Old Yorker

  • Song for Marion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Andrew Williams (2012)

    Arthur (Terence Stamp) is an asocial and a grumpy old man.  His wife of many years, Marion (Vanessa Redgrave), although her health is poor and she’s largely confined to a wheelchair, is gregarious, cheerful and life-loving – she especially enjoys singing in a local senior citizens’ choir.  Marion’s cancer returns and is diagnosed as terminal.  She dies.  Arthur withdraws even further into himself and his prickly relationship with his and Marion’s son, James (Christopher Eccleston), deteriorates further.  Elizabeth (Gemma Arterton), the school music teacher who runs the seniors’ choir in her spare time, persists in trying to bring Arthur out of his shell.  Out of love for Marion and in honour of her memory, Arthur joins the choir and eventually sings a solo at a choral festival.  The closing moments of Song for Marion suggest that he and James are consequently reconciled.   The end credits are introduced by a dedication of the film ‘To family’ and conclude with unusually verbose expressions of thanks, to all and sundry, from the writer-director Paul Andrew Williams.

    It would be easy to dismiss Song for Marion, set in present-day suburban London, as tears-and-laughter, triumph-of-the-human-spirit formula.  It certainly is that but it’s rather terrifying too – at least for someone as unsociable as me.  Arthur’s hostility towards Elizabeth and the other choir members is selfish and inconsiderate to the extent that Marion loves singing with them.  Even so, he usually takes her to choir practice and brings her home, where he cares for Marion conscientiously.  It doesn’t seem so reprehensible that Arthur – knowing Marion isn’t going to live much longer and anxious both to protect her and to keep her to himself – resents the jolly choir’s arrival one morning to serenade Marion and him outside their home; or that he’s not grateful when they invade the house on the day of Marion’s funeral.  Paul Andrew Williams is at pains to make clear, however, that Arthur’s gloomy outlook can’t be excused on the grounds that his lifetime companion is dying.  As Marion affectionately reminds him one evening, Arthur has always been a misery-guts – although there’s no suggestion that this character defect (which is how it’s presented) has got in the way of her loving her husband.  ‘You know what I feel about enjoying things,’ Arthur admits to his son at one point.   The script shows no interest in exploring Arthur’s personality – how or why he seems to have a grudge against life.  He’s simply someone who needs to change.  All that’s required in order to change, according to Paul Andrew Williams, is that Arthur – like everyone else we see – joins in.

    In recent years, Gareth Malone has built a television career demonstrating that being in a choir is good for you.  Malone’s often effective proselytising is almost tentative beside the moral coercion at work in Song for Marion.  And aren’t old people comical!   Elizabeth calls her group the OAPz and has them sing things like Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ and Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’:  this proves there’s risqué life-in-the-old-dogs yet although one of the choir does himself a mischief trying robot dancing … It doesn’t matter to Paul Andrew Williams that the choristers – particularly the ones who look to be in their mid-sixties – could have been Motorhead fans when the ‘Ace of Spades’ album was released over thirty years ago.  The OAPz are wrinklies through and through – the way that Arthur is totally a grouch.  A standout illustration of Williams’s antiquating tendencies comes when Elizabeth asks Arthur what kind of music he likes and he replies, ‘Sinatra, Dean Martin …’ Not impossible, of course, but this reply is delivered by Terence Stamp, a teenager when Elvis had his first hits and a screen presence – to senior citizens in the audience, anyway – redolent of the years in which London was Swinging.

