Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 30, 2021

  • Secret Honor

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Robert Altman (1984)

    The prologue is painstakingly clear:

    ‘This work is a fictional meditation concerning the character of and events in the history of Richard M Nixon, who is impersonated in this film.  The dramatist’s imagination has created some fictional events in an effort to illuminate the character of President Nixon.  This work is not a work of history or a historical recreation.  It is a work of fiction, using as a fictional character a real person, President Richard M Nixon – in an attempt to understand.’

    Secret Honor, a one-man show, was originally a theatre piece, first produced at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre.  It was written by Donald Freed and Arnold M Stone, who share the screenplay credit, and performed by Philip Baker Hall, who recreates his Richard Milhous Nixon in Altman’s film.   This is Nixon a few years after his resignation as President.  His monologue is delivered in his study (somewhere in New Jersey, according to Wikipedia), which nevertheless gives the impression that its occupant – in his own and in the popular mind – is condemned to remain in the Oval Office.  The walls are hung with portraits of presidential predecessors, including Eisenhower and Kennedy, and of Henry Kissinger, against whom Nixon inveighs especially bitterly.  Altman cuts repeatedly to CCTV screens in the room that multiply images of the man alone in it, evoking the paranoia and increasing isolation of Nixon’s time as President.  The tape-recorder he intermittently uses does the same, bringing to mind the Watergate tapes specifically.

    Nixon enters the study wearing a suit and tie.  He immediately replaces the suit jacket with a maroon velvet smoking jacket, which stays on until the last few minutes of the film.  The natty, verging-on-rakish look of the garment is unexpected but there are few other surprises to follow.  A Monthly Film Bulletin (January 1985) interview with Richard Combs (used as the BFI handout for their screening of the film) includes the following from Altman:

    ‘I think that the piece talks about the White House, the job, rather than the facts of history … If this were just about Nixon, I don’t think it would be anything. … When I first saw the play of Secret Honor, I kept thinking about Kennedy, who was the big hero of all the people who didn’t like Nixon.  But I tried to think of how often Kennedy sat in his room, knowing that there were certain things inside his brain which he couldn’t tell another living soul. …’

    I honestly don’t understand how Altman could think the Nixon of Secret Honor somehow representative of latter-day Presidents.  Presenting him as such only a decade after he left office was bound to be a tall order, given his public image and the unprecedented nature of his departure from the White House.  The scripts refer to specific events in a specific political career (most of them familiar even to this moderately informed British viewer – Checkers the dog, and so on).  It’s true the film’s Nixon eventually claims to have been a political pawn until ‘secret honor’ drove him to resist the orders of the network controlling him.  He insists his masters pressured him to prolong the Vietnam War to protect their commercial interests in the heroin trade in Asia; his conscience wouldn’t allow him to do this; he therefore staged Watergate as a route out of office.  But the claim is so bizarrely incredible – and the rancorous self-justification with which it’s expressed so typically Nixon (according to popular ideas of who he was) – that it can’t possibly serve to illustrate the lack of free agency of American Presidents more generally.

    In her positive review of Secret Honor, Pauline Kael remarked ‘an acting feat by a man who probably isn’t a great actor … Hall draws on his lack of a star presence and on an actor’s fears of his own mediocrity in a way that seems to parallel Nixon’s feelings …’   An interesting idea but I didn’t find the result transcendent as Kael did.  Philip Baker Hall’s performance is a feat but it’s very repetitive.  He keeps working up a head of vitriolic steam until a burst of bitter laughter interrupts it and leads him to ease off briefly.   Then he starts again.  A solo actor in a live show might do this to compelling effect (as well as in order to earn himself necessary breathing spaces).  It doesn’t withstand the camera’s scrutiny so well.

    Armed with a pistol (which he doesn’t use) and a bottle of Chivas Regal (which he uses a lot), Nixon lurches between addressing – among others – the judge in an imaginary court of public opinion, an aide called Roberto who’ll transcribe and edit the tape being made, and his late mother.  As he gets drunker, he spits out more and more expletives – aimed at Jews, liberals, the media, ‘East Coast shits’, individual bêtes noires like Eisenhower and Kissinger, and the American electorate.  His last words are ‘Fuck ‘em!’, which he yells over and over until his voice is drowned out by a crowd’s ‘Four more years!’ chant.  The CCTV monitors multiply his malignant valediction before the image on the screens disintegrates into snowstorm.  In the MFB interview Robert Altman notes that ‘Everything in the play comes from things that Nixon has written, or that have written about him’.   Plenty of these things may not have been common knowledge.  Yet Secret Honor, disappointingly, gives you the feeling you’ve heard it all before.

