Monthly Archives: January 2025

  • A Complete Unknown

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Mangold (2024)

    Catching part of James Mangold’s Walk the Line (2005) on TV the other week reminded me how much I like the film despite its dreary biopic cliches, and why.  It’s a dual biography, of June Carter as well as Johnny Cash, and both are splendidly portrayed (by Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix).  The whole story tends towards the happy ending of June agreeing to marry Johnny; it’s a happier ending because we already know that the marriage endured.  There’s lots of good music too, as there also is in Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, but this Bob Dylan biopic, starring Timothée Chalamet, lacks other things that Walk the Line had, romantic momentum among them.  To the extent that Mangold means to present Chalamet’s Dylan as enigmatically inaccessible – the film’s title, echoing the phrase in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, makes this clear enough – there’s no reason why romantic momentum should feature strongly.  Yet the screenplay, by the director and Jay Cocks, is hardly more imaginative than the Walk the Line script Mangold wrote with Gill Dennis:  A Complete Unknown still depends heavily, for example, on dramatising the main character’s love life – Dylan’s affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – and it does so in a thoroughly conventional way.  The same applies to the crude, cartoonish presentation of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and other mercenary music industry figures.  To deliver on the ambitious approach to a biopic protagonist that his movie seems to profess, Mangold needed to ground it in a much more imaginative narrative than he supplies.

    Not that Bob-Dylan-the-enigma is an original screen concept anyway.  Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) was premised on Dylan’s elusiveness, realised by Haynes having different actors incarnating different aspects of Dylan’s persona – none of these incarnations was called Bob Dylan – during his already long career.  The acknowledged source material for Mangold and Cocks’ screenplay, Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, sounds to have a very specific subject; and A Complete Unknown‘s timeframe is short, 1961 to 1965.  As context, Mangold trots out, via black-and-white television screens, the usual big news events of the period:  the Cuban Missile Crisis; the March on Washington (with Timothée Chalamet inserted into the footage for Dylan’s appearance there); the Kennedy assassination.  The film’s supposed climax is the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 – specifically what Elijah Wald’s subtitle to Dylan Goes Electric! labels the ‘Night That Split the Sixties’.

    Before Dylan goes ahead with his electric guitar performance, despite the pleas of Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and others on the Newport committee, he and Joan Baez duet ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’.  Bob and Sylvie Russo (aka Suze Rotolo: according to Wikipedia, the real Bob Dylan asked the filmmakers not to use Rotolo’s real name) appear to have split up some time ago but he chooses the occasion to persuade her to get on his motor bike with him and come along to Newport.  This means that, as Bob and Joan are singing, Sylvie can stand in the wings, reduced to tears by the unignorable strength of connection of the pair onstage:  ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ is suddenly telling the story of what’s happening on screen as obviously as many a number did in the traditional movie musical.  I felt sorry for Elle Fanning (a good actress):  Mangold repeatedly cuts back and forth between the stage and Sylvie looking upset until she (Sylvie but perhaps Fanning too) can’t take any more and runs off in distress.  To prolong the cliché, Mangold has Dylan follow Sylvie and try in vain to talk her out of exiting his life for good.  This episode is meant to be the hors d’oeuvre to the notorious electric set.  The latter is staged so lamely that it becomes a standard-issue biopic illustration of the daring artist scandalising their audience.  This means there are close-ups of three or four people in the Newport crowd chucking verbal abuse and physical objects Dylan’s way, clumsy and futile attempts by the organisers to mute the sound, and so on.

    Timothée Chalamet is a rather shallow actor, which makes it more galling to read rumours that he insisted on being addressed as Bob during the shoot in order to stay uninterruptedly in character.  (At least when there were similar stories about Daniel Day-Lewis you could rely on the results making the actor’s demands seem worth it.)  Chalamet’s portrait makes sense of the film’s conception of its subject but his singing and guitar-playing are more impressive than his interpretation of Dylan in non-musical parts of the story.  What Chalamet does as Dylan the performer is a considerable feat of mimicry – he seems (to these admittedly non-expert ears) to have the original’s nasal whine down to a tee.  What’s more, his intense focus on getting the vocals right means that Chalamet on stage seems to be in a world of his own, which corresponds to  Dylan’s self-absorption and suggests his creative single-mindedness.   When Dylan isn’t performing or in the process of composing songs, however, the effect of not being allowed inside his character is very different.  Chalamet sometimes seems merely to be striking attitudes: because that’s something he’s done before on screen (with less justification), it’s hard not to see the attitudinising here as a tendency of the actor rather than a facet of the man he’s playing.

