Monthly Archives: April 2024

  • Scoop (TV)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Philip Martin (2024)

    Jeffrey Epstein committed abominable crimes but the 2019 Newsnight interview between Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis had a strong element of farce.  The Prince meant to draw a line under the matter of his friendship with Epstein and the allegations made against him (Andrew) by Virginia Giuffre née Roberts.  In the event, the interview was the nail in the coffin of his royal career: stripped of his HRH, Andrew withdrew from public duties and no longer receives taxpayer funding.  In Scoop, Netflix’s entertaining dramatisation of events around the Newsnight fiasco, Philip Martin negotiates well the chasm between the serious matters underlying the interview and the comical downfall that it brought about.

    Scoop’s screenplay, by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, is adapted from Sam(antha) McAlister’s Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews.  McAlister was part of the Newsnight production team involved and claims chief credit for securing the interview.  Most of the story’s main players in BBC news are women:  as well as Sam (Billie Piper) and Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), there’s Esme Wren (Romola Garai), Sam’s boss and the Newsnight editor.  Fran Unsworth (Lia Williams) is the Corporation’s Director of News and Current Affairs.  (All four are now doing other things, by the way.)   Esme Wren’s right-hand man Stewart MacLean (Richard Goulding) is a minor character.  I’m guessing from his lack of surname that Freddy (Jordan Kouamé), whose spats with Sam register more strongly, is an invented one.  The worrying context of Newsnight operations is looming BBC cuts – in an early scene, Fran Unsworth announces the impending loss of 450 jobs.  Once this is established, the workplace tensions play out unremarkably:  Freddy wants news items, especially Brexit items, more politically substantial than the kind Sam seems to be after; Sam is vexed by high-profile Emily, whom she thinks a prima donna, and so on.  But the female dominance of the set-up influences and benefits Scoop’s tone.  Because the victims of Epstein et al were girls, it’s poetic justice that women make the Prince Andrew interview happen.  It’s also, it seems, a fact – one the film-makers consider too important to obscure in a flip, smug treatment of events.

    The narrative alternates chiefly between the Newsnight office and Buckingham Palace, with the addition of scenes of Sam’s home life, with her young son Lucas (Zach Colton) and her mother (Amanda Redman), who looks after Lucas when single-parent Sam’s at work.  These latter are well enough played though there’s a bit too much about Sam’s self-doubt, soon to be banished by the journalistic coup heading in her direction.  At Buck House, Andrew (Rufus Sewell) does jokey presentations to Pitch@ Palace (some kind of entrepreneur-connecting outfit), erupts at a maid who fails to arrange part of his large collection of teddy bears properly, and is looked after by his adoring private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes).  She’s in no doubt about his vast reserves of personal charm and, dismayed by the Epstein connection’s effect on Andrew’s public reputation, runs with the idea of TV viewers getting to experience his charm, too.  Jason Stein (Alex Waldmann), recently recruited as the Prince’s PR manager, is, to put it mildly, less sure and miffed that he’s getting sidelined.  Jason gets ignored by the film as well as by the Prince – he just disappears from it.

    In contrast, Sam McAlister gets more screen time than she merits but Billie Piper is likeable in the role.  There’s good work in smaller parts from Romola Garai, Lia Williams, Jordan Kouamé and Connor Swindells, as the New York-based paparazzo who snaps Andrew and Epstein (Colin Wells) walking in Central Park at the start of the film.  Keeley Hawes does the best she can with her somewhat puzzling character.  But Scoop is – has to be – all about the two actors playing Andrew and Emily Maitlis.  Gillian Armstrong and Rufus Sewell both benefit from first-rate make-up.  They both deliver some high-class impersonation of the real people’s mannerisms, especially the way they hold and move their heads.  Beyond that, though, one performance is a lot more successful than the other.

    Emily Maitlis was forty-nine in 2019; Gillian Anderson is only fifty-five now but she seems a lot older than the woman she’s playing.  The same thing happened in The Crown:  Margaret Thatcher wasn’t yet sixty when the events dramatised supposedly took place but, in Anderson’s interpretation, she seemed ancient (at least a generation older than Olivia Colman’s version of the Queen).  Anderson is so intent on perfect vocal mimicry that she gives the impression of checking how she sounds as she delivers her lines; at any rate she speaks too slowly and her imitation thereby loses technical accuracy.  There’s a bigger problem, too.  Scoop presents Maitlis in ways that justify Sam McAlister’s perceptions of her.  Emily, who regularly brings her dog to the office (it’s a whippet, echoing its owner’s sleek, streamlined look), is calmly full of herself.  But when she takes Andrew apart, it’s proof to Sam that the colossal ego of Newsnight‘s senior anchor is well worth putting up with.  It’s not too hard to imagine that Emily Maitlis doesn’t lack for self-esteem; the trouble is, the same goes for Gillian Anderson as a performer – transparently so.  If you watch the real interview, you notice that Maitlis sometimes seems sympathetic to Andrew – enough anyway to lull him into a false sense of security (or complacency).  She varies the pitch and tempo of her questions; she occasionally gives little half-smiles.  Anderson, by comparison, is gimlet-eyed and intimidating throughout, stressing the importance of what she’s doing.  Unable to mask her self-regard as an actress, she sacrifices the means whereby Maitlis masks her formidable qualities as an interrogator.

