Old Yorker

  • Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kramer (1967)

    The score by Frank DeVol sounds like something from the fifties (or earlier) and incorporates a version of ‘The Glory of Love’ (which dates from 1936) but it’s the ineffable attempts to be ‘with it’ that make the film so embarrassing.  The original poster for this interracial marriage drama bears the tagline ‘A love story of today’.   At one point, the Draytons, the late middle-aged couple played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, go to a drive-in café, where teenagers are grooving strenuously to music on a transistor radio.  In a truly aberrant sequence, a white delivery boy and a sexy mixed race girl who helps with the cleaning at the Draytons’ impressive San Francisco home prance away from the house together in an incipient dance routine (which, thank goodness, doesn’t go any further).  This unfortunately comes across as suggesting, as much as youthful high spirits, that interracial love is able to bloom carelessly among the lower orders (it’s just as well that the Draytons’ straight-talking black housemaid Tillie is bigoted).  There’s supposed to be a considerable age difference, as well as a racial one, between the Draytons’ daughter, Joey, and the black doctor she’s going to marry.  He’s 37, she’s 23.  It’s fortunate that no one is concerned about this because Katharine Houghton’s Joey looks as deep into her thirties as Sidney Poitier, who plays the doctor.  (He was close to 40 when he made the film; Houghton had just turned 30.)  Although it’s both the mothers who react in thunderstruck silence when they first meet their child’s intended and see the colour of his/her skin, they instantly get over it.  The two fathers find it harder to come to terms with – the film comes close to the ludicrous proposition that having a problem with mixed marriage is exclusive to older men.

    The Losey film Time Without Pity which we saw recently, purportedly an anti-capital punishment tract, had to make clear, in order to make its point, that the condemned man was innocent of the murder of which he’d been convicted.   In a similar way, Stanley Kramer, to make the case for interracial marriage, not only casts the iconic and irreproachable Poitier as Dr John Prentice but, with the screenwriter William Rose, gives the character a stunning CV – a maxima cum laude academic history, a nobly humanitarian career, a tragic family life (John’s first wife and their child were killed some years previously).   Joey Drayton’s father Matt is a renowned liberal (he has a framed photograph of FDR on the desk in his study to prove it) but Kramer and Rose give hardly any sense of how Matt feels, as he experiences the conflict between his ethical and political principles and his gut reaction to Joey’s whirlwind romance and marital intentions.  The attempts to appeal to as wide an audience as possible (and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner was a big box-office hit) are exemplified by the role of the priest, Monsignor Ryan, and his relationship with the family.  Although he’s Catholic (therefore likes a tipple), he’s racially enlightened.  The Draytons are not themselves religious – Matt sees the Monsignor on the golf course rather than at mass.

    It’s hard to believe that William Rose’s screenplay was written directly for the screen (harder still to believe that it won the Academy Award – against, among others, Bonnie and Clyde!)  The artificial urgency of the situation (the action takes place in the course of a single day, Joey and John having set a tight deadline for receiving her parents’ blessing), the essentially one-set location, the series of exchanges between pairs or other combinations of characters to talk through and neatly confirm and resolve the issues of the story – these all reek of the well-made play.  The screenplay is remarkably mechanical in the way that it moves prejudice around from one character to another to keep the thing going (as, for example, when Hepburn’s Christina fires her work colleague Hilary St George:  that name is a giveaway).

    The performances in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner are famous:  partly because this was the last screen appearance together of Hepburn and Tracy, who was desperately sick when the film was being made and died before it was released; partly because the role of Dr Prentice epitomises the way in which Poitier – the noblest negro of them all – had come to be cast.   (By coincidence, we’d watched a programme about Reeves and Mortimer’s Shooting Stars the evening before we saw Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.  The excerpts included, as one of the ‘true or false’ questions:  ‘Bill Cosby was the first ever black man’.  The answer, which Johnny Vegas got right, was false; unusually, Bob Mortimer’s explanation had a simple satirical logic:  ‘Of course it’s false:  the first ever black man was of course Sidney Poitier’.)   In spite of this, Poitier does a respectable job – especially when he’s allowed to be light-hearted.  Unfortunately, he’s required to be sanctimonious much more often.   It’s hard not to see Tracy’s acting as remarkable chiefly in terms of his skill in concealing his mortal illness; I found myself almost relieved to do that because the role was so thinly written.

    Hepburn’s arrival on the scene gives the stiff proceedings an injection of verve and fluidity, as she rattles through her opening lines (Kramer should have gone for much more overlapping dialogue throughout the rest of the cast but Hepburn seems to do enough for all of them put together).   After that – and after Christina Drayton’s snap conversion to her daughter’s point of view – you lose interest in the character that Hepburn’s playing, though she herself remains riveting, albeit for mainly the wrong reasons.   You wonder why she takes so long to remove the coat and silly cap in which she makes her entrance.  You can’t help noticing the beginnings of her Parkinson’s tremor.  You watch her eyes repeatedly fill with tears.  In the climactic scene, when Matt Drayton  gives Joey and John his blessing, putting us out of our misery too, he tells the young(er) couple that he knows they love each other and that, ‘If you have half of what we had …’ – and he looks at Christina.   This moment is all about Tracy talking about and looking at Hepburn.  You would need a heart of stone not to be moved by it and I welled up with her.