    All the actors do their own singing and seem to do it very well, Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton especially.  Barbaro’s voice isn’t as rich as Joan Baez’s but it’s lovely to listen to.  Norton’s Pete Seeger is infinitely benign and that warmth comes through in his singing as well as his speaking voice – no mean achievement.  In what in this film is the small role of Johnny Cash, Boyd Holbrook also gives an enjoyable performance on and off stage.  It’s a pity that, later on, Cash keeps reappearing just to support Dylan when no one else seems prepared to: when he hands over his own acoustic guitar for Bob to do a folk song as an encore at Newport, it’s one encouragement too many, even if it did really happen.  The narrative starts with Dylan – at this stage a complete unknown in terms of recognition too – visiting Woody Guthrie, his idol, in hospital, when Guthrie’s friend Seeger is also at his bedside, and Bob impresses them both with the ‘Song to Woody’ he’s recently composed.  Scoot McNairy is magnetic as the ailing, nearly mute Woody although, after another couple of short scenes between him and Pete, Mangold forgets about Guthrie until the closing sequence, a postscript to the Newport kerfuffle, when Dylan visits him again.  This seems to be for bookending purposes only.

    The only saving grace of the ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ bit comes when, as she sees Dylan about to join her on stage, Joan Baez gives him the finger, turning so that the Newport audience can’t see what she’s doing.   (This was also the only time I laughed throughout the film.)  It’s not long into their relationship that Baez says to Dylan one morning, ‘You’re kind of an asshole, Bob’ and he tonelessly replies, ‘I guess’.  That exchange sums up James Mangold’s film rather more neatly than it should.  Whatever anyone thinks of Bob Dylan, few will deny he’s a hugely consequential figure in twentieth-century music.  For all the performing talent in evidence, A Complete Unknown feels inconsequential.

    21 January 2025

  • The Defiant Ones

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kramer (1958)

    Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) is Stanley Kramer at his awkwardly high-minded worst but this earlier collaboration with Sidney Poitier is relatively good.  Since the late 1940s, Kramer had produced a string of well-known movies – Champion (1949), High Noon (1952) and The Wild One (1953) among them – but had directed only two films before The Defiant Ones.  (I’ve not seen either of these, Not as a Stranger (1955) and The Pride and the Passion (1957).)  Written by Harold Jacob Smith (screenplay) and Nedrick Young (story), The Defiant Ones would, within a very few years, be seen as typical Kramer fare – an earnest, politically liberal perspective on thorny social and moral issues.  One night, somewhere in the American South, a vehicle transferring prisoners from one jail to another crashes and two convicts escape.  One’s African American, the other white and they’re shackled together ‘because the warden had a sense of humor’.  Noah Cullen (Poitier) and John ‘Joker’ Johnson (Tony Curtis) don’t like each other – one of their prospective pursuers predicts they’ll kill each other before they’ve gone five miles – but they’re physically required to co-operate in order to stay on the run.  By the film’s closing scene, in which Noah and Joker are recaptured, they have got rid of their metal chains and learned they’re bound together by their common humanity.

    The Defiant Ones is visually more fluid and dynamic than you might expect from a Kramer film.  (Sam Leavitt’s black-and-white cinematography won the Academy Award, as did the didactic screenplay; the picture received six other Oscar nominations, including nods for Kramer and both his leading men.)  The sequences in which Noah and Joker run through hilly terrain, often in bad weather, are exciting and almost amusing – Noah has a much longer stride so Joker especially is always off balance.  A weakness is that, though the narrative is premised on the twosome’s gradually increasing trust and understanding of each other, illustrations of this seem thin on the ground.  Kramer and the writers are sure of the story’s final destination but it’s not long before that’s reached that Joker, once they’ve eventually disposed of their shackles, is on the point of making off without Noah.  Even after that, they part company:  it’s only when he learns Noah is heading for a swamp in which he’ll certainly drown that Joker changes his mind and goes after Noah.

