Old Yorker

  • The Elephant Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lynch (1980)

    David Lynch is at his best when his preoccupations and talents are in tension with the material he’s working with, or the format he’s working in.  For most of its thirty episodes, Twin Peaks was a fine illustration of Lynch’s exploiting the constraints of an hour-long weekly episode on a mainstream television channel.  In comparison, feature films like Wild at Heart and Lost Highway – where he has more freedom – are discursive, lacking in friction as well as coherence.  Blue Velvet may be the fullest expression of Lynch’s artistry in a tight dramatic framework (I’ve not seen his most recent movies) but The Elephant Man is one of his best cinema films.  Lynch’s obsessive interest in dreams and deformity transforms the story of John Merrick but doesn’t overpower it.  There are some fine oneiric sequences but Lynch also suggests that Merrick’s whole existence must have been a series of nightmares and – much less often, when he was on the receiving end of human kindness – improbably sweet dreams.  (Joseph Merrick, as he was actually called, died at the age of twenty-seven, in 1890.)

    Victorian London is brilliantly realised in the lighting (by Freddie Francis) and production design (by Stuart Craig).  We sometimes seem to be looking at photographs of the period (although the images are always kinetic).  This impression is echoed in the framed photos on Merrick’s bedside table and on the mantelpiece at the home of Frederick Treves, the London Hospital surgeon who first sees Merrick in a freak show and gets him into hospital and away from the clutches of Merrick’s predatory manager, Bytes.  Although the story is set in the 1880s, you naturally think of the time and place as Dickensian and there’s an echo of Oliver Twist in the narrative:  just as Oliver, after safe haven with Mr Brownlow, is ambushed by Nancy and Bill Sikes and returned to Fagin’s den, so John Merrick is taken from the room he’s made home at the London Hospital and repatriated to the freak show circuit (indeed expatriated, across the English channel).  Lynch makes the relatively new aspect of mechanised industrial London frighteningly dynamic to see and hear (the place really does seem to be ‘the Big Smoke’).  The Elephant Man has a sci-fi quality, and this is disorienting for the audience as well as for Merrick, who’s trapped in the alarming immediacy of his surroundings.  We’re highly familiar with the Victorian era on screen and have got used to retrospective sci-fi, through Doctor Who, for example, yet we still experience this London as to some extent futuristic.

    Lynch delays the exposure of John Merrick’s hugely deformed head in a way that plays off horror film expectations.  By the time we see him, though, we’ve already witnessed so many horrified reactions to the sight of Merrick that the viewer has built up sympathy rather than apprehension.  This is a horror story but one told from the point of view of the protagonist.  And because David Lynch is fascinated by repulsive flesh and capable of drawing out the sensuous aspects of practically anything (like the amputated ear in Blue Velvet), beholding Merrick’s disfigurement is a confounding experience.  At the same time, I was aware of feeling reassured that this was all amazing make-up (by Christopher Tucker).  The photograph of the real Joseph Merrick on Wikipedia is more alarming (part of the alarm is realising that someone actually had to live with that head).

    Watching John Hurt as Merrick reminds you just how good he was at his peak.  From inside – and through – the massive prosthesis, he communicates a beguiling mixture of melancholy and wonderstruck politesse:  he achieves what might seem the impossible task of giving the character a humorous, dandified quality.  Hurt is perfectly complemented by Anthony Hopkins who, as Frederick Treves, gives one of his finest performances – he’s especially good at conveying the combination of scientist’s excitement at the extraordinary specimen he’s come upon and appalled human compassion for Merrick.  The actors in the key supporting roles create similarly complete and ambivalent characters, though in very distinct registers:  Wendy Hiller is at her emotionally precise best as the matron, Mrs Mothershead, and John Gielgud, as Carr-Gomm, the head of the London Hospital, wins first prize (in a keen competiton) for his immediate reaction to the sight of the Elephant Man.  There’s good work too from Hannah Gordon as Treves’s wife and Lesley Dunlop as one of the nurses.

    Compared with Gielgud and Hiller, Anne Bancroft as the famous actress Madge Kendal, who helps turn Merrick into a West End society cynosure more benignly than Bytes promoted him in the East End, is disappointingly vague, even though you can see why Merrick finds her grande dame smiliness so appealing.   The letdowns in the cast are the baddies.  Although he looks dead right as Bytes, Freddie Jones overdoes the sweaty vileness and Lynch doesn’t handle the menacing lowlifes, headed by Michael Elphick, with anything like the subtlety that marks the rest of The Elephant Man:  you never get a sense that their blaring taunting of Merrick is fuelled by fear or incomprehension – they just seem nasty brutes.  The score by John Morris calls to mind a music box melody but an unusually supple one in terms of its emotional variety.   The choice of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ for the beautifully sad climax to the film feels clichéd now although that’s thanks to the likes of Oliver Stone and Terence Davies rather than the fault of David Lynch, who got there years before them.

