Old Yorker

  • A Man for All Seasons

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fred Zinnemann (1966)

    Watching A Man for All Seasons again, for the first time in probably half a century, was very enjoyable – not least because this can fairly be described as a Fred Zinnemann film, not just a screen record of Robert Bolt’s famous stage play.  The original is opened out judiciously.  Bolt did the screenplay so may well deserve some credit for that, but it’s Zinnemann’s movie craft that ensures the outdoor sequences strike the right balance.  They give the material cinematic life.  They never try to compete with the dialogue yet are never merely filler – this is especially true of Henry VIII’s visit, by royal barge, to Thomas More’s Chelsea home on the banks of the Thames.  Zinnemann ably builds the central drama of More’s refusal, through his Catholic faith and moral convictions, to sign a letter to the Pope requesting the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon or take an Oath of Supremacy that declares the King to be Supreme Head of the Church of England.  More’s three years as Lord Chancellor elapse abruptly (though that’s partly because Zinnemann commendably doesn’t resort to a ‘Three years later’ signpost on the screen).  The interrogations and his imprisonment in the Tower of London go on a bit too long.  The ‘realistic’ staging of his conclusive trial is sometimes shaky.  But Fred Zinnemann’s storytelling is for the most part, and as you’d expect, bracingly fluent and clear.

    Under the skilful filmic surface, though, this is still Robert Bolt’s play and that’s an irresistible difficulty.  One of Thomas More’s contemporaries, the grammarian Robert Whittington, coined the description of him as ‘a man for all seasons’.  This supplied Bolt with a good, striking title, but puts his admiring cards on the table virtually before the curtain rises.  Paul Scofield, who played More in the original West End and Broadway productions of A Man for All Seasons (in 1960 and 1961 respectively), reprises the role here.  Scofield gives an immaculate performance.  That’s not entirely a compliment, because Bolt’s Thomas More is an immaculate conception – thoroughly principled yet worldly wise, a saint in waiting, and with more than his fair share of Bolt’s best lines.  When someone else is speaking, More listens, almost always patiently, before coming out with a reply that bests the other person epigrammatically as well as morally.  (Times change … In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas Cromwell is a bullying villain, but in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2015), Thomas More is a chilly, sneaky ideologue, Cromwell is morally nuanced and thoughtful, and Mark Rylance’s portrait of the latter often brings Scofield’s More to mind.)  Even so, Paul Scofield’s precision and vocal musicality are very pleasurable to watch and listen to.  And when More does occasionally lose his cool – either in anger or in distress and anguish, when his wife and daughter visit him in prison – it’s powerful:  a fine illustration of the benefits of an actor’s keeping his emotional powder dry.

    As mentioned elsewhere (see The Ghoul), I was once in a school production of A Man for All Seasons; I still have my copy of the Heinemann Educational Books edition of the text used at the time.  This includes a preface by Robert Bolt, along with his notes on ‘People in the Play’, which, although succinct, are highly prescriptive.  Richard Rich, for example, is,

    ‘Early thirties.  A good body unexercised.  A studious unhappy face lit by the fire of banked down appetite.  He is an academic, hounded by self-doubt to enter the world of affairs, and longing to be rescued from himself.’

    Bolt’s notes anticipate the qualities of his dialogue – consistently crisp, often witty, but, in effect, telling the audience the same thing repeatedly about the person delivering the lines.  There’s little scope for the actors in A Man for All Seasons to explore for themselves what makes their character tick and develop that character over the course of the play.  This is liable to be even more of an issue when the piece moves from the stage to the screen, where faces and gestures will naturally express thoughts and feelings more transparently.  If the faces and gestures convey the same message about the character as their words, some of what an actor does is liable to be superfluous.

