Old Yorker

  • The Heartbreak Kid

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elaine May (1972)

    The Heartbreak Kid was released just as I was getting interested in cinema but I didn’t see it at the time, had never seen it since, and don’t remember passing up opportunities in television listings to rectify the omission.    The screening of the film on Channel 4 on New Year’s Day was part of a Father Ted evening and thanks to Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, who love the film and acknowledge it as a big influence on their writing.   After listening to the pair talk so engagingly and interestingly about the ancestry and comic dynamics of Father Ted, it was difficult to watch The Heartbreak Kid without thinking of them.   It became even more difficult when I realised that Charles Grodin, as the picture’s foolish protagonist, had a look of Ardal O’Hanlon (as well as of a young George W Bush) about him.  The connection between two things in particular that Mathews and Linehan said kept occurring to me as the film progressed.   First, that the highest praise they could give to comedy was that it was extremely silly (The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer was given as an example).  Second, that they wanted to create in Father Ted a female sitcom character who was more than an audience for, or on the receiving end of, what the male characters got up to.  By respecting both these principles, they came up with Mrs Doyle.  Although she’s the priests’ skivvy, she’s also strongly individual.  Her behaviour is at least as silly (often as proactively silly) as theirs.

    In The Heartbreak Kid, however, Lenny Cantrow (Grodin) has a near-monopoly on silliness and the other significant characters (all but one of them female) are put in the position of having to respond to him.   Linehan and Mathews described the film as a ‘very special’ one – but didn’t enlarge much on why.  Lenny (the malignant Bishop Brennan in Father Ted is also a Len) does plenty of dim and/or inexcusable things yet, as so often, we’re meant to root for a man behaving badly in comedy because he can’t help it and because he’s more simpatico (he can’t help that either) than anyone else on view.  What made The Heartbreak Kid much more of a rarity – and perhaps this helps Linehan and Mathews to feel comfortable admiring it – was that it was directed by a woman, one who was already an illustrious name as part of a comedy double act with a man.   It’s a rarity too in that the screenplay is by Neil Simon but adapted from the work of another writer (a short novel, A Change of Plan, by Bruce Jay Friedman).  The film also surprises in the directions the story eventually takes.

    Thirtyish, Jewish Lenny Cantrow lives in New York (Charles Grodin was actually thirty-seven at the time).  He’s spent three years in the army; he’s now a sports equipment sales rep.   In a fast-moving opening to the film, he courts Lila (Jeannie Berlin), marries her, and they go on honeymoon to Florida.  These early sequences are just about perfect.  The Jewish wedding ceremony, joyous and inelegant, is well observed – especially in the shot of the tall, well-built bride, looking a bit like a wedding cake, being inched down a narrow aisle with a parent either side of her.   Lenny is on a continuous surge of enthusiasm for Lila – or for sex with Lila (who won’t have it until they’re husband and wife) – until the marriage actually gets underway.  Although they enjoy their wedding night in a motel en route to Florida, Lila’s irritating habits start hitting Lenny’s nerves.  She asks him repeatedly to confirm he’s happy with her; she talks as she chomps on a roll and bits of egg accumulate on her face.  Lenny’s happy grin starts to fracture:  Lila keeps reminding him too that their marriage is going to last ‘forty … fifty … sixty years’.   Once they’re in Florida, Lenny is impatient to get started on the sunbathing, goes down to the beach ahead of Lila and there meets Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), a beautiful, Wasp blonde from Minnesota.

