Monthly Archives: July 2021

  • Our Friend

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gabriela Cowperthwaite (2019)

    Terminal illness screen dramas tend not to be unflinching about the physical reality of the condition propelling their story.  ‘The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word’, an autobiographical piece by Matthew Teague published in Esquire magazine in 2015, describes the two years between his wife Nicole’s cancer diagnosis and her death, at the age of thirty-six.  The memoir is physically (and emotionally) unflinching.  It’s named for Matthew’s long-time best mate, Dane Faucheux, who, in December 2013, decided to put his own life, in New Orleans, on hold and moved into the Teagues’ home, in Fairview, Alabama, to help Matthew care for Nicole and the couple’s two young daughters.  Dane stayed for the next fourteen months.  Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film tries hard to do justice to the Esquire article.  The result succeeds in plenty of ways, without ever being free of tension between its uncompromising source material and the type of movie that Our Friend is, to some extent, bound to be.

    The struggle and good taste involved in this project are evident even in the title.  A shamelessly commercial enterprise might have opted instead for the seven words after the colon in Teague’s original.  When Cowperthwaite’s adaptation, with a screenplay by Brad Ingelsby, premiered at the Toronto festival in September 2019, it was simply The Friend; at some point between then and its North American theatrical release in January 2021, The became Our.  If the film-makers were thereby trying to inject more appealing human warmth into the title – this is a $10m-budget picture after all – it was a tentative effort.  The promotional poster – with Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and Matt (Casey Affleck) in a loving embrace, Dane (Jason Segel) right beside them, all three smiling gently – has a similar quality.

    More substantially, the film’s construction gives priority to exploring the main characters and their relationships, rather than showcasing the twists and turns of Nicole’s decline.  Our Friend begins with her and Matt deciding it’s time for their daughters, Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evie (Violet McGraw), to be told that the cancer they already know their mother has, will soon end her life.  From there, the narrative shifts back and forward in time – to the couple’s early days together and encounters with Dane, to more recent history.  About two-thirds through (the film runs just over two hours), there’s a reprise of part of the opening sequence.  The action then moves ahead to Nicole’s end, and the immediate aftermath of her death.  For as long as she’s alive, each episode is dated on the screen as so many days/months/years before or after her diagnosis, so the story is easy to follow.  The structure also yields more sustained variety of mood than a strictly linear progress would allow.

    For a minority of critics, relieving the grimness in this way is just what’s wrong with Our Friend.   ‘”The Friend” is not an inspirational essay, and how dare they turn it into that kind of movie?’ asks Peter Debruge in Variety.  Although this misrepresents the film, the question does point up the yawning difference between Our Friend‘s and Teague’s article’s views of death:  Debruge describes the former as a ‘dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death’.  The prevalence of this kind of account, he claims, was what ‘inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place’.  Cowperthwaite’s version certainly is sanitised in the sense of removing most of the wrenching graphic detail of Nicole’s illness that’s a big part of what makes ‘The Friend’ an extraordinary piece of writing.  The film consequently tones down too how the effects on her body and mind of the cancer and drugs taken to combat it, affected a husband’s feelings about his wife.  Even so, Our Friend (whose executive producers include Matthew Teague) can’t fairly be described as emotionally squeamish.

    I don’t know how much Brad Ingelsby has added in terms of the principals’ lives outside the Teagues’ deathbound house.  The real Matthew obviously is a journalist; did his preoccupation with work and the time he spent on overseas assignments, as the film suggests, jeopardise his marriage until Nicole’s illness brought him home?  Was she really a musical theatre performer who had a fling with her director (Jason Bayle)?  Teague’s memoir notes simply that Dane, by moving in with his friends, ‘had given up a management position and a girlfriend back in New Orleans’.  In the film, he has a crappy job in retail and his move to Alabama leads to a break-up with his girlfriend (Marielle Scott).  He also has ambitions to be a stand-up but no talent for it.

