Daily Archives: Sunday, August 28, 2022

  • Hester Street

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joan Micklin Silver (1975)

    In the pre-Sundance era of American independent film-making, writer-director Joan Micklin Silver’s debut feature enjoyed unusual success.  Hester Street got some good reviews, fared well at the box office (Wikipedia shows takings of $5m from a $370,000 budget) and earned its lead actress Carol Kane a surprise Oscar nomination.  Micklin Silver’s screenplay is adapted from Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, first published in 1896.  Yekl is a novella and Hester Street, which runs ninety minutes, a small-scale drama with barely a subplot in sight.  But the theme is important (though never self-important) and the characters are engaging.

    The setting is the Jewish immigrant quarter on New York’s Lower East Side, in the last decade of the nineteenth century.  The people are Ashkenazi Jews, mostly of Russian origin; the drama derives from the tensions between their preserving traditions of the old country and assimilating into the culture of the new.  Yankel (Steven Keats) has acculturated quickly in America.  He now goes by the name of Jake; he’s having an affair with Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), a Polish immigrant who works at a dance ‘academy’ and aspires to set up her own.  Jake borrows money from Mamie, though he’s the best paid worker in a tailoring business, where he spends his days hunched over a sewing machine.  He works in the sweatshop opposite Bernstein (Mel Howard), Yeshiva-educated and in mourning for a life from which emigration has exiled him.  Bernstein boards with Jake because he can’t afford anything better.  Jake has a wife and a young son back in Russia; when his own father dies, they cross the Atlantic to join Jake in Manhattan.  The wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), is frustrating to her husband because she’s ill-prepared and ill-disposed to Americanise.  She has no English.  As a married Jewess, she insists on wearing a wig or a kerchief to cover her own hair.  Jake wants their son Yossele (Paul Freedman) to be known as Joey from now on but Gitl digs her heels in.  Distressed by but resistant to her blowhard husband’s bullying, she’s increasingly drawn to the sad-eyed, courteous Bernstein.

    Joan Micklin Silver seems to make her cultural sympathies instantly clear.  Hester Street’s opening sequence is set in Mamie’s workplace, owned by Feltner (Stephen Strimpell):  couples move around the cramped dance floor and change partners (predicting the film’s conclusion).  After the dance class, Jake, Mamie, Feltner and others drink and chat in a bar, where they’re joined by, and make light-hearted fun of, a younger Jewish immigrant (Zane Lasky), just off the boat and still wearing a traditional beard and hat.  Later, when Gitl and Bernstein have begun to talk together while Jake is out drinking or womanising, they declare, in Yiddish, ‘a pox on Columbus’.   Although this too is light-hearted, they mean what they say.  Away from his New Home sewing machine (a real make put to symbolic use), Bernstein continues to study his holy books.  He does so out of a sense of duty but the books are also a linus blanket.

    Micklin Silver turns out to be far from thoroughly traditional, though.  Gitl’s gradual emergence from an oppressive marriage is at the heart of Hester Street and, in the climax to the story, she and Jake divorce.  The officiating rabbi (Zvee Scooler) reminds the ex-couple of the dictates of Jewish law:  a divorced husband is free to marry again immediately while his former wife must wait at least ninety-one days to do so.  Micklin Silver uses the rabbi’s words not just to make a feminist point but to foreshadow her neat, just-desserts conclusion.   As Jake and Mamie rush off to wed, Jake learns that his new bride, thanks to the divorce settlement, is less well off than he thought – a strong hint that he’ll repent at leisure.  In contrast, Gitl walks down the street unhurriedly with Bernstein and the son she now calls Joey.  She also speaks English and shows her own hair; her husband-to-be is no longer submerged in regret for what he lost in coming to America.  With the money Gitl obtained in exchange for the divorce, she and Bernstein plan to open a grocery store.  They discuss whether to stock sodas and seltzers.  The last line of the script – Bernstein’s – is ‘we mustn’t be too quick to say this or that’.