    2 February 2012

  • An Englishman in New York (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Richard Laxton (2009)

    Effectively a sequel to The Naked Civil Servant, An Englishman in New York covers the period of Quentin Crisp’s long life from his departure from England to New York in 1981 until shortly before his death in 1999, a few weeks before his ninety-first birthday and the new millennium.  The director, Richard Laxton, has worked mainly in television – he directed the praised Hancock and Joan, which I found unwatchable.  The writer Brian Fillis authored The Curse of Steptoe, much the best of the quartet of TV films of which Hancock and Joan was part.  The first ten minutes of An Englishman in New York are so creaky that I nearly didn’t go any further.   In the opening sequences, there’s next to no suggestion of any contrast between the reality of NYC and how Crisp saw it – that is, as a place where any individual could be herself or himself without being threatened.  The movement of the camera over the actors’ faces is stiff and the acting is wooden, especially from the theatre audience at Crisp’s early one man shows in America.  Even after the film improves, there are some very ropy bits.   Quentin Crisp’s career and reputation within the gay community took a dive when he described AIDS as ‘a fad – nothing more’:  there’s a scene here in which he’s confronted by a group of enraged gays, led by a man whose partner is dying of AIDS, which is staged in crude mimicry of sequences in The Naked Civil Servant where Crisp is set upon by ‘roughs’ in the streets of London.  (There’s also one glaring continuity error.  Even accepting that Quentin Crisp likes to ring the changes with his shirts and scarves, it seems too much for him to put on a different colour combination in the course of going from outside a building to inside.)

    The Naked Civil Servant – written by Philip Mackie, directed by Jack Gold and produced by Verity Lambert – was brilliantly hard-edged:  the style of the film chimed with the stylish nihilism of its protagonist.  Because it was also a great story of bloody-minded survival and became the epitome of Crisp’s achievement of stardom, the LWT film also has a triumphant quality, which has grown over the years.  An Englishman in New York, by contrast, has an often sentimental feel, which seems alien to the spirit of Quentin Crisp.  Laxton, Fillis and John Hurt as Crisp also have a more fundamental problem on their hands.  The bons mots in the book and screen version of The Naked Civil Servant are enjoyable partly because they were created by someone in obscurity, as far as the general public was concerned.  Some of the ones I heard for the first time in this film are very good (‘I don’t believe anyone has rights – if the human race got what it deserved, we would starve’) but, once Quentin Crisp became a celebrity, his penchant for shocking epigram became a practised professional habit, and, as such, a bit boring.

    Yet An Englishman In New York won me over.  By the end, its weaknesses don’t seem so serious – and to say that the film still isn’t in the same class as The Naked Civil Servant is hardly to disparage it.  The wan music (by Paul Englishby) eventually gives way to the song that gives the movie its title and which Sting wrote about Quentin Crisp:  its sprightly melancholy makes it one of Sting’s most successful songs and, because it was written in 1987, when Crisp was still going strong, its elegiac quality is more complex now.  Crisp’s relentless iconoclastic witticisms also develop a new dimension once we realise that they’re an essential part of how, in old age, he kept himself going, kept his brain working.  It’s good this film wasn’t made immediately after Crisp’s death:  the interval has given John Hurt more time to grow closer to the right age for the elderly Crisp (Hurt is now coming up seventy).  In light of the success of The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp described Hurt as ‘my representative on earth’ and that phrase has an extra meaning now that Crisp is no more.  (You hope, for his sake, that he’s no more:  he writes in The Naked Civil Servant that ‘The one thing I would not wish on my worst enemy is eternal life’.)   John Hurt doesn’t in the least rely on his original interpretation of Crisp to make his performance in Englishman effective but you can’t help being reminded that it has been, for all the excellence of his work in 10 Rillington Place,  I Claudius and The Elephant Man,  the highlight of his career.  He has some marvellous moments here:  when the elderly, ailing Crisp applies his make-up in a kind of determined trance; when – looking incredibly ancient as Crisp playing Queen Elizabeth in Sally Potter’s Orlando – he utters the queen’s quiet demand that Orlando never grow old.  And what gives Englishman its own individuality is the skilfully developed description of three of Crisp’s relationships during his years in New York:  with a gay magazine editor and critic called Phillip Steele (according to Wikipedia this is an amalgam of two of Crisp’s friends, Phillip Ward and Tom Steele); the painter Patrick Angus; and a theatre performer known as Penny Arcade (real name Susannah Ventura).