    The risk is all the greater if the actors are as high-powered as most of Zinnemann’s cast were.  I chose Bolt’s summary of Rich as the example above because John Hurt’s playing of him is a prime example of the issue in question.  Rich was Hurt’s first high-profile role in cinema.  A very gifted actor, understandably eager to make a strong impression, Hurt nails the anxiously driven and unscrupulous careerist Rich in his first scene:  the role is so thinly written there’s nowhere else to go with it from there.  Something similar happens with actors less talented than Hurt – Leo McKern as Cromwell, Susannah York as More’s daughter, Margaret.  The protagonist’s dilemma and fate make for an absorbing story, but Thomas More’s satellites are too often figures in a medieval or early Tudor morality play – that is, personified vices or virtues, with just the one vice or virtue per person.

    A few of the cast achieve more agency in their roles, with mixed results.  Not surprisingly, Bolt’s screenplay jettisons the stage play’s quasi-Brechtian narrator, the Common Man (the role that Leo McKern played in the original West End production).  In the theatre, the Common Man, as well as commenting on the action in direct address to the audience, is a succession of pleb bit parts – publican, boatman, jailer, jury foreman, executioner, and Thomas More’s servant.  A different actor plays each of these characters in the film:  Colin Blakeley, as the servant Matthew, does quite a lot with very little.  Orson Welles’ vast, decaying Cardinal Wolsey is an extraordinary image but Welles, in the exchange between More and Wolsey, goes too far in doing his own thing:  he’s intent on making an impact with his every line, but there’s next to no emotional continuity.  Robert Shaw’s Henry VIII is much more successful.  Although his shouting bits are hit and miss, Shaw, in his shiny gold costume, is dazzlingly volatile, and comes through as a living screen presence.  She’s hardly tested in the role of More’s simple-minded, exasperated wife, Alice, but Wendy Hiller is always entertaining and, in the couple’s final meeting, surprisingly moving.

    1 August 2026

  • The Odyssey (2026)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Nolan (2026)

    The original is hardly short, and Christopher Nolan is a prolix filmmaker.  All things considered, The Odyssey, clocking in at 173 minutes, isn’t as long a cinema journey as you might have expected.  That’s what I kept telling myself as I watched the film, but to no avail.  Nolan encourages audience participation of an unusual kind, proving again here his talent for making viewers interrogate the nature of time.  Wristwatch-watching rather a lot, I could swear that, around halfway through The Odyssey, the hands on my watch moved backwards once or twice – which trumped the Interstellar (2014) experience of time standing still.  In that earlier picture, Matthew McConaughey’s spacecraft lands on a planet subject to ‘gravitational time dilation’; each hour on the planet’s surface equates to seven years on Earth.  In The Odyssey, when Matt Damon’s Odysseus asks Charlize Theron’s Calypso how long he’s been lotus-eating on her island, her answer is also seven years.  Odysseus is astonished that he’s been there such a long time.  Sitting through Nolan’s film of Homer provides the reverse experience.

    In Oppenheimer (2023), the character played by Damon, Colonel Groves, did the audience a service by summarising J Robert Oppenheimer’s supposed psychological profile, which you couldn’t infer from Cillian Murphy’s opaque interpretation of the father of the atomic bomb.  This time, Damon has the lead but there’s no one in Nolan’s cast of thousands to help in the same way; and though Matt Damon is a better actor than Cillian Murphy, he can’t tell us too much about Odysseus.  As we know from the classicist and translator Emily Wilson’s piece on the film in the London Review of Books (one of a small minority of negative reviews to date), writer-director Nolan has said publicly that he drew inspiration from the first line of Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey, ‘Tell me about a complicated man’.  Damon’s grizzled and weatherbeaten Odysseus makes an impressive image, but he delivers most of his many lines with minimum tonal variation.  This may be meant to signal how deep in complex thought Odysseus is, and Damon looks as though he’s thinking, but that’s about as far as it goes.

