Old Yorker

  • Misery

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Reiner (1990)

    Stephen King’s novel Misery is essentially a paranoid-fantasy-cum-horror-story, about a best-selling author at the mercy of his ‘number one fan’.  What’s distinctive about the film of the book, with a screenplay by William Goldman, is that its strengths are unexpected ones for the genre – good dialogue and seriously good acting.  Paul Sheldon is a best-selling, trashy historical-romantic novelist who wants to write something better.  (It seems unusual for a man to be a market leader in this particular literary department but the film doesn’t comment on this.)  Sheldon is sick of Misery Chastain, the fictional heroine who’s made his fortune:  in the latest novel in the sequence he’s killed her off.  When his car crashes in a Colorado snowstorm – and in the middle of nowhere – Annie Wilkes, an ex-nurse, pulls Sheldon’s unconscious body out of the wreckage and gets him, and a manuscript for a ‘serious’ novel he’s written, back to her isolated farmhouse.  She intends, as well as to nurse him, to keep him there; Sheldon, who has two broken legs, isn’t well placed to argue.  Annie insists on burning the manuscript, which she tells Sheldon is profane and unworthy of him.  When she buys ‘Misery’s Child’ and discovers that he’s ‘murdered’ his leading lady, Annie forces him to write a sequel resurrecting her.  As work on the book progresses and Sheldon’s recovery from his injuries gathers pace, the psychotic Annie is forced to take increasingly gruesome steps to detain him and to stop the outside world from discovering her prized possession.

    The film is virtually a two-hander for James Caan as Sheldon and Kathy Bates as his crazed admirer.  Rob Reiner concentrates on their relationship and strikes gold.  It’s unusual for a performance in this type of movie to win a leading role Academy Award but Kathy Bates is among the most deserving Oscar winners of recent decades.  There are some wonderful highlights in what she does – the way she hits different notes in the course of a single line of dialogue and brings it to a ringing climax, the alarming moments of physical abandon.  Bates’s portrait of Annie is also complete and, in spite of the extremity of the character, truthful.   Reiner sometimes shoots her in close-up to emphasise her moon face; the effect is nearly cartoonish – except that the face is so humanly compelling:  the animation in it comes and go; when it goes, the pale flesh is dead weight, and you feel sorry for and frightened of Annie at the same time.   Kathy Bates creates a monster that’s scary and likeable (like Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates).  You want Paul Sheldon to escape but you want Annie Wilkes’s dream to come true too.  As Sheldon, James Caan, an actor who needs to do little to seem to be doing too much, is unusually expressive.  Being bedridden and then in a wheelchair seems to work for Caan, who gets across precisely Sheldon’s combination of fear and incredulous, sarcastic humour:  he’s particularly amusing in responding with forced, nearly manic grins to Annie’s displays of gauche girlish levity (one of her favourite phrases is ‘Heavens to Betsy!’) and gracious hospitality.  The writer’s situation is a nightmarish bad joke:  there’s very little he can get away with, not only because he’s immobilised but also thanks to Annie’s encyclopaedic knowledge of his books and the biography of Misery (who shares her name with Annie’s sow).

    The quality of the lead performances makes Misery an unusual scary movie; in other respects, it’s a no more than serviceable thriller.  When Annie Wilkes is seized with anger, Kathy Bates uses her size to intimidating effect; she makes you just about believe that Annie had the physical strength to rescue Paul Sheldon from his wrecked car and the bludgeoning violence in the movie is of a piece with Annie’s heft.  The famous moment when she ‘hobbles’ Sheldon to stop him going anywhere works as comedy violence, not least because it’s over pretty quickly;  the extended slugging fight between the two principals at the climax is a problem, though.  This gory, thwacking mayhem is staged as if it were the culmination of what’s been a consistent feature of Misery but the change of style is jarring.  By this point there have already been hints that Rob Reiner’s concentration on the actors, at the expense of constructing a robust horror film context, is going to leave him stranded at the business end of the picture.  The fatal visit to the Wilkes farm by the local sheriff is a little reminiscent of what happens to the private detective in Psycho.  Arbogast’s murder in the Bates’s house is a shock – both because it’s brilliantly staged and because we were expecting Arbogast to sort things out and restore order.  He hasn’t had enough screen time to matter much as a person, however; in comparison, the scenes between the folksy sheriff Buster (Richard Farnsworth) and his wife (Frances Sternhagen) are regular relief from the main story of Misery:  the couple are reminders of a sane world outside Annie’s farmhouse.  (The small cast also includes, as Sheldon’s agent, Lauren Bacall, in a ‘special appearance’ which is nothing special.)  Richard Farnsworth is so physically expressive (for example, when Buster is searching unsuccessfully in the snow for Sheldon’s car) and has such warmth and humour that, when Annie shoots him, it throws the film out of whack – in a way that, unlike in Psycho, feels unintentional.   The killing isn’t mentioned again (it’s not clear what Annie does with the corpse or why Buster’s wife doesn’t report his disappearance) as if Reiner and William Goldman were embarrassed by the miscalculation.