    Lila’s first, rash attempt to get a tan ends in horrible sunburn and she’s confined to the couple’s hotel room.  While she’s out of action, Lenny sees Kelly as much as possible – to the mounting irritation of her adoring but bigoted businessman father (Eddie Albert).  I knew this was the basic plot of The Heartbreak Kid and assumed the fling with Kelly (not really even a fling) and the movie would end when the honeymoon did, with Lenny resuming his life sentence with Lila and being able to remember and regret forever his bad luck in meeting Kelly at just the wrong moment.  This would have made the story a good comic twist – tempered with eventual realism – on the idea of honeymoon as romantic zenith (essentially not that different from what happens to the Rebecca Hall character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona in a pre-nuptial variation on the theme).  In fact, the marriage ends before the honeymoon does:  on their return to New York, Lenny arranges a quickie divorce from Lila then sets out to let Kelly and her parents know he’s got things sorted and is now a free man.

    From this point onwards, I lost belief in The Heartbreak Kid.  At first, it’s merely hard to keep from your mind the memory of Lila’s family at the recent wedding – and the thought of how they would be reacting to their daughter’s aborted marriage (and how their son-in-law would stand up to their reaction).  But then Lenny travels to Minnesota and confronts Kelly, who’s with other students at the college she’s started attending:  you can’t accept that this comfortably self-centred girl would hear him out, let alone take the relationship further.  Kelly’s primary emotional relationship appears to be with her father – she knows he too is eating out of her hand and the only terms on which you can believe she might go all the way with Lenny is as a means of stirring up Mr Corcoran.  (She’s amiably neutral with her placid mother, played by Audra Lindley, who was also Cybill Shepherd’s mother in the TV sitcom Cybill.)  If we’re meant to think that Lenny’s daring doggedness changes Kelly’s mind about him there’s something wrong with Cybill Shepherd’s playing of her.  Kelly is unchanged – she remains a smug, amused tease.

    The cumulative effect of the events on the honeymoon is both farcical and, in the scene when Lenny tells Lila he can’t live with her, distressing.  The rapid accumulation of those events may be improbable but they’re amusing and effective because there’s a truth to them, given the characters involved.  (Although it’s never easy to believe that Lenny is dim enough to think that a rich, pampered Daddy’s girl like Kelly has real feelings for him.)  Charles Grodin’s performance as Lenny is both funny and intelligent:   his and (I assume) Elaine May’s decision to put some of the actor’s intelligence into the character makes a big difference.   Lenny’s words and behaviour in the Florida part of The Heartbreak Kid suggest a thoughtless fool but the glints of reflectiveness that come through from Grodin give a niggling tension to the character.  Once we see Lenny in Minnesota, Grodin’s approach makes sense – there is more to Lenny than you might have thought from what he did on honeymoon.

    Grodin also keeps you largely sympathetic towards him (Lenny might well have been insufferable) but his skill isn’t enough for us to suspend disbelief in what happens in the movie’s second half.   As Lenny’s behaviour becomes less farcical it becomes more incredible.   It made no sense to me on any level that Lenny gets to marry Kelly.  It seems he’s allowed to only so that – once he’s landed the prize – he can resume wishing for something different (doubts set in even earlier this time, at the wedding reception).  The film ends here – and its sobering last scene seems to carry an implication that Lenny is chronically dissatisfied and that this says something about the American drive to achieve and acquire.  This note rings false:  it isn’t as if Lenny has dashed into the second marriage as thoughtlessly as the first.  It isn’t clear either why he should be so immediately disenchanted with his new bride.

    Eddie Albert is excellent as Mr Corcoran:  his slow burns as he listens to his daughter’s suitor are masterly.  But it’s Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter) as Lila whose portrait is the most satisfying in The Heartbreak Kid.  This is partly because Lila’s screen time is confined to the pre-nuptial and honeymoon stages of the story:  Berlin doesn’t – unlike Grodin, Albert and Shepherd – have to cope with the contradictions in the latter part of the picture.  Berlin does a wonderful job of making Lila both pitiable and alarming.  When she and Lenny are in bed together, she’s ridiculous and oppressive but sensual too:  she makes you feel how Lenny must be feeling.  Lila’s final scene – in which she gets to eat lobster before Lenny delivers the coup de grâce – is perhaps the film’s finest.  The writing, the direction and Grodin and Berlin’s acting are all at their best here.  (Lenny’s excessively angry outburst with the waiter, because the restaurant has run short of the pecan pie that Lenny’s kept promising Lila, is especially convincing as a guilty anticipation of the hard words of a different kind he’s about to launch on his newlywed wife.  Charles Grodin delivers this tirade brilliantly.)  This scene is the outstanding example of the distinctive comic tone that Pauline Kael praises in her review of the film:  you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is funny or not.

