Old Yorker

  • The Descendants

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alexander Payne (2011)

    I knew before seeing it:  (a) this was the story of a family in Hawaii and centred on the father Matt, a lawyer preoccupied with his work and emotionally neglectful of his daughters; (b) the family’s lives were turned upside down when the mother Elizabeth was injured in a powerboat accident; (c) Matt discovered that Elizabeth, now lying unconscious in hospital, had been unfaithful to him.  I assumed that, even so, Matt would, while his wife was out of the picture, learn to be the father he never had been, Kramer vs Kramer-style.  I didn’t know that it would soon be revealed that Elizabeth had suffered irreversible brain damage and that it was only a matter of time before her life support was turned off.  A long time, as it turns out:  The Descendants is tediously maudlin and it comes as a relief when the wife expires.  Before that happens, she’s been on the receiving end of angry and/or tearful bedside monologues from Matt, from her elder daughter Alex, and from the wife of the man with whom Elizabeth with had been having an affair.  The hospital room has also heard various exchanges of cross words between Elizabeth’s nearest and dearest.  There were moments when, listening to all these overwritten home truths, I felt the brain-dead patient was better off than the audience.  Still, the deathbed verbiage isn’t as bad as Matt’s voiceover, which dominates the early stages, as he explains situations and characters which are already obvious.  On his way to pick up Alex from her boarding school on ‘another island’, he looks down from the plane window at the ocean and islands and muses that, ‘A family feels exactly like an archipelago … separate but part of a whole and always drifting slowly apart’.  This insight seems to be enough to shame even Alexander Payne and his co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (their screenplay is adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings).  After a while, the voiceover is heard no more.

    Payne had a deserved success with his last feature Sideways – a comedy with depth and a secure tone – but The Descendants is much more like his previous feature About Schmidt, which veered clumsily between poignancy and easy laughs.  This latest effort also recalls not only Kramer vs Kramer but another multi-Oscar winner of the period, James Brooks’ Terms of Endearment, which  Pauline Kael summed up as follows:  ‘At the end, the picture says, “You can go home now–you’ve laughed, you’ve cried.” What’s infuriating about it is its calculated humanity.’  I neither laughed nor cried during The Descendants (seeing it less than a week after War Horse underlines how unaffecting it is) but this shallow, unoriginal film is getting plenty of praise and prizes.  One reason may be that, while this kind of stuff – an unhappy middle-class family moves through crisis into a sadder-and-wiser, tentatively hopeful tomorrow – was a nearly annual feature of the Academy Awards thirty years ago (Kramer vs Kramer, Ordinary People, On Golden Pond, Terms of Endearment in the space of five years), it hasn’t had the same Oscar-winning prominence in more recent times.  (It’s noticeable that, as in Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People, the family in The Descendants finds its salvation in reuniting father and children, and getting rid of a problematic mother.)  Perhaps the most depressing aspect of The Descendants is that it can be seen as refreshingly different from most of what else is around now.  The second most depressing aspect is the lead performance.

    George Clooney is notoriously not a family man in real life and he hasn’t been a father in his best-known film roles to date (except, somewhat incidentally, in Syriana – and in Fantastic Mr Fox).  This is why his work here is getting such accolades.   It’s the casting-against-type path to glory:   Clooney isn’t playing someone with a handicap or in the physical disguise that is often the best way of an established star’s getting a different kind of attention.  But, as Matt King in The Descendants, he’s not himself.  There are moments in the early stages when he’s impressive – as when a doctor tells him Elizabeth’s condition is hopeless and Matt’s face goes dead and he disappears inside himself for a few seconds.  But, for the most part, Clooney’s acting is unusually effortful.  This is because he’s straining for human depth that certainly isn’t supplied by the script and possibly isn’t accessible to him as an actor.  He’s often compared with Cary Grant and, although the comparison is facile and in some respects inaccurate, they do share, I think, an ability to make essentially shallow characters magnetic and fully engaging.  Up in the Air isn’t eventually a satisfactory film but Clooney’s brilliant performance in it seems to sum up his complex appeal.   Watching tears appear repeatedly in his eyes and eventually trickle down his face in The Descendants feels to me almost like a betrayal of this appeal yet George Clooney trying to be a conscientious husband and father seems to be reassuring to a lot of people.  The attempt gives him a new (bogus) dignity and maturity.  It’s bad enough when Oscars are awarded to actors who aren’t very good.  It’s infuriating when they go to those who usually are but not in the roles that win the prize (the Sean Penn in Mystic River syndrome).

