Old Yorker

  • Amour

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Haneke (2012)

    Amour is fluent and humane.  Since it’s written and directed by Michael Haneke, the second quality is more remarkable than the first:  in view of Haneke’s work to date, you would no more expect a film of his called Amour to celebrate love than you’d have expected a Todd Solondz movie called Happiness to be an illustration of its title.  The lives of the octogenarian married couple Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), as she suffers a series of strokes and becomes entirely dependent on his care, are realised by Haneke with a detailed precision that’s effortless.  You take this for granted yet you know it’s something that only a very gifted film-maker can achieve.  In the same way, the two leads are so good that you’re hardly ever aware of their acting (but you’re aware that you’re hardly ever aware …) Images in your mind of what these two were like half a century or more ago give their senescence a particular charge even though Trintignant (aged eighty-two) and Riva (eighty-six) haven’t been fixtures of international cinema in the intervening decades (at least for audiences outside France).

    Georges and Anne are both retired music teachers.  At the start of the film they attend a public recital by a former pupil (played by the pianist Alexandre Tharaud).  Once or twice later on a tape is played in their Paris apartment and Georges sings ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ to Anne but one of the most striking things about Amour is the absence of any other music on the soundtrack (even though this is usual in a Michael Haneke film).  Once Anne is housebound, Haneke’s camera also stays within the apartment.  The sustained silence increases the sense of intimacy between the couple and the audience in the cinema (and makes you realise how often a film score can have the opposite effect).  This is also an example of a movie where the isolation of the principal characters is credible because it’s willed by them.  Anne and Georges are in this grave situation together – she and he, especially, are determined, as things get worse, that no one is going to gatecrash:  certainly not their brittle, humourless daughter Eva, who visits occasionally.  I’m not a fan of Isabelle Huppert but the peculiar deadliness with which she invests Eva’s lines is surely just what Haneke had in mind.   It’s not easy to get out of your own mind the sound of Eva rattling on to Anne about her and her British husband (William Shimell)’s financial planning, telling her nearly wordless mother that the interest rate on a savings account is currently 1.75%.  The only other living creature that seems in any way to share the old couple’s situation is a pigeon which twice gets into the apartment and, with the help of Georges, back out again.  You can see the pigeon as a symbol for something or other but it’s the fact that its comings and goings remain mysterious that makes it such a strong and beautiful element of the story.

    We understand that particular events cause Anne’s condition to get worse:  we’re not shown all these events but we see their effects.  Haneke does show, in real time, Anne’s first ischaemic episode, which occurs as she and Georges are having breakfast.  This is ‘a moment in and out of time’, in more ways than one.  From Georges’s point of view, it’s a frightening interruption of the flow of his life with Anne; once she ‘comes back’, it’s as if the episode occurred in a different world.  From Anne’s point of view, she has, of course, no memory of what happened – only her husband’s concern to disquiet her.  Amour includes an extraordinarily powerful dream sequence, its impact increased by the fact that the location of Georges’ nightmare is the couple’s apartment – or, at least, the corridor outside the front door of the apartment – so we take what we’re seeing as reality.  Haneke is also very successful in conveying the erosive effects, on morale and physical strength, of grim and, from Anne’s point of view, humiliating routine.  There’s no denying that Anne’s continuing, unstoppable decline is more upsetting because Emmanuelle Riva is so slim and elegant – because she looks still to be within touching distance of Anne’s younger self.  Trintignant’s Georges looks at Anne with a kind of impacted, disbelieving resentment that she’s disappearing but he does everything for her.   You hope that Anne will drift off into death as Georges tells her a childhood story but the end is not peaceful:  it’s a struggle which he, though increasingly weak and tired, has to win.  Haneke doesn’t explain what has happened to Georges at the end of the film but he doesn’t need to.   You accept that Anne’s death is, to all intents and purposes, the end of Georges’ life too.  That he departs with her.

