Old Yorker

  • Invictus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clint Eastwood (2009)

    It has to be accounted a surprise that Invictus has only two Oscar nominations (for the performances of Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon).  It’s a particular surprise, given the irreproachable subject matter and Clint Eastwood’s enduring popularity with the Academy, that it missed out on a Best Picture nomination in a year when double the usual number was available.   The film has performed well enough at the American box office and hasn’t been badly received by US critics but its impact has been underwhelming.  Rugby doesn’t mean much to Americans:  the NFL-themed The Blind Side has made more money and got a Best Picture nod.  It’s probably Invictus’s relative lack of success that is the bad reason for my not disliking it as much as most Eastwood pictures.  Apart from the two main actors, it’s a mediocre piece of work but less objectionable than anything I’ve seen by this director since The Bridges of Madison County.

    Invictus tells the story of how Nelson Mandela saw the 1995 Rugby Union World Cup in South Africa as an opportunity to realise his dream of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, and of the pivotal role the Springboks’ captain Francois Pienaar played in this – but it’s also the blandest of Eastwood’s pictures since Madison County[1].  Anthony Peckham’s screenplay, based on a book by John Carlin, is a feeble, clumsy piece of work but I suspect the main cause of the blandness is (as it was in Madison County) the absence of baddies.   Polarising heroes and villains is meat and drink to Clint Eastwood.  The villains can be either individuals (like the dastardly opponent who does for the boxing heroine in Million Dollar Baby) or institutions (the Los Angeles Police Department in Changeling).   It hardly matters how crudely these forces of darkness may be conceived and presented (and it’s usually very crudely):  Eastwood is enfeebled without them.  In spite of the political inheritance and racial tensions he’s describing in Invictus, the vilest character he and Peckham can come up with here is the two-faced boor Johan De Villiers, TV pundit and ex-Springbok captain (in the apartheid years – when the team was banned from international rugby).  De Villiers is played by Robin Smith virtually as a pantomime baddie.

    I’ve read a couple of reviews which see as a main weakness of Invictus the fact that we know the ending – a puzzling objection, given how many much better films than this could be dismissed for the same reason.  The problem is not that we know that South Africa won the 1995 World Cup (perhaps a sizeable part of the US audience doesn’t know that anyway) but that there’s so little else going on in the picture.  Hardly anything, in fact, except for a perfunctory sub-plot about the black and white security men who work for Mandela and whose mutual animosities are gradually overcome.  Apart from meeting a Taiwanese delegation and reference to a couple of trips abroad, Mandela’s job as President seems an improbably cushy one.  The script can’t even decide how interested or knowledgeable about the rugby he is or gets to be.  Just before the tournament starts, he asks an assistant how important is it that South Africa beat Australia in their opening group match.   Told that if they lose the game, the Springboks will then need to beat both New Zealand and England to reach the final, Mandela comes up with the piercing insight, ‘So it is very important that we beat Australia’.   When South Africa have won their quarter final match, we see the President marking up the result on his World Cup wall chart.  One round and a couple of scenes later, he’s asking his female Chief of Staff (who we’ve been told is sceptical about the whole rugby thing anyway) who is playing in the other semi-final.

    The culminating rugby game is a gift to any director.  The Springboks’ win over the All Blacks was not only a significant political event but, in sporting terms, a David-against-Goliath victory.  (The way the match progressed – with South Africa more than once pegging back New Zealand’s narrow lead before getting their noses in front in the last few minutes of extra time to win 15-12 – is a big help too.)  But it says a lot about the film that what the Boks’ win means to Francois Pienaar is more affecting than what it means to Nelson Mandela and the rest of the country.   Invictus delivers emotionally as a genre film – the story of a sporting triumph and how it can make very different kinds of people feel great.  It doesn’t sufficiently get across how extraordinary this particular triumph was.  Except for Pienaar and Chester Williams, the one black player in the team, none of the Springboks emerges as any kind of individual – at least until Joel Stransky kicks the winning drop goal in the final.  There’s no sense of relationships within the team or attempt to develop racial sub-plots:  nothing on the feelings about, or on the part of, the white man drafted in to replace Chester Williams, who’d suffered a hamstring injury, in the early part of the World Cup; nothing on the irony that the All Blacks’ lethal weapon was a non-white, the Maori Jonah Lomu.