    It’s easy enough to contrast the concealing snow drifts outside the farmhouse with what’s inside but the cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld’s palette of browns and greys turns the dreary homeliness of the interiors into something increasingly worrying and Garrett Lewis’s set decoration, including Annie’s ‘cute’ animal ornaments, is excellent.  Misery is a lot stronger as you’re watching than when you think about it afterwards.  Annie Wilkes is something of a tautology:  she’s not only the obsessive fan who kidnaps their hero; she also has a serial killer past.  The belt-and-braces attempts to present her as a bogeywoman feel contrived since the nature of her murderous history doesn’t seem either to relate to her appetite for the Misery books or to chime with what she does to Paul Sheldon.  When Sheldon looks through Annie’s ‘Memory Lane’ book of family snaps and press cuttings and discovers her track record of infanticide (mostly), Rob Reiner pours on Marc Shaiman’s spooky music (phrases in which evoke the Psycho score).  This sequence is an economical piece of exposition but the discovery has no real impact – we don’t, by this stage, need to be told that Annie has killed before in order to be convinced she’s capable of killing now.  Her derangement would be more focused (and more plausible) if it was triggered by her passion for Misery.  It might even be more effective if it was the discovery that Misery’s been terminated that sends Annie over the edge – but that termination raises another problem with the plot.  If Sheldon is so famous, wouldn’t his killing off of Misery have generated more publicity?  Wouldn’t Annie, who can quote his every chat show and magazine pronouncement from years back, already know about it?  And why isn’t Sheldon’s disappearance more prominent on television news?

    Annie Wilkes switches instantly from desperate ingratiation to pure anger.  In a split second, Kathy Bates raises the volume of her voice by decibels – it’s alarmingly stentorian rather than nervously agitated – but there are no physical telltale signs of the Jekyll and Hyde variety.  You don’t see colour rise in her wan face or even a flicker in her eyes:  except for nearly imperceptible changes in her facial muscles, Bates appears to accomplish the violent mood swings through purely internal emotional processes.   Against the odds, she’s exceptionally convincing as someone who’s mentally ill because she makes you see that the mania is coming from inside.  Annie Wilkes is an all-round loser.  She’s shapelessly fat and physically and socially awkward, has risible cultural values, negligible culinary skills and a pathetic lack of dress sense (she wears drabs, blues and browns – and all the outfits emphasise her bulk and pallor).  Annie’s character in the screenplay is detailed through a concoction of slurpy sentimentality (Liberace records), romantic novel fervour, and prudishness (substituting baby words for swear words except when she gets uncontrollably mad) – with a garnish of religious mania. These are familiar ingredients for a lonely, murderous nutcase but the actress’s skill keeps her character a step ahead of the audience.  Annie’s madness is something to reckon with; as the film goes on, you’re sad for her when she’s depressed and happy in her moments of euphoria.  Kathy Bates’s artistry and empathy make Annie Wilkes truly memorable.

    3 January 2013

     

  • American Hustle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David O Russell (2013)

    American Hustle is peopled by con artists, cops and politicians – and peopled is the operative word:   one of the strengths of the film is that just about everyone is humanised.  The crooks, law enforcers and representatives of the people all belong to the same species – no one is viewed censoriously by David O Russell and his co-writer Eric Warren Singer.  (Singer wrote the original screenplay, which Russell then reworked.)  Professional intentions are complicated by personal attractions and antipathies; the moral of the story – voiced more than once – is that, whoever you are, you need to pretend a bit (or a lot) to get by.  There’s a ‘citation needed’ statement in the Wikipedia article on the movie that Russell wanted to focus on the characters rather than the plot.  Same here:  I couldn’t follow all the double-crossing twists and turns but felt I always wanted more of the people in American Hustle.  Afterwards, though, I wondered if what I’d really wanted was more of (most of) the actors.  Among the five principals, all except Jeremy Renner have worked with Russell before; so has Robert De Niro, who makes an uncredited but incisive brief appearance here as a Mafia boss.   De Niro, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence were all at least Oscar-nominated in their previous outings for Russell, and Bale and Lawrence won:  it’s not surprising all were happy to work with the director again.  Russell evidently knows how to get actors to deliver both individually and as an ensemble:  I thoroughly enjoyed watching Renner, De Niro, Lawrence, Adams and Cooper in American Hustle.   But, in retrospect, I realise that I wasn’t keen on the film as a whole.  Writing about it, I have to fight the urge to accentuate the negative.  The only performer I didn’t like watching was Christian Bale.  I think what irritated me about him links to a larger resistance to David O Russell as a director.

