the one characteristic:  Alice speaks in an emphatic monotone, Herb not at all, except to whisper to Alice.

    Herb does, finally, utter one audible line, and it pays off.  So too, more importantly, does the climactic transmission of ‘Comedy Cavalcade’, to a studio audience as well as millions of TV viewers.  Wearing a joke mobster’s suit with mile-wide shoulders, King panics just beforehand that he should be wearing the musketeer outfit first.  (This happens every week, according to the chain-smoking wardrobe lady (Selma Diamond).)   He’s actually in the right costume, though it turns out not to matter when the two big sketches collide.  Rojeck’s henchmen arrive literally on the scene – the set for the TV show – to do King over.  He slugs it out with them – two against one, until Swann rediscovers his inner swashbuckler.  From high in the studio theatre, he swings down on a rope to join forces with King on stage, and the baddies are vanquished.  The chaotic bravura goes down a storm with the audience.  Alan Swann proves to be the hero Benjy has never stopped wanting him to be.

    Who coined the adage ‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard’ remains a matter of dispute but it’s often attributed to Edmund Gwenn, in a deathbed conversation with the director George Seaton.  Alan Swann, quoting it to Benjy, credits a much earlier Edmund – Kean.  Meryl Streep also quoted the line, with reference to My Favorite Year, when she presented Peter O’Toole with his honorary Oscar in 2003.  Perhaps the hardest thing about comedy is making it look easy but that’s what O’Toole does in this film.  Swann’s sentimental backstory, around the teenage daughter he’s estranged from, is standard issue.  The pandemonium of the finale kicks off with his panicked, last-minute discovery that the show isn’t recorded and he has to perform to a studio audience – hard to believe, when Swann has repeatedly proved he’s more with it than you thought.  (Seemingly unconscious while Benjy pleads with King not to dump him, Swann hears all.  However blotto he is, he arrives for rehearsals on time.)   Thanks to O’Toole, these shortcomings barely matter.  Whether he’s doing verbal or daringly physical comedy, it’s inventive and seems effortless – from Swann’s first appearance, coming to in bed on the morning-after-the-latest-night-before, all the way through to his accidental triumph on Saturday night live television.

    9 May 2021

  • Corpus Christi

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Boże Ciało

    Jan Komasa (2019)

    Catholic vestments in modern Polish cinema are liable to clothe the unexpected.  In Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013), the title character, a novitiate nun in Communist-era Poland, discovers that she’s Jewish.  The charismatic young priest and protagonist of Jan Komasa’s Corpus Christi, set in the present day, isn’t really a priest, though he’d like to be.  His real name is Daniel.  He’s recently been released from a juvenile detention centre, where he served time for second-degree murder.  Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia) owns a clerical collar and bib (whether he got it from a fancy-dress shop or stole it from a sacristy isn’t clear).  He wanders into a rural church, gets talking with a young woman there, tells her he’s a priest and whips out the dog collar to prove it.  Within the space of a few hours, Daniel is accepting an invitation to deputise for the church’s priest, Father Wojciech (Zdzisław Wardejn), an alcoholic who needs time to dry out.

    Daniel calls himself Father Tomasz, the name of the priest who was his mentor while he was in ‘juve’.  Daniel wants to enter a seminary on his release.  As Father Tomasz (Łukasz Simlat) reminds him, he can’t, because of his criminal record; Tomasz helps arrange a job for him in a saw-mill instead.  Daniel takes one look at the place and heads off to the nearby church where his deception gets underway.  In an early scene in Corpus Christi, Father Tomasz  addresses the inmates in the detention centre.  His words resonate throughout the film – in Daniel’s mind and the viewer’s, too.  ‘I’m not here to pray mechanically,’ Tomasz tells the young offenders, ‘and I hope you’re not either…  We can go outside and… God will follow us.  … Each of us is the priest of Christ – each and every one of you. …  What does pray mean?  It means talk to God – tell him something important, personal.  … Sing to him about it!’  Father Tomasz then asks Daniel to do just that, and he sings the opening lines of ‘The Lord’s my shepherd’.  When Daniel stands before his congregation for the first time, at a loss for words, he repeats Tomasz’s, and acts on his advice, as he ‘talks to God’ – aloud – and reprises Psalm 23.

    The young woman Daniel meets in the church is Marta (Eliza Rycembel) whose mother, Lidia (Aleksandra Konieczna), is both church warden and housekeeper to Father Wojciech.  Lidia seems suspicious of Daniel from the start, insisting that he sleep not in the priest’s house but in a shabby annex.  Daniel learns from her and Marta about a recent family tragedy:  Kuba, their son and brother, was one of six teenagers, all travelling in the same car, who were killed in a road crash.  The driver of the other vehicle, who also died, had a bad reputation in life and in death is seen as a murderous drunk-driver.  His widow, Ewa (Barbara Kurzaj), has been receiving abusive anonymous letters ever since the accident; the villagers won’t even allow her husband’s cremated remains to receive Christian burial in the local cemetery.  Daniel leads the bereaved families in both prayerful vigils and more startling exercises to voice their furious grief.  Spending time with Marta and her contemporaries, he sees the persisting divisions between them that are a legacy of the crash.   Walkiewicz (Leszek Lichota), the mayor and owner of the saw-mill, ominously warns Daniel not to interfere in the dispute over burial of the ashes.