    On paper, these inventions – if that’s what they are – smack of dramatic conventionality, even padding, but that’s not how they come across as you watch the film.   An early scene in a Middle Eastern hotel, where Matt resists the female colleague who’s making a play for him, comes to mean more when he reacts, rather self-righteously, to the discovery of Nicole’s brief affair (though his derisive bafflement as to what she saw in the theatre director is reasonable enough).  Giving Dane a largely unfulfilling life in New Orleans throws a different light on his motives for moving in with the Teagues.  This doesn’t  detract from the heroism of what he does for all four of them.  It does make Dane more than simply self-sacrificing.

    As always, Casey Affleck is unafraid to show his character’s less likeable aspects – and the actor’s integrity in doing this makes you root for the man he’s playing.  Affleck also shows fine imagination, especially when Matt tells their daughters that Nicole is dying, and at the very end of the film.  Jason Segel’s abundant wit and good humour are unfailingly anchored in the credible, nuanced personality that he creates.  The exchanges between Dane and Matt are reliably penetrating and sometimes funny – so too scenes between Matt and Nicole.  Dakota Johnson is doubly affected by the adjustments Cowperthwaite and Ingelsby have made.  Matthew Teague is unsparing to the bitter end, describing the sound of his wife’s last breaths as ‘like someone slowly dragging a cello bow across her vocal cords. I realized then that the last honest person to describe death may be whoever came up with “croaking”.’   The film’s Nicole, like many screen cancer victims before her, dies fragrantly and peacefully.  Besides, once the physical horrors are excised, the story is largely about the friendship of the two men so that Johnson’s role, compared with theirs, seems underwritten.  Even so, she gives a committed and compelling performance.  There’s an invigorating cameo from Cherry Jones as an end-of-life carer.  Isabella Kai does very well as the Teagues’ elder daughter.

    The film wobbles in the closing stages.  There’s a surfeit of sweetly melancholy music as Nicole approaches death, even allowing that some of this is part of a flashback to a stage show in which she was the star.  Shortly after she dies, Dane goes into a decline and shuts himself away in his room; it feels wrong that he revives the moment he discovers the piece Matt has been writing is a paean to him as much as a tribute to Nicole.  Our Friend recovers in its final moments, though, in the contained emotions of the men’s farewell to each other, as Dane returns to New Orleans and Matt embarks on life as an entirely lone parent.

    Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s background is in documentaries.  This is only her second dramatic feature and she does a good job.  She’s true to the dichotomy that Matthew Teague points up between the public and private aspects of death in affluent modern western society – bucket-list social life versus isolation behind closed doors.  Brad Ingelsby’s dialogue is consistently strong.  Scene by scene, the film impresses, even as you realise its limitations.  Because it has plenty of mawkish predecessors, you may feel, when tears come to your eyes (as they did a few times to mine), that the movie is par for the course.  But Our Friend is not that.

    1 July 2021

     

  • The United States vs Billie Holiday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lee Daniels (2021)

    As its title suggests, Lee Daniels’s biography presents Billie Holiday as an American government target as well as a famous jazz singer.  The two aspects are fused through her celebrated song ‘Strange Fruit’, which the FBI deems less politically insightful than it is inciteful, and which is at the heart of Daniels’s narrative.  Holiday first recorded ‘Strange Fruit’ in 1939 so The United States vs Billie Holiday is concerned with the last two decades of her life; there’s just the occasional flashback to, for example, the Baltimore brothel where, as a pre-adolescent, she ran errands and scrubbed steps.  Billie (Andra Day) is repeatedly discouraged from performing ‘Strange Fruit’ and repeatedly refuses to drop it from her set.  The authorities, unable to prosecute her for this, convict her on narcotics charges instead.  The film charts Billie’s relationship with Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes) who, after active service in World War II, joins the FBI but eventually quits.  His feelings for Billie grow pari passu with his disgust at the Agency’s tactics.

    Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote the screenplay, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist.  Some of the comically clumsy dialogue she’s concocted makes this hard to believe.  ‘People are calling the song a musical starting gun for the so-called civil rights movement,’ says Roy Cohn (Damian Joseph Quinn) of ‘Strange Fruit’, in a pow-wow with Senator Joe McCarthy (Randy Davison) et al.  You wouldn’t guess Parks’s reputation as a playwright from the script’s construction either – or, at least, from the mess it has become in Daniels’s hands.  At the start, Billie is being interviewed by a camp journalist called Reginald Lord Devine (Leslie Jordan).  You’re primed for this to be used as a framing device.  It turns out to be just another bit – Devine returns only a couple of times throughout the whole 130 minutes.  (To be fair, the rarity of Leslie Jordan’s appearances – like several others in the cast, he’s miles over the top – is a relief.)  An exact date and place are shown on screen to introduce some sequences, but by no means all.  This seems pointless when the relationship of these scenes to other, unexplained ones is often unclear.   When Billie ‘remembers’ the events that inspired ‘Strange Fruit’, Jimmy is also part of them; she’s presumably having a bad dream so we’ve no idea what she actually experienced.  As for the songs, they’re often interrupted.  Daniels cross-cuts, for example, between Billie performing ‘Them There Eyes’ and Billie having it off.

    As a singer, Andra Day sounds more like Billie Holiday than Diana Ross did in Lady Sings the Blues but so she should.  Ross didn’t try to mimic Holiday; Day does, and it shows.  She always seems to be doing an impression of the famous voice.  She captures some aspects – the huskiness, say – with a deal of skill but her vocal texture is thinner than the original’s and her mannerisms, as a result, are too salient.  As an actress, she isn’t a patch on Ross:  Day tries hard (and often looks to be concentrating hard) but she lacks emotional variety and fluidity.  There’s a further problem, albeit one now usual in biopics set in the middle of the last century.  In Judy (2019), Renée Zellweger’s disintegrating Judy Garland was too shapely and toned.  Andra Day’s Billie, for someone who has abused her body for years, looks surprisingly robust.  It appears she goes to the gym more often than she takes heroin.

    Since Jimmy Fletcher might have got himself in good shape, this is less of a problem with him, despite Trevante Rhodes’s super-ripped physique.  It’s less of a problem too, of course, because Jimmy isn’t a famous person, though he was presumably a real one:  the closing legends inform us that – believe it or not! – he regretted to his dying day working for the FBI.  Rhodes, who made such a strong impression in Moonlight, is a more naturally expressive actor than Andra Day.  He’s particularly good at suggesting Jimmy’s ambivalence in the early stages – before, that is, it becomes a main plot element.  But his character, as written, is both overdone and underdone.  There are times when Jimmy’s predicament seems meant to be a representative African-American dilemma of the era – how to make a success of your life without selling your soul to the diabolical status quo – but this theme isn’t worked through.  Once he falls for Billie, the film gives only a sketchy account of how this affects Jimmy at work.

    His boss there is Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), in reality the first commissioner of the US Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and holder of the office from 1930 until 1962.  At one point, Anslinger tells Jimmy that ‘You looked like Nat King Cole but you sounded like Stepin Fetchit’.  Hedlund, not for the first time giving a decent performance in a bad film, has too much taste to deliver this thudding barb with the emphasis that Suzan-Lori Parks and Lee Daniels probably intended.  Louis McKay (Rob Morgan) is a minor character here compared with in Lady Sings the Blues, though around long enough for Daniels to demonstrate McKay’s violent treatment of Billie.  The film grinds glumly and tediously through to her death in July 1959.  Even when she’s in her hospital bed, Anslinger is trying to frame Billie for drugs offences.  She tells him that one day his grandchildren will be singing ‘Strange Fruit’.  Daniels implies that her prophecy is accurate and, therefore, consolatory.  At the same time, the load of text he puts on screen at the end includes the information that, as of February 2020, the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act had still not been passed by the US Senate.  A more intelligent film-maker might juxtapose Billie Holiday’s prediction and  this political reality to ironic effect; Daniels just uses them as two more attention-grabbers.   His muddled thinking puts the seal on a chaotic film.

    28 June 2021

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