    Everything about Carol Kane’s gently blossoming Gitl and Mel Howard’s droll, melancholy Bernstein is eloquently natural.  Paul Freedman’s Yossele-Joey, who resembles his pale, fair-haired mother so much more than his swarthy, rakish father, is also very right, though the boy’s part is underwritten.  He gets on well with kind, earnest Bernstein but also with the more exuberant Jake – it’s not clear what effect the rift between his parents has on the child.  There’s some coarse, stagy acting in smaller parts – how coarse seems to depend on how small the part.  Robert Lesser is excruciatingly crude in his one scene as Mamie’s lawyer, ineptly negotiating a divorce deal with Gitl.  Doris Roberts has the screen time to turn Mrs Kavarsky, who seems at first a cartoon nosy neighbour and gossip, into a more rounded character.  The main weakness of Hester Street is Steven Keats’s Jake.   Instead of showing, as he needs to do, the strain of Jake’s determination to be American, Keats struggles to convince that he was ever anything else (and particularly with sustaining the accent meant to show his European origins).  His screen presence is strong enough but contains not a trace of the old country:  it’s impossible to believe Jake was once like the bearded, prayerful greenhorn immigrant in the bar at the start of the film.

    Joan Micklin Silver chose to shoot in black and white (the cinematographer is Kenneth Van Sickle).  This makes sense:  her audience is familiar with the world that Hester Street brings to life primarily through monochrome photographs of the period.  Micklin Silver ends, however, with a freeze frame that doesn’t suggest a still.  This shot of Gitl and Bernstein in a busy Manhattan street conveys, rather, suddenly arrested motion – that these people were moving on the screen a split-second before.  William Bolcom arranged the music, by Herbert L Clarke  (who was famous chiefly as a cornet player:  Gerard Schwarz plays the score’s cornet solo).  This soundtrack is always agreeable and occasionally very effective – for example, as accompaniment to Jake and Joey’s pretend baseball game on a picnic outing.  At other times the music tends to overstress that Hester Street is minor but that’s never enough to detract from the film’s great interest and real charm.

    25 August 2022

  • Nope

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jordan Peele (2022)

    I emerged from Curzon Richmond needing a Wikipedia plot synopsis and – worse – an Armond White review.  I hoped his predictable vivid antipathy to a Jordan Peele picture would dissolve some of the nervous tension of watching Nope.  White duly obliged and so did Wikipedia, which defines Peele’s third feature as an ‘epic science fiction horror film’.  It did sometimes make me want to scream but out of boredom rather than fear.

    Wikipedia’s label omits an important genre component of Nope:  the Western.  The action, which takes place in the present day, is centred on a remote ranch in California, the site of a distinctive family business.  After the death of Otis Haywood Sr (Keith David) in the opening minutes of the film, his son OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) take over the reins of the business, wrangling and training horses for movie and television work.  Haywood’s Hollywood Horses is the only set-up of its kind owned and run by African Americans.  (Hayward [sic], by the way, was the forename of Jordan Peele’s late father.)  The Haywoods’ few neighbours include Jupe (Steven Yeun), who wears cowboy outfits and runs Jupiter’s Claim, a theme park where visitors can pretend to be in a Western.  The set-up strongly suggests that Peele’s interested in the Wild West as a money-making vehicle – with particular reference to the involvement of ethnic groups not usually associated with the commercial Western.

    On the wall of an office at the ranch is a poster for Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher (1972), a Western in which the title roles were played by Poitier and Harry Belafonte.  But the Haywoods’ family connection with horses and film-making is – as Emerald explains in a pitch for a TV commercial – uniquely long-standing.  As part of the pitch, she shows one of the earliest moving-picture images, created by Eadweard Muybridge in the late nineteenth century.  It shows a galloping horse ridden by a Black jockey:  he was, says Emerald, Alistair Haywood, her and OJ’s great-great grandfather.  It’s an intriguing connection and, though fictitious, acquires the semblance of truth because Muybridge’s ‘The Horse in Motion’ is real and the horse’s rider really was Black.  Jupe, in the Korean-American person of Steven Yeun, isn’t similarly connected to his low-budget Westworld domain but his fictional backstory is also fascinating.  Jupe was once Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park, a child actor in ‘Gordy’s Home’ – a hit TV sitcom of the 1990s until the title character, a chimpanzee, went berserk on set, attacking and maiming his human adult co-stars while the terrified Jupe hid under a table.  The show was recorded before a live studio audience:  even as Gordy wreaked havoc, the illuminated studio sign kept up its flashing cue ‘Applause’.