    Shot by Piotr Sobociński Jr, Corpus Christi is visually oppressive.  A green-greyish light predominates – in the detention centre, in domestic interiors, in most of the church sequences, sometimes even outdoors.  Occasional shafts of sunlight gilding the images are sinister rather than warming.  The film isn’t without humour:  the first time that he hears confession, Daniel cribs from the standard script he’s looked up on his phone.  The next confession sequence is very different.  When Walkiewicz asks him to bless the opening of a new wing to the saw-mill, Daniel is startled to recognise a face there.  Pinczer (Tomasz Zietek) is the latest young offender released from the detention centre to work at the mill.  A few screen minutes later, Daniel is hearing Pinczer’s voice and seeing his eyes on the other side of the confessional grille.

    Jan Komasa tells an absorbing story but the two main strands of Mateusz Pacewicz’s screenplay – Daniel’s pretence and the road accident that has traumatised the community – rather get in each other’s way.  The film’s climax sees the real Father Tomasz, tipped off by Pinczer, arrive in the village to confront Daniel.  In the latter’s lodgings, Tomasz surveys mementoes of Daniel’s time in the parish – photos, gifts from the locals with messages of gratitude.  This might seem the thematic crux of the piece:  how wrong can Daniel’s imposture be if, as a result of it, he’s been a positive influence on the lives of others?   The moment doesn’t register in this way, though.  Komasa focuses so much on the aftermath to the car crash that the theme of Daniel and the villagers getting to like his spiritual leadership hasn’t developed much texture.

    Father Wojciech describes the parish as a place of ‘many people, few believers’.  Church attendance (not that sparse even at the start) increases greatly while Daniel is running the show.  His passionate improvisations have understandable impact but it’s unclear what these mean to the locals beyond novelty.  In the pulpit, Daniel tells the congregation he once killed someone but their reactions to this are hardly explored.  It’s a nice question as to how much his sympathy for Ewa’s reviled husband relates to Daniel’s own past and how much it’s an expression of Christian charity.  He eventually succeeds in conducting a burial service for the man but the fatal crash doesn’t function as a larger parable of forgiveness or of failure to forgive.  The narrative prefers to drip-feed revelations about the crash – it was the kids who were drunk rather than the other driver, the latter had just stormed out of a row with his wife threatening to kill himself, and so on – in a dramatically conventional way.

    Daniel and Marta are drawn to each other from an early stage.  After they’ve confronted Lidia and others with their threatening letters to Ewa, Marta moves out of the rectory and stays with Daniel in the annex, where they have sex.  For the audience, knowing the truth about him naturally has the effect of making Daniel’s variously profane behaviour less remarkable than it might otherwise be.  Here too, however, Komasa leaves opaque what the locals think – even what Marta thinks about sleeping with a man she still believes to be a priest.   A pity because Eliza Rycembel is an expressive actress:  she’s so good at showing Marta’s divided feelings that it’s frustrating that, at this important stage, she’s not allowed to have any.  Bartosz Bielenia easily passes the charisma test (he sometimes brings to mind the young Christopher Walken).  His pale blue eyes certainly hold the camera; you never doubt the strength of Daniel’s appetite for the transformative.  At the same time, Bielenia’s zealous intensity makes his character perhaps too conspicuous.  Daniel always looks nervous, is never someone who blends into his surroundings.  The film’s best performance comes from Łukasz Simlat, a solemnly impressive presence as sad-eyed, gritty Father Tomasz.

    I neither liked nor understood the explosive, gory ending of Corpus Christi.  In the opening scenes in the detention centre, Daniel is threatened and abused by an inmate known as Bonus (Mateusz Czwartosz), who is the brother of the man Daniel killed.  Even at the start, some of the lads in the centre, especially Bonus, look strikingly mature for juvenile offenders.  Daniel doesn’t stand out in this way (although Bartosz Bielenia was in his mid-twenties when the film was shot) but, since he’s served his time there, it’s puzzling that, after his spell in the outside world, he’s sent back to ‘juve’ – for impersonating a priest?  I couldn’t help suspecting that the main reason for his return was to enable a showdown between Daniel and Bonus.  This is both brutal and bloodily protracted.  Daniel finally comes out on top – I assumed that Bonus was dead – and somehow walks free.  I just don’t know what Jan Komasa means this conclusion to say.

    8 May 2021

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