    The presentation of contemporary racism is interesting.  Noah and Joker try to break into a general store in the hope of stealing tools to free themselves but are captured by a group of locals whose vile leader Mack (Claude Akins) wants to burn both men.  It’s striking that, because Joker is literally attached to Noah, Mack is ready to kill the white man (who’s a redneck bigot like himself) along with the Black man but the pair’s saviour is a pat idea.  Big Sam (Lon Chaney Jr), who persuades the other locals to lock Noah and Joker up for the night and hand them over to the law next morning, surreptitiously releases them:  it’s revealed that Big Sam was once a chain-gang prisoner, too.  A much longer episode involves a white pre-adolescent called Billy (Kevin Coughlin), then his mother (Cara Williams).  (She’s ’the woman’ in the cast list – I’ll give her an initial capital.)  Noah and Joker bump into Billy, who’s out in the fields with a rifle (‘hunting’); in a struggle for the gun, Billy falls over and hits his head on a rock.  It’s Noah who stays back to bring him round; once he succeeds, the boy runs straight to Joker for protection, staring hostilely at Noah.  The three of them then head back to where Billy and the Woman live (the man of the house has deserted his wife and son).  With a hammer and chisel that Billy brings from the yard, Noah and Joker break their chains.  The Woman then gives food to Joker but is disinclined to do the same for Noah until Joker tells her to.  These instances of automatic, casual racism hit home harder than a set piece like the lynch mob.

    Kramer alternates the principals’ story with scenes involving their main pursuers – a sheriff (Theodore Bikel), a police captain (Charles McGraw), and the man responsible for the police bloodhounds and Dobermans (King Donovan); there’s also a newspaperman (Lawrence Dobkin) in tow.  Theodore Bikel works up a decent characterisation as the humane sheriff but this group’s disputes are too many and mechanical – we always want to get back to the main duo.  Both are serving time for a serious offence – Noah for ‘assault and battery … intent to kill’, Joker for armed robbery.  It’s not suggested that either has been wrongfully convicted although Noah’s attack was on a white man who racially insulted him.  Excellent as they are, Poitier and Curtis, because they’re so naturally engaging, have to work hard to convince you they’re men capable of criminal violence, and I’m not sure they do.  Both have fine moments, though.

    Oddly enough, Curtis’s best bit not only doesn’t come in an exchange with Poitier but collides with the film’s worst performance, from Cara Williams.  From the moment the Woman appears, she’s giving Joker the glad eye in a big way.  Fiddling with the top of her skirt, smiling furtively, Williams strikes come-hither poses for Joker and the camera that are held far too long.  This lonesome Woman is clearly hungry for a man but she needs to be rougher, more straightforward for the desperation to come through credibly:  Cara Williams’ Deep South flower-born-to-blush-unseen number is gruesome.  When he and Noah arrive at her house, however, Joker is ill – with ‘poison in his system’, Noah tells the Woman – and passes out.  When he comes to, and with Noah now asleep, the Woman is nursing Joker.  Kramer gives Joker a lot of script here – the theme is ‘All the things you ever wanted but you ain’t gonna get’ – but Tony Curtis feels what he says and his enervation makes it all work.  And you do believe in Joker’s need for sex – he and the Woman sleep together that night.

    Poitier’s highlight – a triple highlight – is also in the nature of a solo and indeed it comes in singing rather than spoken dialogue.  Noah delivers an adaptation of W C Handy’s 1920s blues song ‘Long Gone John (from Bowling Green)’ three times during The Defiant Ones.  At the start, he’s driving everyone in the prison van crazy with it.  The next time he sings, while they’re on the run, he again gets on Joker’s nerves.  The third rendition comes after the two men have tried and failed to jump on a slow-moving train – Noah gets aboard and attempts to pull his companion up too but Joker can’t make it, and they both fall to the ground.  Exhausted, they wait for the inevitable, which arrives in the form of the sheriff, who arrests them.  Sidney Poitier may not be technically a good singer but he’s a mightily expressive one in the sarcastic anger and exasperation he gets into Noah’s version of ‘Long Gone’, especially in the second reprise.  Joker, lying against Noah, is finally at peace with his singing.  This may simply be because he’s done for, yet the moment conveys better than perhaps any other the friendship the men have formed.  It also supplies The Defiant Ones with a highly effective ending – unemphatic and, as such, uncharacteristic of Stanley Kramer.

    19 January 2025

     

    Postscript

    The Defiant Ones was the second of two films that I saw in BFI’s Sidney Poitier season, following The Slender Thread.  There would have been more but I’d seen others before, including A Raisin in the Sun as recently as last October at BFI.  When I wrote about that film, I was looking forward to seeing Ralph Nelson’s Lilies in the Field in the Poitier retrospective.  It does strike me as silly for BFI’s brochure to mention in the note on The Slender Thread Poitier’s ‘historic Best Actor Oscar win in 1963 for Lilies of the Field’ but give no explanation as to why Nelson’s film wasn’t included in the current Poitier season.

     

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