    16 June 2021

  • The Father

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Florian Zeller (2020)

    There aren’t too many ways that dementia dramas can end.  As their number increases, so does the pressure on writers and directors to come up with formal novelty.  In last year’s Relic, for example, Natalie Erika James turned the subject into a horror movie (the concept seemed to me a tautology).  Florian Zeller was ahead of the game.  In his internationally acclaimed stage work Le Père, first staged in Paris in 2012, the title character, André, is losing his mind and that’s where, essentially, the action takes place.  A complete stranger turns up in André’s apartment and claims to live there.  More than one actress plays Anne, André’s daughter.  The apartment’s décor is somewhat unstable.  Le Père first became a piece of cinema in the form of Philippe Le Guay’s Floride (2015) but it seems fair to see The Father as the play’s authentic screen adaptation.  Christopher Hampton, who translated Le Père into English for the stage, shares the picture’s writing credit with Zeller, making his debut here as a feature film director.  André is now Anthony, played by Anthony Hopkins

    The dramatic (and moral) virtue of Zeller’s approach is that the audience, for a while at least, shares in the protagonist’s disorientation instead of merely observing it.  Anthony’s sense of being trapped builds gradually and strongly.  I assume the occasional sequences outside his London (Maida Vale) flat – he once or twice looks out of the window and watches life going on outside; Anne (Olivia Colman) does some shopping and takes her father to see a doctor (Ayesha Dharker) – don’t have their equivalent in the stage play.  But these interludes hardly relax the claustrophobic tension, which Yorgos Lamprinos’s editing consistently reinforces.  Well played, paced and designed, The Father is an accomplished piece of cinema.  This is the second high-profile film of 2020, following Nomadland, to use for its score an earlier composition by Ludovico Einaudi.  In this case, the music’s austere melancholy gives Anthony’s life a culturally rarefied quality that reminds you of The Father‘s more than thematic kinship with Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012).  This isn’t a big issue, though:  Zeller uses Einaudi sparingly.  The only real problem – I think not a small one – is that, once you realise how The Father works and is set to continue working, you may find yourself less involved in Anthony’s predicament, more aware that you’re watching an acting masterclass from the Anthony portraying him.

    In 2015 Anthony Hopkins played Sir in a TV adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, directed by Richard Eyre.  Hopkins was excellent, except for being too good in the bits where his character, an elderly ham actor, was performing King Lear.  It was all the more disappointing, then, that Hopkins’s own King Lear, in another TV dramatisation that Eyre directed (in 2018), was shouty and lacked variety.   There are echoes of King Lear in The Father – in Anthony’s fears of going crazy, of a sense of eviction from his own life, of persecution by those close to him.  Thanks to the dual incarnation of Anne, he seems to have three daughters:  he’s repeatedly baffled and distressed by the absence of Anne’s younger sister, his favourite child (who it seems died some years ago).  Anthony Hopkins’s patriarch in The Father, a retired engineer rather than a former king, is all his television Lear wasn’t – emotionally rich and precise as well as powerful.  Hopkins is often funny too.  He conveys a fine sense of what octogenarian Anthony must have been as a younger man, and of how he’s always treated Anne.  For the benefit of his new carer, Laura (Imogen Poots), he breaks into a little tap dance.  Blatantly flirting, he tells her he used to be a professional dancer.  Laura is charmed; Anne, who knows her father better, less so.

    It’s exhilarating that Anthony Hopkins, eighty-two when the film was shot, can deliver this performance.  He doesn’t just still have all his acting marbles; he seems, amazingly, to be at the height of his powers.  His Academy Award for The Father, although considered a surprise, was thoroughly deserved.  (Chadwick Boseman is terrific in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom but there’s no way he’d have been the Oscar front-runner for his work in that film had it not been his last.)  Hopkins gets first-rate support from everyone in the small cast.  Olivia Colman melds compassion, exasperation and hurt so skilfully that Anne, despite her father’s volatile perceptions, is a coherent character.  As her husband, Rufus Sewell expertly deploys his talent for civilised menace.

    Each of the other three key players has at least two roles, and Olivia Williams has three.  Imogen Poots doubles briefly as Anthony’s lost younger daughter.  Mark Gatiss, after materialising in the flat, giving his name as Paul, claiming to live there and to be married to Anne, isn’t seen again until the closing stages, when Williams, having appeared as both Anne and Laura, takes her third role.  As daughter and carer, she has a well-meaning but businesslike streak that distinguishes her from Colman and Poots respectively.  As Paul, Mark Gatiss’s bonhomie is edged with condescension.  In both cases, these qualities make added sense when the actors eventually turn into staff in the nursing home where Anthony ends the film.  Confusing Williams’s nurse with his mother, he weeps like a child in her arms.  I found the closing moments of The Father moving.  I feel bad that I can’t say the same of most of what went before in this admirable, dramatically limited film.

    11 June 2021