Monthly Archives: April 2022

  • True Things

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Harry Wootliff (2021)

    Harry Wootliff’s second feature is the story of a woman’s obsessive attachment to a clearly unreliable man – or, rather, a man who reliably mistreats her.  Kate (Ruth Wilson), in her thirties and single, lives in Ramsgate and works in a benefits claims centre.  She prefers her phone screen, scrolling through images of sunny holiday destinations, to her office PC.  Her manager (Michael Moreland) warns Kate about poor time-keeping and absenteeism.  (Is it really the case that you need a medical certificate for a one-day migraine?)  As he talks, her attention wanders to two flies crawling up the wall.  She perks up a bit when a new claimant, probably about the same age as her, arrives at her desk – a peroxide blonde-haired man (Tom Burke), who has just been released from prison.  After running through claim registration formalities, she asks if he has any further questions.  ‘What are you doing for lunch?’ he replies.  By the end of the working day, they’re having a stand-up quickie in a multi-storey car park.  Blond (as he’s known throughout the film) aggressively calls the shots during this encounter but it’s Kate on whom it makes a lasting impression.  While they’re having sex, her head smacks into the wall behind her (‘You all right there, darlin’?’).  It’s not long into True Things before you’re wondering if that collision with concrete has resulted in brain damage.  Why does Kate pursue a hopeless relationship with this man?

    It says a lot for the direction and for Ruth Wilson’s performance that, not too much further into the narrative, you accept Kate’s unhappy devotion to Blond – even though he repeatedly goes incommunicado and, when he re-emerges, is mostly antagonistic and insulting about Kate’s attitudes, dress sense, and more.   You accept this not simply because you know there’s no film without it.   The screenplay, by Wootliff and Molly Davies (adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’s 2010 novel True Things About Me), doesn’t give the isolated protagonist much context – she seems to be an only child with just one friend, Alison (Hayley Squires), who’s also a work colleague – but it’s enough to show that, as well as being turned on by Blond and enjoying sex with him, he represents a kind of grim corrective to a life that’s stifling Kate.  In the latter part of the story, Wilson occasionally suggests the character’s own incomprehension of why she wants more of Blond and her driven curiosity to find out what will happen next, though it’s bound to be unpleasant.  The viewer shares this combination of feelings.  Ashley Connor’s cinematography also helps realise the obsession: the camera is often so close up on Ruth Wilson that it’s virtually sharing Kate’s point of view.

    Like Wootliff’s first film, Only You (2018), True Things is limited but absorbing, and Kate’s monomania serves to validate the one-track story.  The main characters aren’t likeable as they were in Only You but Wootliff delivers some deft mood shifts.  On one of Kate’s rare enjoyable outings with Blond, when they go swimming and sunbathing together, he makes fun of the ‘posh’ way she talks – ‘I bet you call your parents mummy and daddy’.  Kate, amused, replies that her parents’ names are Susan and Trevor, and asks what Blond calls his.  The answer to that is ‘bitch and cunt’:  he says he never knew his father and that his mother put him in care when he was a young child.  When we first meet Kate’s (un-posh) mother and father (Elizabeth Rider and Frank McCusker) the details of lower-middle-class conventionality feel a bit overdone – until Wootliff starts to ring the changes.  Susan’s tone, as she announces that Kate’s married cousin has just had another baby, is chiding and wistful; both parents want to know more about their daughter’s new (unnamed) young man.  Kate explains that he’s been having a tough time but is now getting back on his feet even though ‘he has no legs’.  Her mother is suitably appalled; her father laughs when Kate reveals she’s joking.  He tells Kate she must take some of his home-grown tomatoes, which she insists she doesn’t want.  Wootliff then cuts to her driving back from her parents’ home with tears in her eyes and tomatoes on the passenger seat.

    There are moments where Kate’s awareness of the potential effects of what she’s doing make her think twice.  Although phone texts are by now a standard part of film vocabulary, Wootliff makes clever use of them.   Kate composes an enthusiastic message to Blond that ends in four exclamation marks; on reflection, she removes three of them.  On the point of sending him a less jolly text, complaining about what he’s done, she pauses then deletes it.  Kate seems to feel a duty to do what’s expected of her.  After a showdown with her mother, she makes amends by accompanying Susan, numbly and glumly, on a tour round a show house.  At other times when she tries to do the conventional thing, Kate does it wrong.  During one of Blond’s absences, she goes on a blind date, arranged by Alison, with Rob (Tom Weston-Jones) – he’s good-looking, pleasantly sociable, and he bores Kate silly.  She drinks too much in the bar where they meet; when Rob gives her a lift home, she starts removing her dress and asking him for sex.  He’s appalled (‘This is a work car!’) and hurriedly drops her off near her flat.  Waiting outside to reclaim Kate is Blond, who takes her to a party, during which he vanishes again.