    The title of The Descendants refers both to Matt’s daughters and to the King family more largely – wealthy landowners in Hawaii for several generations.   The film’s subplot concerns the Kings’ plans to sell 25,000 acres of unspoilt land on the island of Kaua’i for development.  Needless to say, reappraisal of his priorities causes second thoughts in Matt’s mind about this bigger inheritance picture.  In time-honoured melodramatic fashion, he decides not to go ahead with the sale at the moment when his pen is poised to sign the deal.   Alexander Payne doesn’t bother to show us what happens when Matt is put in the tricky position of having to explain his decision to a public meeting of his large extended family, which will mostly be hostile to the news of his U-turn.  This omission is in striking contrast to an earlier scene when he rounds up the neighbourhood to inform them, his voice trembling with emotion, that Elizabeth is on the way out.   Since Matt is meant to be so preoccupied with work and money that he doesn’t notice what’s going on his close family, this speech to the massed ranks of the Kings’ ‘dear friends’ makes no sense – beyond providing George Clooney with another opportunity to show his underdeveloped sensitive side.   The Descendants is very lazily plotted.  I can’t pretend to regret that the tensions between Matt and his elder daughter aren’t resolved slowly and painfully but, as it takes only a scene or two for them to be getting on fine, you wonder what the problem was in the first place.   Seventeen-year-old Alex has a boyfriend called Sid who, at first, is alarmingly boorish.  On a visit with Matt and his daughters to Elizabeth’s parents, Sid laughs at something the mother says, failing to understand that she has advanced dementia (as if no one would have explained that to him beforehand).  But, once he and Matt have gone through a couple of regulation spats, Sid turns simply affable.  (I’d briefly dropped off at the time but Sally explains that the official turning point occurs when Sid reveals to Matt that his own father died recently:  in other words, he too has known pain and loss and so must be a decent human being.)   The younger child, Scottie, is ten yet she’s entirely unconcerned by her mother’s condition and incurious about whether it’s going to change.   This is purely in order that, when the doctors break it to Scottie that Elizabeth is about to die, the child can be taken by heartrending surprise.  I expected the screenplay to be as manipulative, but not as perfunctory, as it turns out to be.

    Shailene Woodley (Alex) and Amara Miller (Scottie) are good as the daughters, although the appeal of the younger girl often depends on the familiar idea of having a little kid say outrageous things (as if these can’t be hurtful coming from one so young).  Woodley doesn’t try and ingratiate herself and there’s a mildly interesting dissonance in the suggestion that Alex’s new-found enthusiasm for her father is impelled less by love for him than by a desire to expose her mother’s adultery.  Nick Krause is Sid and Elizabeth’s lover Brian is played by Matthew Lillard:  this is a thankless role to start with and casting an actor whose face is not his fortune seems a cheap shot.  (You seem to be meant to think:  how could Elizabeth cheat on George Clooney with a man that looks like that?)  Until her ludicrous outburst in the hospital, Judy Greer gives a nicely judged performance as Brian’s wife.  Although it’s an obvious one, Robert Forster brings some grit to the role of Elizabeth’s adoring, ornery father and Beau Bridges gives flavour to his two scenes as one of Matt’s many cousins, all involved in discussions about selling the land.   The other cousins include a mysteriously wordless Michael Ontkean.  (According to Wikipedia, he now lives on Hawaii so maybe he just turned up for the occasion.)  The beautiful landscape is photographed by Phedon Papamichael but the film isn’t visually inventive.   The two images I think I’ll remember are both underwater ones.   The first is when Matt breaks the news about Elizabeth to Alex.  She’s in a swimming pool and she goes under to keep her initial reaction to herself (even so, the moment might be more expressive if we saw her disappear and reappear and were left to imagine her face in the intervening seconds below the surface of the pool).  The second is after Matt and the girls throw Elizabeth’s ashes into the sea, and leis along with them.  We see the submarine garlands and, beside them, a white shape.  The younger child has asked at an earlier point, ‘Can I swim with the sharks?’, and for a second I thought it was a shark we were seeing and what a remarkable composition this was.  But it’s only the underside of the boat.