    Peele accumulates instances of human exploitative abuse of non-human creatures and the latter’s revenge.  The mayhem on the sitcom set happened because the performing chimp was frightened by the pop of balloons (it was Gordy’s birthday).  At the filming of the TV commercial, OJ’s warning to the crew not to spook their horse by shining a light in its eyes goes unheeded:  the animal reacts violently and the Haywoods are fired on the spot.  At the centre of Nope‘s plot is a UFO, which appears to be the cause of Otis Haywood Sr’s peculiar death at the start:  a coin falls from the sky and penetrates his eye and brain.  The UFO – shaped like a flying saucer but reminiscent too of a ten-gallon hat – subsequently sucks up horses on the ranch.  When Jupe uses a horse as bait to get the UFO to perform at Jupiter’s Claim in front of a paying audience, the thing in the sky obliges by devouring Jupe and his customers instead.  With the help of tech geek Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), OJ works out that the UFO is no spaceship but a territorial creature that eats anything that looks directly at it.  OJ starts referring to the thing as ‘Jean Jacket’, after a horse his father could never tame.

    This much (or nearly this much) I gleaned from watching Nope; it seems pointless to include further plot details that I only discovered afterwards.  I can’t know how many of these I missed through picking up no more than intermittently what people on the screen were saying.  In her first scene, when Emerald is making the Haywoods’ pitch, Keke Palmer’s delivery is refreshingly distinct.  Once that public speaking is over, she’s the chief offender in the indecipherability stakes.  It’s not a question of volume – Emerald’s usually excited voice is loud enough.  Making out the words, though, is a different matter.  Daniel Kaluuya is less of a problem if only because OJ, in keeping with his Western hero quality, is a man of relatively few words (one of them the film’s title).  Besides, Kaluuya is expressive in other ways, to a greater extent than anyone else in the cast.  Although I don’t like Nope, I was once again impressed by its lead actor.

    In his hostile review of Peele’s Get Out (2017), Armond White described Kaluuya’s ‘dark skin/bright-teeth image’ as ‘inadvertently recall[ing] the old Sambo archetype’.  Noting that ‘Surely Spike Lee would have recognized the resemblance to Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland, and Willie Best, the infamous comics who made their living performing Negro caricatures during Hollywood’s era of segregation’, White suggested that Peele seemed ‘too caught up in exploiting modern narcissism to notice old repulsion’.  Even at the time, I thought White was probably wrong to think this inadvertent and Peele’s subsequent work – Us (2019), now this film – settles the argument.  It seems that Peele casts Kaluuya both for his acting skill and precisely because his facial characteristics evoke the egregious treatment of Black performers during Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’.  In Nope, the weight of Kaluuya’s melancholy presence does more than reflect OJ’s particular circumstances.  It also situates him in racially exploitative cinema history, the exposure of which is evidently essential to Jordan Peele’s own film-making.

    Armond White is right, though, when he censures Peele for the naming of his latest protagonist (‘Every time OJ is addressed, Peele achieves an unearned cultural frisson’) and compares his approach with Quentin Tarantino’s in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019).  Like Tarantino’s worlds, the world of Nope is defined by ‘movieland history’ (White again), which limits its impact – even its immediate impact.  Unlike Tarantino, Peele isn’t, since Get Out anyway, a naturally talented storyteller.  As with Us, the themes of Nope sound promising on paper – an alien entity’s force field is a location peopled by Hollywood ‘aliens’, and so on – but they don’t play out interestingly.  As a piece of horror cinema, the few minutes of the ‘Gordy’s Home’ subplot are much more gripping than the UFO-or-is-it stuff that makes up most of the film’s 130 minutes.  (Inside the chimpanzee costume is Terry Notary, whose extraordinary simian antics also briefly enlivened Ruben Östlund’s overrated The Square (2017).)

    Get Out was a deserved critical and commercial success, and a dual surprise.  Peele, who had worked predominantly in television comedy, gave evidence of precocious film-making skill in a genre you wouldn’t have expected from him as a first-time director.  His second film was another racially charged horror movie and the result much less effective, although Us (2019), like its predecessor, was a big box-office hit.  Peele was thus established, even before writing and producing the remake of Candyman (2021), as a purveyor of smart-aleck horror and Nope proves it’s time he tried something else.  For a while, the film is more tonally varied than Us but it’s also longer and, by the halfway point, has turned into a bombastic spectacular slog.  As with Us, I saw Nope through with difficulty.  To this cinemagoer, the title of his auspicious debut is starting to sound like warning advice on sitting down to watch a Jordan Peele film.

    18 August 2022