    As in The Souvenir (2019), Tom Burke plays a capricious, controlling figure who takes over the heroine’s life, this time with a dodgy instead of an RP accent.  Burke gives another strong performance but having less to say makes it harder for him to build a character – as Wootliff surely intends:  she presents Blond primarily in terms of what he is to Kate.  We don’t know whether the little he reveals about his past is true, and Kate is rarely inclined to find out more.  Blond claims to have spent his formative years in a series of homes; he also claims to have a sister and an invitation, including a plus one, to her wedding in Spain.  Kate never asks about the sibling relationship when they were growing up.  At one point, in desperation, she turns up outside the address Blond gave at the benefits centre.  She doesn’t see much or hang around for long, though, and there’s no follow-up to this visit.

    Kate’s phone-screen sun-seeking eventually becomes an acrid then a liberating reality.  She goes to Spain as Blond’s wedding companion but travels from England alone.  He’s not there to meet her at the airport; by the time he turns up, she’s angry enough to be short with him.  As they get ready to go to a party that evening, he vetoes the shoes she was planning to wear.  At the party, she’s left on her own as Blond chats up other women and joins in swimming-pool horseplay.  Kate wanders out into the town, then into a club.  (The flashing lights forced me to look away so I’m guessing that, like Kate’s preceding stroll in the town, her visit to the club simply delivers an enlightening taste of independence.)  She returns to the hotel room, where Blond is asleep in bed, and writes him a message.  This time there are no second thoughts or edits.  The camera shows us the message though it doesn’t need to.  We know Kate will use exactly the same words Blond scribbled down on one of the occasions he left her in the lurch:  ‘Had to run.  See you’.  The next morning Kate is driving unaccompanied through a sunny landscape.  For the first time in True Things – in its closing shot – she looks relaxed.

    Most of us will be relieved that Kate finally gets Blond out of her system – but just like that?  The Damascene conversion undermines the film’s premise.  Even so, Harry Wootliff has made another consistently absorbing drama.  The sex scenes are exemplary:  they’re discreetly done but strongly convey how much the sex means to Kate (and how little to Blond).  Through Ashley Connor’s lens, Ramsgate, in the town and on the seafront, is emotionally expressive to a surprising degree.  Ruth Wilson gets good support from the reliable Hayley Squires as Alison, well-intentioned but always keen to be in charge of Kate, and Tom Weston-Jones, who helps make the blind date episode a grimly amusing highlight of True Things.  The music, effectively used, is by Alex Baranowski and, during the closing credits, Claude Debussy.

    2 April 2022

  • Marnie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1964)

    Margaret ‘Marnie’ Edgar is a frigid kleptomaniac.  The inevitable destination of Alfred Hitchcock’s film is an explanation of why.  Hitchcock reaches the destination after more than two hours but plenty of viewers will get there sooner, and get bored with the delaying tactics of the protagonist’s repeated lies and evasions.  It’s little wonder Marnie received largely negative press and failed to set the box office alight in 1964 but its cinematic reputation has kept rising since, while Hitchcock’s personal reputation has declined, thanks chiefly to his alleged treatment of certain actresses, particularly Marnie’s star, Tippi Hedren.  (The relationship was dramatised in the television film The Girl (2012), inspired by Donald Spoto’s Hitchcock biography.)  The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who rates Marnie its director’s finest work, isn’t wrong to say that ‘The movie’s story and its backstory converge’ although the impact of that may not be so great for those who’ve seen the earlier film on which Hitchcock and Hedren worked together.  Silly as The Birds (1963) mostly is, the progressive dismantling of Hedren’s character’s impeccable appearance is all the more unpleasant when you learn what Svengali Hitchcock put his Trilby through in shooting the relevant sequences.