    2 January 2011

  • Calvary

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Michael McDonagh (2014)

    Calvary has a brilliant opening sequence.  Father James Lavelle hears in the confessional the voice of a man who describes the abuse that he suffered as a child at the hands of a Catholic priest.   Fr James admits that he doesn’t know what to say in response, beyond asking if the man has sought and received counselling, made a formal complaint etc.  The voice thinks that would be pointless and not only because the offender is dead now:  what’s the good anyway of revenge on a bad priest?  But a good priest, like Fr James, is a different matter – revenge on a good priest would mean more.  ‘I’m going to kill you, Father,’ the voice explains, ‘because you’ve done nothing wrong’.  The appointment with death is set for the following Sunday.  During this conversation, there has been only one face on screen, that of Brendan Gleeson, who plays Fr James.  He seeks advice from his bishop (David McSavage), saying that he knows the identity of the visitor to the confessional booth.  Since the man didn’t seek absolution for the sin he announced his intention to commit, the bishop’s view is that Fr James isn’t bound by the priest-penitent privilege that normally governs confession – that he would be entitled to report the matter to the police if he chose to do so.  The bishop stresses, though, that it’s Fr James’s choice.   Fr James goes not to the police but to meet his nemesis in due course – on a nearby beach, as agreed – and his death, with a bullet through the head.

    In spite of the title, the words of St Augustine that appear on the screen at the start of Calvary (‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned’) and the film’s release in Britain to coincide with Holy Week, the parallels with the Easter story aren’t at all laboured.  (It was striking to see Calvary the day after watching this week’s episode of Rev on television.  Adam Smallbone, mired in scandal, literally carries a heavy cross on a Hackney via dolorosa.  The vagrant Colin denies knowing him just before a burglar alarm goes off on a nearby KFC-type joint with a cockerel logo.  Do the people responsible for Rev think that because it’s unhappy and mostly unfunny it must have depth too?)  John Michael McDonagh divides the narrative of Calvary into daily chapters between the threat in the confessional and Fr James’s murder but I didn’t pick up other suggestions that the events were happening in the run-up to Easter.  Even so, the paschal flavouring makes you notice that the priest dies on a Sunday morning rather than the preceding Friday.

    After that opening, which you can’t get out of your head, McDonagh introduces Fr James’s parishioners in the small country town in County Sligo where the film is set.  I worried for a while that Calvary might be marking time before returning to the heart of the matter but not at all.  The oppressive malignancy and/or bad behaviour of the locals, their various forms of hostility towards the priest, experiences that cause him to question his Christian beliefs – these make for a powerful and relentless combination.  A tourist dies in a car accident.  The young serial killer (Domhnall Gleeson) whom Fr James visits in prison asks the priest to confirm that God created him.  By the time Sunday approaches, you’ve become so absorbed by the travails of the priest’s life that the thought of the death threat against him is, rather than the dominant element, something that keeps returning to shock you.