    28 January 2012

  • Fur:  An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Shainberg (2006)

    Unless it’s a wind-up, Fur – also known as Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus – must be one of the most ludicrous biographical films ever made.  (If it’s a wind-up, it’s still at least an hour too long – it runs just over two.)  The legends at the start should be refreshing (even if the twee cursive script is offputting).  We’re told not that what we’re about to see is ‘based on a true story’ but that it’s an ‘imaginary biography’ – an attempt to show the ‘inner experiences’ that shaped Diane Arbus and made her one of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers.   The screenplay, by Erin Cressida Wilson, is based on Patricia Bosworth’s non-imaginary biography of Arbus (who was born in 1923 and committed suicide in 1971).  Wilson has retained some but not all of the family details.  As in reality, Diane is married to Allan Arbus, a successful commercial photographer, and she’s from a rich New York family – her parents David and Gertrude Nemerov are in the fur trade.  Diane Arbus’s daughters, however, whose real names were Doon and Amy, are here, for some reason, called Grace and Sophie.  The film says that Allan fell in love with Diane when she was fifteen or sixteen and they were in fact married when she was only eighteen.  The events in Fur are set some seventeen years later, in 1958, and Steven Shainberg and Wilson present the thirty-five year old Arbus as variously inhibited:  frigid in the bedroom, socially scared and inept.  Her desire to become a photographer, rather than carry on as her husband’s professional and domestic helpmate, comes – to her and him – as a bolt from the blue.  This is a more significant departure from the biographical facts:  there’s no indication in the film that, from the mid-fifties onwards, Arbus had been studying with a succession of big-name photographers in the US – Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model.

    You immediately wonder from those opening legends what Shainberg and Wilson mean by ‘inner experiences’.  Are we going to see events which generated these experiences – or will these events be a metaphor for the psychological journey taken by Arbus in developing her aesthetic?  In either case, it seems that we need to have some idea of Diane Arbus as an artist to provide our own context.  I knew only that she was famous for creating disturbing images of people with unusual, often grotesque faces or bodies – famous as, to put it baldly, ‘a photographer of freaks’.  Shainberg and Wilson presumably know a good deal more about Arbus but the pathos of the picture is that the film-makers’ ‘imagination’ doesn’t extend beyond the conceit that her penchant for physically bizarre humanity was inspired by her love for a man called Lionel Wheeler, who suffered from ‘hypertrichosis’ – abnormal hair growth on the body.   The Wikipedia article on hypertrichosis shows a photograph of a sufferer from a congenital form of the disease called Stephan Bibrowski, who was known as ‘Lionel the Lion-Faced Man’ and who, I assume, is the source for his namesake in Fur.   Lionel lives in the same block as the Arbuses, a few flights above.  His apartment is a little museum of abnormalities.  He appears to make his living by creating wigs out of his own surplus hair, and he introduces Diane to a freak-bohemian sub-culture in New York.  As her relationship with Lionel develops, so too do her photographic skill and daring.   She grows up or away from her husband and eventually leaves him and their children.

    What’s doubly pathetic about Fur is that in order to develop this story Shainberg and Wilson depend on ancient clichés of romantic melodrama, many of them familiar from more conventional biopics.  Because they do so, it’s virtually impossible to avoid interpreting the story literally (or at least as what-might-have-been) rather than metaphorically.  Early on in their friendship, Diane tells Lionel that, from adolescence, she’s been drawn to mortuaries, flophouses and other parts of life’s underbelly but that, rather than exploring these, she’s spent her whole adult life being a housewife.   So Lionel takes-her-to-places-she’s-never-been – although, except for a quick look at a cadaver, their encounters with the deformed or different (some of these people are abnormal only by virtue of being, for example, transvestite) are social and convivial.   Lionel suffers not only from hypertrichosis but from lung disease and, as soon as you see him with his inhaler, you know that the illness is going to be terminal.   Sure enough, the point comes when he explains that the increasingly rapid degeneration of his lungs will mean that he ends up ‘drowning’ without ever going near water.  He also tells Diane that his favourite place is the ocean.  The climax of their relationship occurs when Diane wanders one evening into Lionel’s apartment and finds him undressed.  He asks her to shave his body, which she does.   They then make love and of course she responds to Lionel in a way she’s never responded to her husband.  Diane and Lionel’s final moments together are on a beach, where he presents her with a fur coat, made from the hair she’s recently removed from him (I assumed – although the hair coat is a much darker colour) before drowning himself.   The implication is that Diane went on to do all she did as a photographer in loving memory of Lionel.