    Williams stacks the deck against his protagonist clumsily as well as crudely.   Early on, Arthur asks James, at very short notice, to take his mother to and collect her from choir practice because ‘it’s my night at the pub with the lads’:  this is presented as (a) Arthur’s putting himself first and (b) an example of his peremptory treatment of James.  There’s no good reason, however, for this request to come at the eleventh hour – it makes no sense when Arthur is consistently anxious to ensure that Marion is looked after well and when these pub outings – which Arthur appears to enjoy in a low-key way – are part of a regular routine.  Shortly before she dies, Marion asks Arthur to promise her that he and James won’t become strangers; one of Arthur’s first actions after her death is to tell his son he thinks it would be better for them not to see each other again.   If there was any kind of explanation of why father and son had always got on badly, I missed it but the estrangement from James is, in any case, utterly phony.  Marion is still present enough in Arthur’s mind for him to speak aloud to her when he visits her grave; whatever he thinks of James, you can’t believe he’d betray Marion’s trust in this way.  Besides, cutting off contact with his son means cutting off contact with his granddaughter Jennifer (Orla Hill), with whom Arthur seems to get on well.  Also in a low key – a register that’s clearly not good enough for Paul Andrew Williams.   With the exception of Vanessa Redgrave and the congenitally glum Christopher Eccleston (I never expected to find his moroseness such a relief), practically everyone in Song of Marion accentuates the positive uniformly and gratingly.

    When Arthur agrees to join the choir, Elizabeth tells him, in the tone she might use to encourage a previously uncooperative boy in her class at school, ‘Marion would be very proud of you’.  Williams clearly endorses Elizabeth’s commendation although I hoped (in vain) that Arthur would reply to her in the very bad language her condescension deserved.  The turning point in his interactions with Elizabeth occurs when he opens his front door late one night and finds her on the doorstep in floods of tears, and invites her in.   She’s been dumped by her boyfriend.  This isn’t hard to believe; nor is her admission, when Arthur duly asks why-are-you-telling-me-this, that she hasn’t any friends her own age.  After all, Elizabeth is very annoying.   Yet you know the real reason she’s turned to Arthur is that, now Vanessa Redgrave’s passed on, Paul Andrew Williams has to make something (though, as it turns out, not much) happen between Terence Stamp and Gemma Arterton, who has second billing in the cast list.

    It’s fortunate for Williams ­– and for the viewer – that Stamp and Redgrave were persuaded to be in the film.  These two did The Lady from the Sea in the theatre in the late 1970s; I’m not aware they’ve co-starred on screen before but they seem, thanks to their personas in 1960s cinema, naturally right together.   In their mid-seventies when the film was made, they’re both such remarkable camera subjects that they easily transcend Song for Marion‘s view of the elderly as quaintly delightful.   Vanessa Redgrave’s physical size and innate authority eclipse the writing of the role of Marion, and she manages to be dignified without being false.  Terence Stamp plays Arthur with much more integrity than Paul Andrews Williams deserves.    Stamp is always empathetic; he sometimes makes Arthur’s grumpiness funny but avoids making it cutely funny.  It’s an artificial moment when Arthur, sitting in the passenger seat of Elizabeth’s car, sings for the first time but Stamp’s voice, not strong but pleasant, draws your attention away from the falsity of the scene’s conception.  The choral festival is primitively staged and the solo that Arthur eventually sings is a rather dull Billy Joel song called ‘Goodnight, My Angel’ (it should be noted that the visual scheme of the film includes more than enough setting suns).   But Stamp’s honesty makes a genuine climax out of the number.   His eyes are closed nearly throughout and the strain of performing in public always shows; he convinces you that Arthur, as he sings not very well, is still engaged in a private conversation with his late wife.  I was glad that, in spite of the required transformation of the character that the story delivers, Terence Stamp kept faith with Arthur’s unsociability.

    12 November 2015

  • Animal Kingdom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Michod (2010)

    Animal Kingdom is well made and acted but not that interesting.  (This may mean it’s not as interesting as a second viewing of Never Let Me Go immediately beforehand, which left me drained – but that’s not the whole story.)  Josh Cody’s mother dies of a heroin overdose.  He calls the emergency services but doesn’t know what to do next.  He phones to ask the advice of his maternal grandmother. Janine; she was estranged from her only daughter but she sounds pleased to hear from Josh and invites him to go and stay with her family – a family of professional criminals.  Josh is a (big) seventeen-year-old, barely out of high school in Melbourne.  Janine’s three sons, his uncles, are Andrew (nicknamed ‘Pope’), Craig and Darren – their specialities are armed robbery and drug-dealing.  There can only be two ways this set-up can go:  either the innocent Josh will be infected by the power of family and emerge a hardened criminal; or he’ll surprise the kin who think he’ll be a soft touch by resisting and/or avenging their tyranny.  In fact there’s a third way, which sees Josh do both and which the writer-director David Michod (whose first feature this is) eventually takes, in an effective conclusion.  But there are few surprises along the way.  As a title, Animal Kingdom is somehow impressive yet it gives too much away:   most of the movie feels like a demonstration of the view of human life – or a particular kind of human life – that its title already indicates.  This refers not just to the lifestyle of the Codys; we note, for example, that the police hunt in packs.