    This Odysseus does somehow, though, come across as, in modern political terms, a liberal – perhaps just because the actor playing him is well known for his liberal views.  At any rate, spurious modernising is one of Nolan’s ways of shaping The Odyssey for a twenty-first-century audience.  He casts a Black beauty (Lupita Nyong’o) as Helen of Troy (and her twin, Clytemnestra), a trans actor (Elliot Page) as the Greek soldier Sinon, and so on.  It’s harder to say if having Robert Pattinson play Antinous, the sneaky standout among the suitors of Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is part of the same tactic.  The effect is essentially the same, because Pattinson, as a screen presence, is ineradicably present-day – though to be fair, he has more life and variety, facially and vocally, than any other man in this film.  A further aspect of Nolan’s modernising is putting a rather snobbish distance between his Odyssey and the Hollywood classical epics that most people now seem to enjoy (and some people probably always did enjoy) as entertaining camp.  Nolan is at pains to have his hero, particularly, withhold conventional emotion.  When Odysseus admits that his men are convinced that he has offended Poseidon, it’s not enough for Nolan to pass on visualising the god’s anger through a paroxysm of stormy seas:  Matt Damon’s line reading makes it sound as if he’s upset a touchy work colleague rather than an Olympian.  When the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) turns his companions into pigs, Odysseus doesn’t bat an eyelid.

    The latter underreaction is more understandable because those companions are a dull lot; to be honest, I was mildly disappointed when Odysseus prevailed on Circe to turn the pigs back into men (though Zeus sees to it they don’t survive much longer).  Both among this contingent and in the royal courts of Ithaca and elsewhere, there are capable actors with strong camera faces but, like Matt Damon, they must have been asked to perform in a set way – they sound intense but offer no characterisation.  In this set-up, it’s apt enough that Tom Holland, as Odysseus’ son and heir Telemachus, is a cross between Damon and all the others (except Robert Pattinson):  Holland combines mechanical intensity with a mostly quieter voice, presumably hinting at Telemachus’ potential to follow in his father’s complicated-man footsteps.  Except for Zendaya, a glazed and uneasy Athena, the distaff side of the cast make up for their small numbers with more distinctive portraits:  Anne Hathaway, at least until Penelope’s tediously noble finale when Odysseus returns home; Mia Goth as a perfidious maidservant in Penelope’s household; and, especially, Samantha Morton, whose Circe is always surprising and vivid.

    Nolan’s ‘modern’ dialogue has come in for a bit of stick (from more than Emily Wilson) so it may have helped that I couldn’t make out everything, to start with anyway.  I did stub my ears a few times, though, as when Calypso tells Odysseus, ‘You have been happy here, but your heart was always somewhere else’.  (In what sense, happy, then?)  But Nolan’s chief means of revitalising Homer for today’s audiences is through technological spectacle.  There are some eye-catching highlights – the strangely leaning Trojan horse, certain shots of the cyclops Polyphemus, early stages of Circe’s porcine transformations – and I guess that huge numbers of viewers must be sustained by the regular supply of pyrotechnics, though the overall effect of these is wearingly bombastic.  Nolan allows himself a rare would-be emotional moment when Odysseus’  loyal old dog Argos recognises his master, who has returned in disguise.  Argos’ last movement, before he dies content, is a cute twitch of his CGI tail.

    There’s fighting, fighting, and more fighting:  as in 2025, what’s shaping up as the year’s big event in cinema is One-Battle-After-Another, this time more literally.  There are also vast amounts of flickering flames on the screen for the photophobic to contend with.  These, in alternation with waves of enervating indifference, led me to close my eyes every so often.  I never dropped off, though, thanks to the soundtrack.  Pounding crescendos reliably culminated in a colossal, startling bang – followed, just as predictably, by a burst of contrasting silence, broken only by the relieving whirr of Curzon Richmond’s nearly adequate air-conditioning.  I know that a lot of what I’ve written here is frivolous, but somebody has to treat Christopher Nolan’s Very Important Pictures with the lack of seriousness they deserve.

    29 July 2026

     

     

     

     

     

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