    Katharine Houghton was Hepburn’s niece and her aunt got her the part of Joey.  In her interview with Mark Harris for Scenes from a Revolution – The Birth of the New Hollywood, Houghton was rightly but likeably modest about the limits of her talent as a screen actress.   Beah Richards, as Poitier’s mother, conveys much more with a look than with a line (I found it hard to tell whether Mrs Prentice was meant to be trying and failing to sound posh).   Roy Glenn does the necessary as her husband, as does Virginia Christine as the egregious Hilary.  Isabel Sanford as Tillie is playing what amounts to a black Thelma Ritter role, with energy but rather less variety than the prototype.  Cecil Kellaway, although his Oirish accent seems to come and go a bit, fares better with the impossible role of the Monsignor than it and Stanley Kramer deserve.

    30 August 2009

  • Her

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Jonze (2013)

    Her is a fine idea but proof that you can have too much of a good thing.  At 125 minutes, it’s way too long – and, if you know the running time beforehand, punitive because it’s obvious so soon what’s in store.  Even so, I like the film, for various reasons.  It’s good to see something that’s visually extraordinary and crucially verbal, something that belongs unarguably on a cinema screen but isn’t a blockbuster.  The story is set in Los Angeles in the near future – much of it was shot in Shanghai in 2012, which brings the future nearer (and also perhaps explains the striking number of Asians in evidence in this version of LA).  The interiors of office buildings and apartments – elegant, eerily spacious, impersonal – are a remarkable piece of design.  (The DoP is Hoyte van Hoytema; the production design is by K K Barrett and Gene Serdena.)  I like Her also because it’s science fiction with imagination although those with a better understanding of computer games and the potential of IT may be less impressed by this aspect than I was.  The main character is the tweely-named Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix).  He falls in love with the her of the title – his computer operating system, aka Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).  Spike Jonze creates the world of this relationship carefully and cleverly. Theodore, who earns a living writing letters for other people, is going through a divorce.  If he feels lonely, he can go through prospective night-time conversation partners as easily as switching channels on a TV remote.  It’s suggested at one point that relationships of the kind that Theodore and Samantha develop are unusual but not exceptional.  Yet it’s a decisive – from Theodore’s point of view, a shocking – moment when he realises with just how many operating system users Samantha has a personal relationship:  she is talking with 8,316 others, of whom, she says, she’s fallen in love with 641.  The effect of this revelation on Theodore doesn’t make much sense.  In the world of the film, why wouldn’t it have occurred to him before, especially in view of his job in the personal communications industry?

    Her isn’t a jeremiad about technology taking over human lives.  While this is part of the culture being described, it isn’t the moral of the story:  it’s a relief that Spike Jonze isn’t interested in making such an obvious and potentially censorious point.   The film’s subject seems rather to be a familiar one, placed in a distinctive context:  the difficulty of sustaining a relationship.  But there’s another difficulty in this film, one of Jonze’s own making.  Perhaps it’s intentional that the main characters speak in the same way – that halting yet eventually metronomic, struggling-to-find-the-words-I-need-to-say-how-I-really-feel tempo.  Whether intentional or not, the effect is dulling.  The confidential tone in conversations is virtually a monotone and, because I struggled to hear much of what was being said, the rhythm and register of the voices really dominated.  It’s energising when Theodore and his ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) have lunch together.  She gets annoyed and, just for a moment, there’s tension in the air.  Joaquin Phoenix is one of the actors I now most look forward to watching on screen and casting him as the benign, passive Theodore Twombly is certainly interesting.  I was fearful before seeing Her that Phoenix in this role might merely be subduing the emotional conflict and volatility which delivered a fine performance in Walk the Line and an even better one in The Master.  This doesn’t happen:  Phoenix gets right inside Theodore and the many tight close-ups reveal nothing false.  The problem is rather that he gets too far inside the character – he’s likeable and witty but he seems submerged.

    As Theodore’s friend Amy, Amy Adams is terrific – as free and as varied as I’ve seen her – in the first half of the story.  (As she showed in Junebug, she has a real flair for comedy.)  Later on, as things go wrong for Amy – her own marriage disintegrates – and she turns melancholy, Adams’s playing is less engaging.  Witty as Scarlett Johansson is, there’s a similar disappointment with Samantha’s voice once the mood darkens.  After going nowhere fast for a long time, the climax to Her seems hurried but I wasn’t sorry.  Shortly before Theodore’s discovery that Samantha is common property, she briefly goes offline and he panics that he’s lost her.  In this sequence, the speed at which both the film and Joaquin Phoenix suddenly move is a shot in the arm.   The ending is disappointingly conventional:  Theodore writes his own farewell letter to Catherine and there’s a suggestion that he may be about to embark on a relationship with a real girl in Amy.   With Olivia Wilde as a blind date for Theodore, and Portia Doubleday as a sex surrogate who simulates Samantha.  (Neither evening ends well.)

    16 February 2014

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