    The locals, even if they’re not black-hearted, are a spiritual challenge to Fr James.  An acerbic atheist doctor (Aidan Gillen) taunts the priest when he arrives at the local hospital to deliver the last rites for the unfortunate tourist.  (Dr Harte is first seen among the line-up of those attending mass – a hint that he’s prepared to taunt at all costs.)   The feckless butcher (Chris O’Dowd) isn’t sure if his wife (Orla O’Rourke), a kind of masochistic vamp, is bipolar or lactose-intolerant; in any case, he doesn’t think it’s anything to do with him if her latest boyfriend, an Ivorian car mechanic (Isaach de Bankolé), is beating her up.   The publican (Pat Shortt), allegedly (and improbably) Buddhist, sounds as nasty as he looks.  The greatly wealthy, spiritually bankrupt financier (Dylan Moran), who supposedly owns Holbein’s The Ambassadors (the original is actually in the National Gallery), pisses on it to show Fr James what he’s capable of.   A wily American writer resident in the place (M Emmet Walsh) is at death’s door and wants to decide when he goes through it.  He asks Fr James to get him a gun, the supplier of which is an ex-police detective (Gary Lydon), who’s shacked up with hyperkinetic Leo (Owen Sharpe):  Leo keeps stressing his sexual availability in faux-American hardboiled crime fiction locutions.  There’s a dim lad called Milo (Killian Scott) who, sexually frustrated and having nearly exhausted the possibilities of fulfilment through pornography, seeks Fr James’s advice about joining the army to make professional use of his homicidal feelings.  The main cast is completed by Fr James’s fellow priest, Father Timothy Leary (David Wilmot); the cheeky altar boy Micheal, who also draws seascapes at what will be the scene of the culminating crime (Michael Og Lane – with his amazing, premature old man’s face although, as in The Guard, he’s isn’t so good at reading lines); and two significant women characters, who complicate and enrich Calvary.  The first is Teresa (Marie-Josée Croze), the widow of the car crash fatality and a Catholic whose dignified acceptance of her husband’s death impresses Fr James.  He sees Teresa again at the airport when he’s decided, on the Saturday morning, to leave town; meeting her and looking at her husband’s coffin ready for loading on the plane sends him back to meet his own fate.  The other woman is Fiona (Kelly Reilly), who visits the priest for a few days, following her latest attempt at self-harming.   She is Fr James’s daughter.

    The priest’s unusual backstory is effective in several ways.  It makes him more suspicious in the minds of some of the locals.  (When he explains in the pub that he was married but his wife died, then he joined the priesthood, Milo asks, ‘Is that possible?’ and Dr Harte drily replies, ‘It would appear so’.)  Rightly or wrongly, his heterosexual achievements will also give Fr James some distance, in the minds of many viewers, from the paedophile priests for whose sins he is the scapegoat.  That he decided, in middle age, to enter the priesthood both reinforces his sense of vocation and is the cause of an unresolved tension between him and Fiona.  (She sometimes addresses him as ‘Father’ with knowing irony.)  Fr James is a seriously conceived and admirably written character:  it’s to the credit of both John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson that you wouldn’t know from Calvary their personal views about the Catholic Church or, more largely, whether either has any religious belief.  Fr James isn’t given long monologues defending his faith but you’re never in doubt that faith is real, and McDonagh does allow him a few simple but potent rejoinders.  (When the serial killer gets pretentious and says that, at the moment of murdering his young female victims, ‘you become God’, Fr James replies with deeply felt derision, ‘No, you don’t … you don’t’.)  McDonagh has said that he decided to write this screenplay because he expected there to be plenty of other films made about the Catholic Church abuse scandals:  he wanted to tackle the subject in his way, sooner rather than later.  It’s fair enough to describe Calvary as a ‘black comedy’ but McDonagh has been at pains to stress its seriousness and it could be argued the comedy is almost entirely in the caustic verbal wit which this writer-director uses with such facility.