    This seems deeply insulting to the real Arbus and having Nicole Kidman play her doesn’t either tell us more or make us believe that Diane Arbus was independent-minded.  Kidman holds the screen but, as usual, her characterisation seems negligible.  When I was doing O-level English Literature, I remember the teacher getting us to develop an idea of the main characters in Far from the Madding Crowd by writing lists of adjectives to describe them.  I sometimes think of this when I see a Nicole Kidman film because, having seen it, I often struggle to come up with any adjectives for the person she’s played.  You can see what Kidman is meaning to suggest moment by moment – now she’s looking curious, now nervous, now she’s condescending (even if she’s not meaning to be:  there’s a moment here when Diane, attending one of the freak soirees with Lionel, smiles like visiting royalty at the shining mutual affection of a dwarf couple present at the gathering).  In the very last shot of Fur she is making very strenuous efforts to appear inscrutable.  But watching Nicole Kidman perform like this, I never have any sense of the woman from whom the emotions derive; I only see Kidman acting out those emotions, one by one.

    The film begins and ends with Diane’s going to spend time in, and take photographs of, a community of naturists – the story of Lionel is a bulky ‘three months earlier’ flashback enclosed within these two brief sequences.   The first of them, when Diane is interviewed by her naked hosts, a husband and wife called Jack and Tippa Henry (Boris McGiver and Marceline Hugot), is as visually arresting as anything that follows – especially the physical contrast in the moment when the ample Tippa rises from her chair and moves over to the skinny, clothed Diane to admire the locket round her neck (containing what turns out to be an infinitesimal part of Lionel’s pelt).  When, early on in the flashback story, Diane’s parents present their latest collection of furs to the public, we’re meant to see these fashions as depraved and denatured in a way that none of the human specimens that Diane meets and comes to photograph can be.  Since an audience of today, unlike one of half a century ago, is culturally conditioned to recoil from beauty-with-cruelty and not to recoil from physical deformity (even if some of us still can’t help doing so), the fur show sequence here counts for very little.  Not long after it, the preparation for Diane’s first proper sight of Lionel – the monster in the attic – begins.  This is so laborious and heavy-handed that he would need the hideousness of ten Elephant Men to justify the build-up.

    Although it was a relief to know from the start that Robert Downey Jr was under the furry make-up, the only way the role of Lionel might have worked would have been with an unknown actor.  This could have left the viewer uncertain and potentially uncomfortable.  Downey’s tawny leonine coiffure may be in acknowledgement of Lionel the Lion-Faced Man but it actually brings to mind a familiar way of presenting the Beast’s head in visualisations of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – except that the actor’s own eyes are much less concealed here than, say, those of Jean Marais in the Cocteau film.   Since we know there’s a good-looking star actor underneath, the eventual revelation of his face and body is redundant; and, since Diane is evidently attracted to the unshaven Lionel anyway, it’s doubly redundant.  (At one point Diane’s husband (Ty Burrell) grows an impressive beard.  This might have been a witty touch but he does it before he sets eyes on Lionel so it’s presumably accidental.)   Although casting and then exposing Downey makes the film all the more ridiculous, he’s still the only thing worth watching in Fur:  he gives Lionel a droll elegance – and charm is in very short supply elsewhere in the picture.   The best performance otherwise comes from Jane Alexander, whom I’ve not seen in years, in the small role of Diane’s snobby, chilly mother.  And the only moment I laughed came when Diane’s parents meet Lionel for the first time and her gamely sociable father (Harris Yulin) smiles and says, ‘Pleased to meet you’, although through gritted teeth.

    Shainberg and Wilson seem unaware that the last act of their ‘tribute to Diane’ disparages Arbus’s imaginative sensibility.  The implication of their one night of physical love is that Diane realises that, beneath his fur, Lionel is beautiful; but Arbus the photographer surely saw human bodies conventionally regarded as grotesque as having their own beauty rather than as imprisoning a beautiful ‘inner person’.  Diane’s having sex with Lionel doesn’t mean much if he’s not the uniquely hirsute Lionel.   It’s a laughable copout to take on this ‘challenging’ subject then render it in ways that seem designed not just to reduce the audience’s discomfort to a minimum but to reproduce the tropes and mechanisms of a formula weeper:  the love story where one of the gloriously doomed couple dies but lives on in the survivor.

    20 December 2009

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