    The security men overcome their racially-based suspicions thanks largely to the World Cup.  They’re meant to epitomise what happens nationally – although, considering the extraordinary sensitivity of their work, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Even so, their suppressed excitement during the final is one of the better bits of Invictus.   We can see how nervous they are – we can’t be sure how much the nerves are about a possible attempt on Mandela’s life or about the outcome of the match.   Otherwise, Eastwood’s cuts from the rugby field to those watching – in the Ellis Park Stadium crowd, in bars across the country – are dully repetitive.   There’s at least one too many stages to the gradually developing relationship between two white policeman engrossed in the match and the black kid hanging about their car (they suspect he’s up to no good before realising he just wants to hear the radio broadcast). I don’t think of Clint Eastwood as a filmmaker inclined to be absorbed by imagery.  It’s surprising, as well as a little distracting, that he lingers in the way he does on the physical dynamics of rugby – the thwacking collisions between players, the heaving slow movement of scrums.

    The use of the W E Henley poem of the title is not as crass as it might have been.  It’s first mentioned by Mandela, when he first invites Pienaar to tea at the presidential residence, as something which inspired him in prison.  Pienaar doesn’t ask what poem it was.  You can believe that – he’s nervous and quite inhibited on this occasion – even if it also suits Eastwood’s purposes to keep this up his sleeve.  Mandela then presents Pienaar with a handwritten copy of the poem shortly before the start of the tournament.   By the time Pienaar and his girlfriend are walking round Robben Island a few days later (I’m assuming it’s true that this visit was organised for the Springbok team and their WAGs), he’s memorised it and hears the words in Mandela’s voice.  (Pienaar’s imagining Mandela in prison uniform, looking penetratingly at him as the words are spoken, is a bit OTT.)  Eastwood soft-pedals on the racial tensions, which are centred almost entirely on the security men.  Apart from some of the crowd booing Mandela when he attends a rugby match shortly after becoming President (and a year before the World Cup), there’s barely a whisper of racist abuse.  Invictus lacks tension as a result:  what made me more uncomfortable was a sense that Eastwood wouldn’t have been so relaxed about race relations if he’d made a film set in America in which they were a central theme.  And the film is pretty hopeless when it consciously aims for a lighter tone.  Apart from what Morgan Freeman manages to deliver in his portrait of Mandela, the laughs are in pretty short supply.   One of the better exchanges is between two of the security men:

    ‘Black guard:  I prefer soccer.

    White guard:  You know what they say:  soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans – rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.

    Black guard:  Yeah, I heard it before.  It wasn’t funny the first time.’

    Unfortunately, that punchline could be applied to most of the other bits of ‘humorous’ dialogue in Invictus.

    Three or four years ago, Morgan Freeman was cast as Mandela in an adaptation of A Long Walk to Freedom, to be directed by Shekhar Kapur, but the project appears to have been shelved or has at least stalled.   Freeman seems to have been the prime mover behind Invictus:  he’s one of the executive producers and it seems that he got Eastwood (his favourite director) involved in the project.  Morgan Freeman is a master screen actor but there’s something unusually self-conscious about his portrait of Mandela.  It’s almost as if Freeman, who has undeniable claims to being the leading black actor of his generation, was determined to get in quick to create a definitive portrait of the greatest black man of his time.  The characterisation is meticulously accomplished – in spite of the deficiencies of the writing, Freeman gets Mandela’s mental agility and humour and bloody-mindedness.  Yet his gravitas feels relatively conventional.  Freeman lacks the almost comical aspect of the real Mandela, which is a singular part of his charisma (and which Harry Enfield’s impression picks up on).