    Phillip Steele invites Crisp to write film reviews for his magazine.  It’s hard to work out what these reviews actually consisted of.  We see the pair coming out of a cinema showing Tootsie; Steele asks Crisp his opinion and Crisp replies, ‘I enjoyed it very much.  Mr Hoffman is very brave.’  Later on, he has a commendatory one-liner about ET too.  (ET and Tootsie are both wonderful films but I’d have preferred to have heard Quentin Crisp’s views of Annie and Gandhi, which appear to be on at the same cinema – the place clearly specialises in pictures with one-word titles:  Diner is also showing there.)  Steele and Crisp fall out over the AIDS controversy but their friendship resumes and develops in Crisp’s last years.   As Steele, Denis O’Hare is especially good in the later stages of the relationship, running errands for the geriatric Crisp to and from his tiny Manhattan apartment (and himself aging very convincingly).  Crisp insists on continuing to use ‘Mr’ in addressing all and sundry – an affectation both archaising and distancing; the moment that he starts calling Steele by his forename heralds an unaccustomed dependence and closeness.  (We gather that, in his late eighties, Crisp was suffering from an enlarged heart and psoriasis and in remission from prostate cancer.)  Brian Fillis develops the character of Steele gradually and intelligently.  When Crisp says, early on, to Steele that he looks ‘frayed around the edges’, I wrongly assumed this was the first sign of AIDS-related illness.  It transpires that Steele has just ended a love affair:  I understood from what followed that, taking a leaf out of Crisp’s book, he stays solitary from then on.

    If that’s right, it chimes unhappily with the relationship involving Patrick Angus.  He’s a regular in the audience for Crisp’s one man show; in these sequences, Jonathan Tucker acts a little too eagerly but things get interesting as soon as he starts up a conversation with Crisp in the latter’s regular choice of diner.  I got to like Tucker’s performance very much.  When he laughs at Crisp’s bleak, lapidary pronouncements, Tucker has a ring of real truth – the laughter speaks delight and desperation.  When they get talking in the artist’s studio, Angus comes out with things like ‘I think love is impossible’ and we see that Quentin Crisp is much less comfortable hearing his own pessimistic epigrams quoted back at him by someone whom he likes and who’s having an unhappy life.  Angus dies of AIDS:  his gay-themed work was successfully exhibited posthumously, according to the film.  As Penny Arcade, Cynthia Nixon makes an over-emphatic entrance – which is very awkwardly staged – but she gets over touchingly the real affection Penny feels for Crisp.   (They have a long-running stage partnership.)

    An Englishman in New York confirms that Quentin Crisp, when regarded as a ‘gay icon’, was radically misunderstood.  Early on in the film, a gay man in the theatre audience, exasperated by some of what’s being delivered from the stage, misguidedly rounds on Crisp, yelling ‘You used to be a pioneer!’  The exchange is clumsily done but a reminder that Crisp’s promotion of individuality could never, with any kind of thought given to what he said and wrote, have been confused with a gay rights crusade.   Even if his description of homosexuality – during his later, controversialist phase – as a ‘terrible disease’ is to be taken with a pinch of salt, Crisp consistently saw his sexual orientation as one doomed to failure.    He reminds his theatre audience of a central tenet of The Naked Civil Servant (I’m paraphrasing):

    ‘For people like me, the object in life is to win and keep the love of a great, dark man – a real man.  The definition of a real man is that he cannot love members of his own sex.’

    Of course, as Fillis’s screenplay makes clear, Crisp’s sexual outlook doesn’t apply to gay men generally.  (He appears to like to think it does:  when he and Phillip Steele visit a gay bar and Crisp sees punters dressed as construction workers, he reflects tartly that ‘To get a great, dark man you obviously must first look like him’.)  But I’m sure it was true for him and that it’s true for others.  Crisp’s farewell stage appearance in America, before departing for the speaking tour of Britain during which he died, is in Florida (Phillip Steele gets him there).  We see him performing and the gay audience giving him a rapturous reception.  This may be misleading in implying that he was, after all, a queer hero – it may seem like the film-makers having it both ways.  But it’s credible in illustrating what is an unarguable aspect of Crisp (né Denis Charles Pratt)’s personality.  As the audience applauds and cheers, John Hurt, with a beatific smile on his face, mouths ‘Thank you’.  He reminds us that Crisp loved to be in the limelight without the fear of its exposing him to abuse or assault.  In this moment, Laxton and Fillis create a genuinely powerful resonance with a scene from The Naked Civil Servant ­ – the great sequence of the evening under starlight in Portsmouth, when Quentin Crisp encounters a group of sailors, who gather round him curiously, laugh at him but also with him, and do him no harm.

    30 December 2009

     

     

     

     

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