    When I read that Rufus Sewell had been cast as Andrew, I smiled – simply because Sewell’s an actor whose versatile, good-humoured animation tends to make you smile whatever he’s in.  Even so, I did wonder if he was the right man to play well-fed, pompous Prince Andrew.  It helps, of course, that the actor is encased from head to toe in ingenious prosthetic (including a briefly glimpsed fake backside, ‘specially shipped in’, according to what Sewell told Radio Times); but would he be submerged, as well as enlarged, by this?  It turns out not at all.  Sewell uses his native wit both to make Andrew quite droll in his blokeish way and to bring out the comic aspect of the car-crash interview.  Emily has given plenty of thought to how she should dress for it; when Andrew sees her entering the room, his first word to her is ‘Trousers!’; Sewell manages to make the exclamation jocular yet misogynistic, which feels perfectly right.  He’s a wonderful blend of rebarbative and ridiculous when Andrew blathers that he couldn’t have bought Virginia Roberts drinks in Tramps nightclub because he doesn’t know where the bar is there, and besides he was at a Pizza Express in Woking with his children on the evening in question.

    Philip Martin, who has directed almost exclusively for television hitherto, does a good job throughout but his film suffers from one frustrating oversight.  Scoop is soon to be followed by Amazon’s A Very Royal Scandal, based on the same events:  the former is a single (103-minute) drama, the latter will be a three-episode series (with Ruth Wilson as Emily Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew); A Very Royal Scandal may therefore have more time to devote than Scoop does to the briefing Andrew received for the Newsnight interview[1].  Martin cross-cuts between Emily Maitlis rehearsing while she’s out running in a London park and Andrew’s getting coaching from Amanda and Jason – but only briefly.  During the recording, Amanda intervenes anxiously at one point but is rebuffed by Andrew and retreats to the sidelines.  From this point on, she’s shown smiling there; Amanda, like her deluded boss (and the Queen’s press secretary, who also watches on), appears to think it’s all gone rather well.  Straight after Scoop, Sally and I watched – for the first time in its entirety – the actual interview on BBC iPlayer.  I felt the dramatisation’s lack of coverage of interview prep all the more keenly after seeing the real thing.  Prince Andrew is astoundingly inept:  incapable of giving a short answer, he much prefers to dig holes for himself.  Did he go off script or did he not even have a script in his head to depart from?

    5 April 2024

    [1] Afternote:  A Very Royal Scandal is indeed clearer on this.  It also gives a more detailed account of the recording and editing of the interview, devoting nearly all the second episode (the best of the three) to this.  The acting, writing and direction are all strong.  For much of the last episode, though, I did wonder if the story of Andrew’s downfall merited quite so much screen time.

     

  • The Castle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Sitch (1997)

    In a couple of weeks’ time, I’ll re-view Orson Welles’s version of The Trial (1962) but watching Rob Sitch’s The Castle wasn’t a Kafka warm-up.  This is an Australian comedy, regarded in its native land as ‘one of the greatest Australian films ever made’ (Wikipedia), though I’d not heard of it until recently.  It’s a David and Goliath story, somewhat in the Ealing Studios tradition of Whisky Galore! (1949), Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953):  a determined underdog community defies the powers-that-be.  To be more precise, this is, as a TV newscaster describes it at one point in the film, a ‘Darryl and Goliath’ story:  the main character is paterfamilias Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton).  Sitch’s movie takes its name from the adage that an Englishman’s home is his castle.  The Kerrigan family lives in Coolaroo, a blue-collar suburb of Melbourne.  Their house is slap bang next to an airport runway.  Federal authorities serve the Kerrigans and their neighbours with a compulsory acquisition order on their properties, the land on which these stand to be developed as part of a planned airport expansion.  Darryl fights the eviction.  The case goes all the way to the Australian High Court.  The little guy, a six-footer with a towering personality, wins.