    Matt Damon is a famous movie star who continues to be underrated as an actor.  He clearly worked hard preparing to play Pienaar:  he’s physically completely convincing and, as far as I could tell, his South African accent is very good.  He develops the character of Pienaar skilfully – from a fairly unremarkable jock, pampered but dispirited, to someone who finds a new meaning in what he’s doing as a sportsman.   The only moments in which I found Damon less than persuasive came when he delivers impassioned, mid-match exhortations to his team.  It’s not really the actor’s fault – Anthony Peckham has supplied lines that sound falsely worked out, over-articulate.  It’s hard to know, given the inadequacies of the screenplay, whether it’s intentional that Pienaar seems very much apart from his teammates – although this apartness and Damon’s presence serve to sharpen the focus on Pienaar, which is no bad thing dramatically.

    Most of the rest of the acting is pretty undistinguished although Tony Kgoroge eventually gives a good performance as Mandela’s head of security.   Adjoa Andoh is too theatrically defined as the Chief of Staff and, as usual in an Eastwood film, players in small parts appear to have been encouraged to ‘do a character’ in a way that makes their playing seem awkward and artificial (like Patrick Lyster as Pienaar’s father, although Penny Downie does well as his mother).   One good thing is that the black youngsters here are looser and more natural than the white American kids in, say, Mystic River or Changeling.  On this occasion, Eastwood has passed the baton for producing a vapid score to his son Kyle (who co-wrote the music with Michael Stevens.)

    Richard Brody’s note on Invictus in The New Yorker describes it as taking its place:

    ‘… in Eastwood’s rigorous series of latter-day reflections on democratic values—here, the republic rests on the shoulders of a virtuous leader who understands the power of political symbolism and senses that a country unites not around its ideas but around its images. As such, it’s also a defense of his own popular artistry—and of the system that sustains it.’

    To break the habit of a lifetime and be fair to Clint Eastwood, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s as surprised as I am to be told he’s made a ‘rigorous series of … reflections on democratic values’.  (What are the forerunners in the series that Brody has in mind – Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Changeling?)   Elsewhere, Brody describes Eastwood’s view of South Africa as ‘sketchy but warmhearted and filled with fine-grained details’.   These details were so fine-grained I didn’t notice them.   I did notice the opening sequence, which takes place on 11 February 1990 – the day of Mandela’s release from Robben Island.  Eastwood shows some white youngsters playing rugby and then – on the other side of the road – some black kids kicking a soccer ball around a patch of waste ground.  The ‘coarse-grained’ quality of that crassly obvious juxtaposition is typical of Clint Eastwood.  It’s the same heavy-handedness you see in the bit when Francois Pienaar goes home with four tickets for the final – for his mother, his father, his girlfriend … but who, his father asks, is the fourth ticket for?   We see the Pienaars’ black maid in the background.  If Eastwood ended the scene there (and we next saw the maid in the Ellis Park Stadium crowd) the moment might be effective.   No such luck:  Francois looks towards the maid, and his father and mother look back at him, and the camera moves in on the maid, and she smiles.  And you wait for ever for the director to say ‘Cut!’

    7 February 2010

    [1] To be precise, it’s the blandest of the post-1995 Eastwood pictures that I’ve seen.  These include Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers and Changeling but that’s less than half the total of eleven. One of the worst things about Clint Eastwood is his prolificacy.