    Richard Brody characteristically overeggs things with bonkers follow-up pronouncements, culminating in ‘Hedren’s performance is one of the greatest in the history of cinema’ – a judgment whose daftness is mitigated only slightly by Brody’s gloss that the performance is ‘inseparable from the pathology of Hitchcock’s approach to her, personal and cinematic.’  Unless you’re aware of that ‘pathology’, the performance – on which Marnie crucially depends – is inadequate.  The Hitchcock oeuvre is hardly rich in substantial female lead roles.  A woman tends to be the male star’s helpmate, or the object of his desire or obsession, even if, occasionally, the actress concerned (Ingrid Bergman, at any rate) is strong enough to appear at least an equal partner.  Psycho (1960) seemed set to be the story of Marion Crane but look what happened to her.  So the two Hitchcock films starring Tippi Hedren are, in this sense, exceptional.  It’s true the heroine of The Birds is upstaged by the title characters but Marnie is a different matter:  whatever you think of the conception of the main character, the actress playing her needs to carry the drama.  Hitchcock hoped Grace Kelly would emerge from Monegasque retirement to take on the role.  Marilyn Monroe wanted it.  Lee Remick and Eva Marie Saint were among others considered.  It’s hardly surprising that Tippi Hedren retrospectively expressed herself ‘amazed’ to be offered the part.  She tries hard but lacks the emotional range and power to bring it off.  Brody’s enthusiasm for Hedren’s ‘presence that’s at the same time an absence’ is an unintended admission that her performance is inadequate.

    A main reason why ‘absence’ won’t cut the mustard in Marnie is the abundance of dialogue.  The psychological thrillers Hitchcock made shortly before this one – Vertigo (1958) then Psycho – have plenty of action and plenty of mystery.   Marnie is short on both but long on talk – in the two, protracted sequences featuring Marnie’s ex-prostitute, man-hating mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), and in many intervening scenes between Marnie and Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), the wealthy widowed businessman who blackmails Marnie into marrying him.  Some surprising names feature in the writing of the film, from the author of the (1961) source novel onwards.  He was Winston Graham, best known for the Poldark chronicles.  Joseph Stefano, who wrote the Psycho script, produced the first draft screenplay for Marnie; Evan Hunter, scenarist on The Birds, took over; when he and Hitchcock fell out, the latter brought in Jay Presson Allen, who had just adapted The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the stage and would go on to write the screenplay for the 1969 film version and for Cabaret (1972).  The surfeit of words in Marnie proves a problem both for Tippi Hedren, whose line readings are often colourless, and for Louise Latham, whose delivery of Bernice’s climactic speech is scaled for the theatre rather than the screen.

    Hitchcock’s far greater aptitude for visualisation, makes the film’s wordless – and music-less – moments all the more welcome.  He makes excessive use of Bernard Herrmann’s score which by now (Marnie was the seventh and last of their collaborations) sounds over-familiar:  when the music stops playing, however, it’s often a cue for a visual highlight.  One such is the opening sequence, where the camera follows a black-haired, dark-suited woman along a railway platform: just as she stops and starts to turn towards the camera, Hitchcock fades out.  There’s an enjoyably extended shot in Marnie’s workplace, when her colleagues have left for the night.  On the right-hand side of the frame, Marnie opens and empties a safe; on the left-hand side, an office cleaner (Edith Evanson) goes about her work.  Separated by a partition, each is oblivious to the other’s presence.  The best thing about the two episodes involving Bernice is the look of the Baltimore street on which she lives.  Beyond the houses, there are boats in a harbour.  This is a painted backdrop, one of matte artist Albert Whitlock’s ingenious creations – thoroughly realistic except that the lack of perspective renders the image unreal.  It’s repeated at the film’s end, when details of Marnie’s appalling childhood trauma have finally been revealed.  The vista’s static quality now seems to confirm the protagonist’s arrested development.  That impression is reinforced – this is one fine image that doesn’t go unaccompanied on the soundtrack – by children’s voices chanting a rhyme.

    In other respects, the clues to Marnie’s past are floridly banal.  The motif of a key turning in a bureau drawer, sometimes to discover another key inside the drawer, is a trite visualisation of the narrative’s quest to unlock Marnie’s secrets.  When, in stressful moments, she literally sees red, could this be triggered by a memory of blood?   When she’s terrified by thunder and lightning, might it be that whatever explains her predicament took place during a storm?  A more significant question:  does Hitchcock mean these things to be as obvious as they are?  (If yes, why not try something less obvious?  If no, how can they be admired as imaginative?)  Plenty of people are nervous of thunderstorms.  It’s probably not because, when they were five years old and saw their sex-worker mother being threatened by a male client, they came to her rescue by bashing him on the head with a poker, as lightning flashed and thunder crashed outside.  Marnie’s singular early childhood surely deserves a persisting phobia more extraordinary than this.