    There are two big differences between Sitch’s threatened protagonist and his Ealing comedy counterparts.  Ealing warriors are self-interested and resourceful, a combination more than enough to outwit vested interests trying to encroach on their territory and/or control their lives.  (Bill Forsyth both celebrated and subverted such confrontations in Local Hero (1983):  as residents of a Scottish coastal village get to like the idea of hefty compensation payments and a share of oil revenues, the representatives of the Texas energy conglomerate looking to develop a North Sea oil refinery become, in different ways, starry-eyed about the place.)  Money isn’t the issue for Darryl Kerrigan.  He’s offered seventy thousand dollars in compensation for eviction and, when he objects, an extra twenty thousand but financial inducements are beside the point:  Darryl just doesn’t want to move.  Compared with Ealing progenitors, he’s a kind of secular version of the holy fool; his wife Sal (Anne Tenney), their grown-up children and others set to lose their homes through the airport development, are no different.  Far from challenging Darryl’s unworldliness, his family, and neighbours like Farouk (Costas Kilias), the Lebanese refugee next door, look up to him.

    The Castle has a basic storyline and its against-the-odds outcome is never in doubt.  Rob Sitch and his co-writers (Santa Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Jane Kennedy) have little time for plot complications:  the film runs only eighty-four minutes and most of them are devoted to repeated illustrations of Darryl’s invincible naivety and the Kerrigan family’s routines.  Whenever a plane goes past their window they can’t hear themselves speak; the house is also adjacent to a toxic landfill; but Darryl thinks they live the life of Riley.  He drives a tow truck, breeds racing greyhounds that seldom win, carries out skew-whiff renovations to his castle and keeps adding to its supply of tacky, wacky décor, acquired at what Darryl reckons bargain prices.  Two of his and Sal’s three sons, Steve (Anthony Simcoe) and Dale (Stephen Curry), still live at home:  nearly every bit of Steve’s dialogue is reading out to his father small ads in trading papers from the pre-eBay era.  Whatever’s for sale – jousting sticks, for example – Darryl always replies, ‘What’s he asking?’ and, when Steve supplies the answer, ‘Tell him he’s dreaming’.

    Steve’s an apprentice mechanic; Dale, youngest of four and the film’s narrator, digs holes.  Their elder siblings have flown the coop in different ways:  Wayne (Wayne Hope) is in prison for armed robbery; the boys’ only sister, Tracey (Sophie Lee), has recently married Con Petropoulous (Eric Bana), an accountant and kick-boxing enthusiast.  Tracey is a hairdresser:  as Darryl never tires of saying, the day she brought home her hairdressing diploma was the proudest day of his life.  He, Sal, Steve and Dale always eat together and Darryl never fails to enthuse about his wife’s culinary efforts:  ‘What d’you call that, darl?’ he asks in wondering tones.  The answer will be rissoles or chicken or ice cream but Darryl will then say, ‘Yeah, but what did you do with it?’  The Castle is so focused on the Kerrigans’ exceeding innocence and dumb remarks that it doesn’t bother to make the forces they’re up against even superficially crafty or formidable.  Dennis Denuto (Tiriel Mora), the small-time local solicitor whom Darryl persuades to represent the family and their neighbours in court, turns out to be more inept than his clients:  it’s not just that Dennis is clueless about constitutional law; he can’t cope with his office photocopier.  A legal deus ex machina arrives in the form of genial retired barrister Lawrence Hammill (Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell), who does understand constitutional law, devises an ‘on just terms’ argument citing Section 51(xxxi) of the Australian Constitution, and gets Darryl and co their High Court victory.

    Shot in eleven days on a budget of less than a million Australian dollars, The Castle made more than ten million at the box office and the cachet claimed for it on Wikipedia turns out to be no exaggeration:  a 2022 piece in the Guardian explains its enduring popularity and cultural imprint in Australia[1].  Watching the film, I found it just about laugh-free:  the comedy, deliberately repetitious, is almost entirely dependent on the Kerrigans’ simple-mindedness.  Yet I started to have second thoughts as soon as it was over.  Most of the actors play straight – they don’t make fun of their characters, even if their lines do.  In 1997 Michael Caton was a familiar face on Australian television; Bud Tingwell had had plenty of film roles; Robyn Nevin was an esteemed actress, particularly in the theatre.  (She has a cameo here, as a baffled judge.)  In the years since, the two younger standouts in the cast, Stephen Curry and Eric Bana, have gone on to successful careers – Curry in Australian film and TV, Bana internationally.  When The Castle was made, though, few of the actors were famous.  This makes their well-judged playing all the more likeable and the orchestration of performances does Rob Sitch credit.  Viewing a few YouTube clips in order to write this note was very different from seeing the whole thing – and did make me smile.  The Kerrigan family’s hearts are in the right place; I think I now see that the film’s is, too.

    2 April 2024

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/19/its-the-vibe-25-years-on-how-the-castle-became-an-australian-classic

     

Posts navigation