    Because Michael Haneke likes and admires his protagonists, and because Riva and Trintignant are moving, Amour seems, compared with Haneke’s earlier work, a relatively emotional piece of work.  Yet it still has a chilliness that I find forbidding.  This quality derives partly from Haneke’s technique, which seems almost too perfect for its subject:  the physically gruelling scenes are staged so skilfully that the technical smoothness is rather appalling.  (The cinematography is by Darius Khondji and the editor is Monika Willi.)   The other chilly element is Anne’s and Georges’s impeccably cultured existence.  Their living room is lined with books and there are tasteful objets d’art in evidence.  They don’t have, though, a pet animal or a television or any trace of vulgarity or frivolity.  Maybe these things don’t make a difference to old age once it descends but the rarefied atmosphere of the couple’s increasingly gloomy apartment emphasises their helplessness.

    22 November 2012

  • J Edgar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clint Eastwood (2011)

    The odd couple here is not Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio – only a matter of time before these two bêtes noires of mine joined forces – but the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and J Edgar Hoover.  But maybe not so odd.  The protagonist and hero of Black’s previous screenplay, Harvey Milk, became a public figure because of the homosexuality that he publicly asserted.  Hoover, according to this film, was a public figure who continued to repress his sexual orientation.  It’s not hard to understand Black’s interest in exploring the life and personality of a man who had at least one major thing in common with Milk but was, in most respects, his polar opposite.   It was a limitation of Milk that Black and Gus Van Sant made Harvey Milk absolutely heroic – although you didn’t experience the film as limited because the story was strong, the characters mostly appealing, and Sean Penn’s portrait of Milk so rich.   This project involves a greater challenge because Black, unsurprisingly, is antipathetic to the politics and personality of J Edgar Hoover.  There’s no suggestion of sympathy for Hoover’s predicament, even though disguising homosexuality was standard practice in, for example, Hollywood throughout the many years that he led the FBI (perhaps it still is); even though Hoover, in his line of work, could hardly have come out, were he ever so liberal.   The film doesn’t explore either the nature of Hoover’s sexuality or how much he was able or willing to understand it.  It’s love at first sight when Hoover (DiCaprio) meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), the man who becomes his lifelong partner at work and outside it, but did Hoover ever like the look of other men?  There’s no hint that he did.  (A similar question surrounds the character of Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain but with a difference.  Miles away from any other human being, Ennis and Jack Twist are already thrown together in an extraordinary way:  you can accept that the experience of their nights on the mountain takes Ennis by surprise, is unforgettable and definitive.)

    Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay is no more shapely than it’s penetrating.  There’s a load of voiceover in the narrative – justified by Hoover’s apparently dictating his memoirs to one of his agents in the FBI (then to this agent’s replacement).  The scenes that don’t feature Hoover are so few they give the impression that Black has temporarily forgotten the framework for his story.  But Eastwood and DiCaprio go beyond the shortcomings of the script:  the actor makes Hoover an uninteresting person; the director renders tired and secondhand the amazing series of political events and social changes that occurred during his thirty-two year tenure of the top job at the FBI.  I guess I’ve heard Hoover’s voice a few times over the years; I can’t bring it to mind but I’ll assume Leonardo DiCaprio gets it right enough.  He’s so focused on getting it right, though, that approximation is all:  there’s no expression in the voice, let alone any variation across the years – the carefully metronomic delivery may be meant to reflect Hoover’s unyielding control of his inner feelings and/or his blinkered mind but it would be easier to think there was more than meets the ear if DiCaprio had been worth listening to before.   Watching Rory Kinnear as the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle in the BBC adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood last week, I was very impressed by his skill in creating a coherent character who, nevertheless, behaved differently with different people (as most people do in life, if not on screen).  This is beyond DiCaprio.  He’s so locked into the idea of a political bigot who can’t or won’t express the rest of his personality that his J Edgar Hoover is baffling (but not mysterious).  We get no sense – not least because DiCaprio has no authority – of how Hoover was viewed by the generations of FBI men who worked for him, or of why Clyde Tolson was attracted to him (beyond his having the looks of Leonardo DiCaprio), or of the complexity of Hoover’s relationship with his dominating mother.  One of DiCaprio’s limitations is an inability to bring to life the particular intelligence of the character he’s playing so the casting of Judi Dench as Hoover’s mother seems not just genetically improbable but an almost cruel joke (and, incidentally, Rory Kinnear in Edwin Drood made the relationship between Septimus Crisparkle and his mother (Julia McKenzie) especially truthful and convincing).  In fact, Judi Dench, although she’s the most vivid and individual thing in J Edgar, isn’t at her best and has a faintly negligent air.  (Her negligent attitude towards an American accent is explained, I assume, by the fact that Anna-Marie Hoover was of German-Swiss descent.)