  • Tangerine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Baker (2015)

    The coming attractions concluded with a trailer for the hardy perennial It’s a Wonderful Life.   The trailers were followed by Tangerine, a very different kind of Christmas movie – although it is set in Hollywood or, at least, in the underbelly of Hollywood.  On the morning of Christmas Eve, a trans woman called Sin-Dee Rella meets her friend and fellow sex worker Alexandra, also a trans woman, in an eatery called Donut Time.  Sin-Dee Rella has just completed a twenty-eight day prison sentence.  She learns from her friend that Chester, Sin-Dee-Rella’s boyfriend and pimp, cheated on her while she was inside.  Sin-Dee storms out of Donut Time and embarks on a search of the neighbourhood for Chester – and for Dinah, the girl he’s been sleeping with.  Although she’s preparing for her lounge-singing debut in a West Hollywood bar later on Christmas Eve, Alexandra agrees to accompany Sin-Dee on her quest, on condition there will be no ‘dramas’.  As if:  it’s not long before Alexandra leaves Sin-Dee to it.  The search for Chester and Dinah is intercut with scenes from the working day of Razmik, an Armenian immigrant taxi driver in the area.

    Since its first showing at this year’s Sundance, Sean Baker’s Tangerine has attracted a good deal of media attention as a feature film shot entirely on an iPhone (to be precise:  on three iPhone 5s, by Baker and his cinematographer, Radium Cheung).  The first test for this film is how long it takes viewers to engage with it as the comedy-drama it means to be, instead of seeing it primarily as a low-tech moviemaking feat.  In my case, this happened very quickly – and I remembered only every so often the unusual way in which the film had been made.  (Not thinking about that may be more difficult for those with a more developed technical sense.)  Tangerine is visually kinetic and vivid – the lurid colouring gives the LA skies and streets a sometimes psychedelic, sometimes infernal flavour.   But I was increasingly depressed by the film, and bored by the central story.  The movie is a long 88 minutes.

    Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (Sin-Dee Rella) and Maya Taylor (Alexandra) are themselves transgender but Tangerine is neither as liberal-minded nor as innovative as its right-on casting and ultra-modern technique might lead you to expect.  There are jokes that depend on the native maleness of the two main characters.  Alexandra deals with a cheating client with enough brute force to reduce him to jelly – he complains cravenly to the police about the treatment she’s meted out.  When she eventually locates the brothel where Dinah works, Sin-Dee-Rella makes her entrance by kicking in the front door.  Razmik’s suspicious mother-in-law is a different sort of cliché:  she’s the familiar, choleric, ethnic battleaxe.  Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch, with whom Baker wrote the screenplay, are unsympathetic in their presentation of heterosexual men:  as well as Alexandra’s contemptible client, there are the physically risible and/or repulsive male customers in the knocking shop from which Sin-Dee-Rella abducts Dinah.  The principals in Tangerine advertise the rightness of freedom of sexual self-expression yet the movie discriminates on the question of when doing your thing is doing the right thing.

    Razmik (Karren Karagulian) is the least obvious character in the film.   You often feel sorry for this pale-faced, persistently harassed man because of what he has to put up with – whether it’s a passenger throwing up in his cab or the matriarchy swarming round the Christmas dinner table when he gets home from work.  Because Razmik seems ordinary, the revelation of his sexual preferences has a relatively strong impact:  he uses part of his earnings to pay for blowjobs in his cab – but only from trans women.  When he picks up a prostitute and discovers she’s non-trans, he gets angry and chucks her out of the car.  Razmik’s disgust at what he sees as violation of the proper sexual order is both startling and funny.  The strongest sequence in the film – visually and emotionally – comes when Alexandra, who regularly services Razmik, gives him a blowjob while the cab is in a carwash.  Sean Baker keeps his iPhone camera on the liquid, steamed up lights of the carwash and the effect is transporting; you suppose the effect for Razmik of what Alexandra is doing in the front of the cab may be similar.  Before taking her leave of him, Alexandra gives Razmik another present – an air freshener to expel the lingering stench of dried vomit that he tried earlier, in an unavailing interior carwash, to remove.  The air freshener is in the shape, and has the fragrance of, a tangerine.  This is an eccentric but authentic Christmas-movie moment.