    Brendan Gleeson is the ideal actor to play Fr James.  Gleeson naturally suggests intelligence and his core of humour means the man he creates is never constricted by solemnity even if he has a great deal to be solemn about.  There’s not a hint of commentary on the priest in Gleeson’s playing of him – he is completely empathetic.  You fear at once for the priest’s golden retriever and are right to do so.  Gleeson makes the relationship with the dog moving; unconstrained by his priestly duties, Fr James can express love for the animal (burying his head in its fur in one scene) and pain at its death quite freely.  Gleeson’s formidable bulk is important too:  he makes Fr James into a man in all senses hard to break down (so that his eventual death is all the more appalling).   The actor’s physical impact in this role stands comparison with that of Max von Sydow in The Virgin Spring.  Gleeson and McDonagh have both said that the parishioners, although they want to throw everything they can at Fr James to test him, also want him to withstand it all – to be able to reassure them in a way that priests can no longer do, not least because they’re figures of suspicion now.  In one crucial, piercing scene, Fr James strikes up a conversation with a young girl (Anabel Sweeney).  The conversation is violently interrupted when her father’s car screeches into the frame and the driver (Declan Conlon) yells at the child to get in and at the priest for daring to speak to her.  The supporting performances are inevitably limited in comparison with Gleeson’s and not all the characters are up to much.  (The joke name for the other priest may be a tacit admission on McDonagh’s part that the craven Fr Leary isn’t much more than a hand-me-down from Father Ted.)  But Calvary is, for the most part, well cast and vividly played.

    While the child abuse scandals are central to the story, McDonagh uses these – and other well-known features of contemporary Irish life, such as the vagaries of the country’s economy – as a moral setting rather than a message, a counterpoint to the beauty and grandeur of the physical terrain.  There’s also a dichotomy between the scale of the landscape and the essential meanness of many of the human concerns and motivations in evidence.  Even though McDonagh has assembled a kind of rogues’ gallery, a collection of artfully differentiated points of view, the inexorable momentum and power of the story make the locals scarily cohesive – a community of ill will in opposition to the good priest.  Fr James’s church is built of wood and painted sky blue:  as naïve as it’s vulnerable, the church is burned down midway through the week.  This doesn’t make complete sense in the scheme of the story:  it’s not as if the voice in the confessional was threatening the priest with death unless he took care to avoid it – he stated simply that he would kill Fr James so the ‘warning’ of the church’s destruction feels redundant, even if the burning building makes for a fine image.   (The cinematography is by Larry Smith.)   A moment more in keeping with Calvary’s blend of tragedy and unaccountable humour occurs when Fr James is driving out of town towards the airport.  Roger Whittaker’s ‘New World in the Morning’ is on the soundtrack – this is a powerful song and the effect is deeply sad.  Then Milo draws alongside on his motor bike and brings Fr James and viewers (like me) back to earth.

    I could have done without Fr James being an ex-alcoholic (with the inevitable reversion).  As in The Guard, there are times when McDonagh himself succumbs to the temptation of showing off his literacy.  It’s funny when the priest criticises the linguistic inadequacies of his tormentors:  Leo rattles on about being fucked by everyone ‘from the hoi polloi to the masses’ and the priest explains wearily that the two are the same thing (he doesn’t mention that hoi polloi doesn’t need an article either).  But in the confrontation on the beach – when Fr James is asked by his killer-to-be if he has any regrets, replies that he never finished Moby Dick and has his his assailant explain how it ends – this smart-aleck flourish merely slows things down (and doesn’t fit with the character of the gunman, who wouldn’t have had the stamina to get through the novel).   Calvary never ceases to be an extraordinary prospective whodunnit but the identity of the man with murder in mind becomes almost secondary – until the murder happens, that is.  (Except for the Melville diversion, this is grippingly staged.)  Something goes wrong at the very end:  in the montage of snapshots of the other characters’ lives after Fr James’s death and particularly when Fiona visits his killer in prison.   (She was told by her father, shortly before he died, that, among the virtues, he thinks forgiveness has been ‘highly underrated’.)  McDonagh does well not to retreat into irony at this stage but what he comes up with instead is too conventional.  It’s about the only thing about Calvary that is, though.  McDonagh, when he set to work, clearly had distinguished priest-in-torment screen predecessors – Diary of a Country Priest, I Confess, Winter Light – in mind.  But he’s made an original and impressive film.

    22 April 2014

     

     

Posts navigation