    When Hoover’s mother dies, her tearful son gets a necklace out of her jewel box and puts it round his own neck.   He fondles one of her old dresses then gets into it.   Ah, the wages of being too close to your mother and not owning up to your homosexuality!  According to Wikipedia, Hoover was rumoured to go in for cross-dressing but Dustin Lance Black should still be ashamed of this scene, assuming that he, rather than Eastwood, is responsible for its conception.  For a few moments, J Edgar looks to be heading into Psycho territory – although no one is going to mistake Clint Eastwood for Alfred Hitchcock:  Hoover ashamedly wrenches the necklace off and the sequence climaxes with the cliché of beads scattering across a floor.  The dialogue is poor throughout.   It’s almost impossible to believe that the stilted exchanges between Hoover and Clyde Tolson were written by the person who wrote the scenes between Harvey Milk and his partner Scott Smith.  When Hoover asks his faithful secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) to get out the FBI file on ‘the President’s wife’, she replies ‘Mrs Roosevelt?’  Shortly after she starts work at the Justice Department, Hoover takes Helen to the Library of Congress and shows her the card catalogue system he’s devised (a list of suspected radicals).  This would-you-like-to-see-my-etchings moment is followed by a proposal of marriage.  Stupefied by the suggestion, Helen turns him down explaining that ‘My career comes first’ – and she’s as good as her word:  she continues as his personal secretary for just about the next half century.   This relationship is too bizarre not to be true and Naomi Watts does what she can with Helen but the whole thing plays like a joke.  Hoover attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King into not accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and, even when he turns on the television to watch a broadcast of the ceremony in Stockholm, still seems confident that King will decline.  You get no sense of the strength of Hoover’s delusion about this and his reaction to King’s accepting the award is little more than petulance.  Whatever you think of J Edgar Hoover, it’s hard to believe he didn’t have abilities greater than Black and Eastwood are willing to allow him.   They describe Hoover merely as a dishonest fool:  he won’t admit either his sexuality or his own part in making high-profile arrests, like that of Bruno Hauptmann (Damon Herriman) for the kidnap of the Lindbergh baby.

    The several Lindbergh sequences are flat-footed and Clint Eastwood delivers one-off episodes like the assassination of JFK as if he were checking things off a list.  As usual in his movies, the scenes lack rhythm, except where the actors create one independently, and that rarely happens here.  Dermot Mulroney is good in the minute role of a clear-minded cop on the Lindbergh case and Armie Hammer is very good in his early scenes as Clyde Tolson: you can see why the congenitally awkward Hoover is taken with Tolson’s social ease and suave good manners.   In private, Hammer’s Tolson has a femininity (as much as an effeminacy) that is expertly cloaked when he’s in the outside world.  But the script is so poor there’s nowhere for Hammer to go and his old man’s make-up is bad.  Leonardo DiCaprio deserves credit for being more sympathetic towards Hoover than Black and Eastwood are.  He’s really trying in this film:  his characterisation isn’t imaginative but it’s rigorously consistent – it establishes and sustains the tone of J Edgar, albeit this is an acrid, hollow monotone.  There are a few moments when, as the older Hoover, encased in prosthetic, you see the odd spark of individuality and get a sense that the mask of heavy make-up is freeing DiCaprio as an actor.   But what it frees him to express is still not much.

    24 January 2012

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