    The black-haired woman at the start – a yellow travel bag tucked under her left arm, a grey suitcase in her right hand – is soon revealed, as she washes out the hair dye, to be Tippi Hedren’s Marnie.  In the meantime, Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel), the boss from whom she stole the contents of her luggage (‘Nine thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven dollars!’), has told the police that the thief employee went by the name of Marion Holland.  A blonde secretary called Marion who makes off with a load of cash then washes in a rented room:  it’s as if the end of Psycho‘s leading lady is the beginning of Marnie‘s.  There’s also a connection between the last scene of dialogue in Psycho and the first one here.  The acting in smaller parts in Psycho is less comically creaky than it often is in late Hitchcock, except for Simon Oakland, as the psychiatrist who finally explains Norman Bates’s deranged personality:  Oakland hands the baton to Martin Gabel’s Strutt and the two detectives he’s talking to, played by Henry Beckman and an uncredited partner in crime.  The  big difference is that they herald the clunky playing of lesser roles that will prevail throughout Marnie.  The more these wooden actors are in evidence, the worse they seem.  I got to feeling embarrassed for Diane Baker, in the admittedly thankless role of Lil Mainwaring, whose sister was Mark’s first wife and who carries a torch for her brother-in-law.

    Sean Connery, the film’s co-star, doesn’t come into this category.  Indeed, in Richard Brody’s view, he’s more than a co-star:  Brody sees Marnie as first and foremost ‘the story … of Mark’s irrepressible lust for Marnie’, only ‘also’ as ‘a story of Marnie’s troubles and Mark’s willingness to turn his life upside down, and put himself at grave legal risk, to help her overcome them …’   If this were Hitchcock’s order of priorities, he wouldn’t have devoted so much screen time to the climactic explanation of Marnie’s ‘troubles’ or removed any sinister implication from the closing conversation between her and Mark.  (As they leave Bernice’s house together and prepare to get into their car, Marnie asks her husband if she’ll go to jail.  ‘Not if I can help it,’ he replies.  ‘I don’t want to go to jail,’ says Marnie, ‘I’d rather stay with you’.)  Brody’s piece was written in 2016, when Sean Connery was still alive, so it’s no surprise there’s no suggestion that the ‘movie’s story and its backstory converge’ also in relation to the male lead.  It’s quite hard, though, to watch the young Connery in this role without being reminded of both 007’s attitudes towards women and the actor’s own history of alleged domestic violence (and public remarks on the subject).

    Still, Marnie without Connery would be an even sorrier affair than it is.  He can’t salvage that much:  when Mark and Marnie honeymoon on a cruise ship, the scenes tread water – save for the one in which Mark startlingly asserts what he deems his conjugal rights.  But there’s no denying Connery’s presence (uncomplicated by absence!) and he can be subtly effective, too.  When sneaky, jealous Lil tips off Mark that his new wife’s mother is still alive, there’s real pain in Connery’s eyes as he registers that Marnie has lied to him (another clue that that this isn’t primarily ‘the story … of Mark’s irrepressible lust’).  After that tip-off, Mark hires a private detective to find out more about Marnie’s mother.  When he subsequently takes a call from the man, Mark says:  ‘You say she killed him? … That means the little girl must’ve been about five, is that right? … Look, have photostats made of all the court records’.  By mistakenly inferring that the unheard detective was telling Mark that Marnie had once killed someone, I anticipated the supposedly shock revelation of the film’s climax.  The misunderstanding was me being dim but it also reflected an assumption, proved right, that the source of Marnie’s lifelong nightmare had to be more than witnessing a terrible event.

    The tasteless melodrama of the closing stages is a mixture of laughable and upsetting.  Marnie’s happiest relationship is with her horse, Forio (‘Phorion’ is Greek for ‘stolen goods’), in whose company she feels free and unthreatened.  During a fox hunt on the Rutland estate, Marnie sets Forio off on a frantic gallop, as overwrought screen hunters tend to do; the horse eventually takes a crashing fall and breaks a leg.  The filming of the crazed gallop and the fall is ludicrously, no doubt knowingly, overblown yet the injured animal’s agonised screams sound real (and are hard to get out of your head).  Marnie puts both horse and audience out of their misery when she eventually gets hold of a gun and shoots Forio.  A flashback to what happened during the storm of yesteryear is crude and overlong but Bruce Dern brings clammy, malign vitality to his cameo as the sailor john menacing five-year-old Marnie (Melody Thomas Scott) and her twenty-year-old mother (Emmaline Henry).  It’s another relief when the little girl and the poker put an end to him.  This was an ill-fated year for Dern:  before 1964 was out, he would also come to a spectacularly bad end in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.  But he briefly animates both these bad films.

    31 March 2022

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