    It’s a pity that Sean Baker also relies on Razmik to bring Tangerine to an implausible tragicomic climax.  After he finishes work for the day, the oppressiveness of the Christmas celebrations and the thought of Alexandra combine to drive him out of his apartment and back to his cab – to the consternation of his wife Yeva (Luisa Nersisyan) and the fury of her fearsome mother Ashken (Alla Tumanian).   He heads first for the club where Alexandra was singing but, by the time he arrives, the show is already over and she’s headed off.  Ashken gets herself a taxi and finds out from another Armenian driver (Arsen Grigoryan) that her son-in-law has not, as he claimed, returned to work for a few more hours.  Baker contrives to get all the main characters together in Donut Time for a series of showdowns – Sin-Dee Rella, Alexandra, Chester (James Ransone), Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), Razmik, Ashken and, eventually, Yeva.   (Ashken, once she’s discovered Razmik in the company of the trans sex workers, phones her daughter to deliver the news.)  I just didn’t believe that the long-suffering Razmik, with his well-established routine for mixing business with pleasure, would jeopardise it in this way.   The memory of the carwash and the smell of the tangerine would be enough to see a man who’s thankful for small mercies (and not so small mercies: he and Yeva also have a young daughter) through the rigours of a gruesome Christmas family get-together.

    I’ve concentrated on Razmik rather than the centre of the film because I can’t find much of interest in Sin-Dee Rella or Alexandra.  Razmik’s outrage that the prostitute in his cab isn’t transgender is witty recognition that the people in the world of Tangerine subscribe to a code of behaviour – just as sexual fuddy-duddies, from whom they seem so different, have codes of behaviour.  With the main characters, however, Baker is doing something that’s more clever than imaginative.  He recycles a story of friendship and betrayal and time-honoured screen depictions of prostitutes (wisecracking on the outside but crying inside) – and puts them in a sexually transgressive gift wrap.  This is clever not only because plenty of people will be wary of denigrating the film on account of its politically correct accoutrements but also because the sentimental elements of the material are used to persuade the viewer that Tangerine is tender as well as tough.  When Alexandra performs in the bar, for example, Mya Taylor sings well and touchingly.  I thought she sang improbably well but I could see it made sense from Sean Baker’s point of view to press this particular audience button.  Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez both give good performances and their faces are effectively complementary.  Rodriguez’s (at least until she removes her wig at the very end of the film) is softer, more feminine, whereas Taylor’s strong jawline gives her the look of a transgender work in progress.  It’s arguable whether the casting of trans women makes the characters they play more convincing than they would have been with cisgender actors in the roles.  ‘Cisgender actors’, in this case, would almost certainly have meant male actors.  This would have resulted in so much attention being given to their Remarkable Transformation that I’m glad Baker cast the film as he did.

    Razmik isn’t the only character who eclipses Sin-Dee and Alexandra.  There’s also the hapless Dinah, a prostitute who’s very different from either of them.  Sin-Dee is mixed race; Alexandra is African-American; both are strikingly good-looking and fast, sassy talkers.  Dinah is thin, white, skanky, drab and dim.  She ends up alone, locked out of the grungy brothel where she worked until Sin-Dee yanked her out by her hair a few hours previously.  Dinah sits in the dark, shivering in her flimsy, sleeveless top.   There’s no denying the power of this image but it made me uncomfortable for a reason that I wasn’t sure Sean Baker intended.  The implication of his film is that life on the streets may be hard but is also a rich human experience provided that it’s an expression of I-am-what-I-am self-assertion, as it seems to be for Sin-Dee and Alexandra.  Selling your body for a living has no such saving graces, however, if you’re an unprepossessing ‘fish’ – a derogatory term for a non-trans woman, which Sin-Dee uses to describe Dinah.  I think Dinah is disturbing too because she leaves the residue of something grimly real.   Sin-Dee and Alexandra are never not characters in a movie.

    22 November 2015

Posts navigation