    The prevailing mood is laboriously grim – thanks in no small part to the relentlessly ominous score (by Antony Partos) and the visuals (the DoP is Adam Arkapaw).  This is probably David Michod’s intention but the film doesn’t have a lot of texture; you never get much sense of the Codys’ world sharing the same space with or subverting a law-abiding one – the darkness at the heart of the material pollutes the whole atmosphere, even in the kitchen of the ‘respectable’ family of Josh’s ill-fated girlfriend, Nicky.  Barry ‘Baz’ Brown, Uncle Pope’s partner in crime, is shot dead by the police; Craig, trying to escape from them, suffers the same fate; Pope gives Nicky a fatal heroin injection.  By this point, the film is on the verge of then-there-was-none territory.  Animal Kingdom has a number of similarities to The Fighter:  it hovers on the edge of black comedy and it has at its centre a compelling matriarch.   The Codys may be psychopathic thugs but they’re emotionally flaky too:  Darren, in particular, seems on the edge of a nervous breakdown.  You get the sense that they’re all screwed-up mother’s boys.

    Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody is a well-written part and Jacki Weaver, who plays Janine, is by some way the strongest presence in the film – she’s also the only character who, although she’s nearly a comic grotesque, has a range of moods.   It’s Janine who seems the real psycho in Animal Kingdom, with her absolute, unthinking allegiance to the brutal sons she continues to infantilise in ways that go deeper than her appending ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ to everything she says to them.  A law-breaking life in the outside world and loyal, loving women indoors are a familiar enough dichotomy in crime melodramas; here, the homicidal tendencies of the Codys seem part of the air they breathe at home, and Janine doesn’t just breathe it along with them – it seems almost to emanate from her, even when she’s cooking and small-talking to a neighbour about the reprehensibly bad teeth of a new television show host.  With her vicious smiliness and her implacable blue-eyed stare, Jacki Weaver occasionally brings to mind an earthier, less glam, much more dangerous version of Barbara Windsor.  The hard-bitten, seen-it-all Janine also has a rather shocking baby-doll quality (in one scene she seems to be wearing a baby-doll length costume).  Like the Melissa Leo character in The Fighter, she looks to be keeping herself young for her Oedipal sons (there’s no sign of their father) but Weaver’s acting has more depth than Leo’s.

    One of the best things about the debutant James Frecheville’s portrait of Josh is that, although his situation is often vulnerable, he’s never as close to or as dominated by Janine as her sons are (and she knows it).  Frecheville starts uncertainly:  in the opening scene, Josh, seated next to his mother’s corpse, is watching television and mildly irritated that the paramedics’ arrival interrupts this.  Frecheville shows Josh’s attention returning repeatedly from what’s going on in the room to what’s happening on the TV screen but this doesn’t happen naturally enough.  A little later, he has a sequence in which he concentrates so much on a bit of business – flicking at some metal bottle tops with his fingernail – that nothing else comes through.  Just as Josh gains in confidence with his uncles, however, Frecheville gets stronger as the film goes on.  Guy Pearce is again impressive, as the decent, humourlessly competent Nathan Leckie, the cop trying to bring the Codys to book; he’s credibly ambiguous in his scenes with Josh, who is crucial to incriminating his family but whom Leckie also seems genuinely to want to protect from them.   The Cody boys are played by Ben Mendelsohn (Pope), Sullivan Stapleton (Craig) and Luke Ford (Darren) but it’s Joel Edgerton, as Baz, who makes the strongest impression after Weaver and Pearce.

    26 February 2011

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