    The inspiration for the movie and its main characters is the FBI’s ‘Abscam’ public corruption investigation and sting operation of the late 1970s and early 1980s – although the ‘Some of this actually happened’ legend at the start is a fair indicator of Russell’s approach.  All the characters’ names have been changed to give him maximum elbow room.  The protagonist is a Bronx-born con man called Irving Rosenfeld (Bale); he’s married to Rosalyn, an airhead loose cannon (Lawrence), whose son Danny (played by the identical twins Danny and Sonny Corbo) Irving has adopted.  His partner in crime and his main partner in bed, however, is Sydney Prosser (Adams).  Like Irving, she comes from the wrong side of the social tracks but a crucial ingredient of their scamming success is Sydney’s professional alter ego – this ex-stripper from Albuquerque poses as  an English aristocrat by the name of Lady Edith Greensley; and she and Irving do especially well selling fake works of art.  Richie Di Maso (Cooper), an ambitious young FBI agent in New Jersey, catches them out on a loan scam but offers not to press charges if they’ll help the FBI bring others to book; Richie’s problem is that, as he admits to her, he immediately falls for Lady Edith.  He devises a plan to ensnare, with the help of Irving and Sydney/Edith, Carmine Polito (Renner), the mayor of Camden (NJ) – popular with his constituents, trying to revitalise the local gambling economy in Atlantic City and vulnerable because he’s desperate enough not to be too principled about where the money for this project comes from.  Richie is eager to ratchet up the sting and the political seniority of those stung, exasperating his immediate boss (Louis C K – excellent) but getting support from his boss’s boss (Alessandro Nivola) for a plan to film with a hidden video-recorder a collection of members of Congress accepting bribes.   Richie’s vaulting ambition is his downfall:  he’s the victim of a conclusive scam by Irving and Sydney.  The disgraced Richie is removed from the Abscam operation and airbrushed out of its history so that he gets no credit for any of its achievements.   Carmine Polito, with whom Irving has genuinely bonded, gets off with a relatively light prison sentence.  Rosalyn agrees to divorce Irving and is kept in the manner to which she’s become accustomed by a suave mobster (Jack Huston) instead.  Irving and Sydney earn enough from their last big con to go legitimate, buy a gallery with real art in it, and live happily ever after – with Irving even getting shared custody of Rosalyn’s son.   (This is a highly simplified summary of a complicated plot.)

    Christian Bale, well known for losing weight for his movie roles, has piled it on to play Irving:  his paunch and his histrionics make him doubly unrecognisable here as the actor who made such a hollow, introverted Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.  Bale’s performance is self-approving and certainly self-indulgent:  he and Russell seem keen to show off Bale’s weight gain for maximum garish effect.  Even allowing for the fact that the beautiful Sydney’s attachment to Irving is meant to be in spite of his appearance, Bale overdoes things – he makes Irving too gross.  It’s obvious that a good deal of what he says is improvised; while the same goes for Bradley Cooper as Richie, the effect is very different.  Bale’s showoff quality makes it harder to like the man he’s playing, as Russell seems to expect you to do.  Irving’s most engaging feature is his hair, or the lack of it – what Sydney describes in voiceover narrative as ‘a very involved comb-over’ – and Bale’s best moments come when Irving has to stand and suffer, or try to conceal, the indignity of his precarious coiffure coming unstuck. The action is set in 1978 so perhaps it’s not surprising that the male hairdos are an unusually prominent feature:  Bradley Cooper’s perm is as grimly determined – Richie wears curlers at home – as Irving’s hairpieces; Jeremy Renner wears a worrying pompadour.  (Renner plays Carmine Polito empathically and highly effectively:  he makes the mayor’s gift of a microwave to Irving bizarrely touching.)

    Otherwise, though, it’s the physical and tonal contrasts between the two women that are the spectacle in American Hustle, consummated in Sydney’s and Rosalyn’s powder room confrontation – which is up there with Celeste Holm’s and Anne Baxter’s head-to-head in All About Eve.  As Rosalyn, Jennifer Lawrence is, to borrow a phrase Pauline Kael used of the young Debra Winger, ‘incredibly vivid’, and Lawrence’s characterisation is both rich and precise.  Rosalyn is ludicrously self-absorbed and small-brained but Lawrence also gets across her capacity for hurt and frustration; she’s so natural but also so comically spot on (for example, when the Rosenfelds are out for dinner with the Politos and Rosalyn, who’s had plenty to drink, is rattling on to Carmine’s wife (Elisabeth Rohm), then to the husbands, about nail varnish) that it’s easy to see why Lawrence has, at the age of only twenty-three, achieved such phenomenal success and kudos.  The choice of songs on the soundtrack is consistently effective but the highlight is ‘Live and Let Die’ with Rosalyn vengefully acting out the lyric.   (If Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for American Hustle it will only be because she won Best Actress last year.)  While Rosalyn is bursting out of her tight, low-cut dresses, the slender Sydney goes in for even more startling décolletage.  Otherwise, Amy Adams gives a performance that’s less triumphantly showy than Lawrence’s but which is impressively sophisticated.  Adams has the ability to express an unusual range of sexual temperatures and, as Sydney, she’s both rarefied and sultry, both ladylike and dirty.  An American playing an American pretending to be a posh Englishwoman, she manages Lady Edith’s ever-so-slightly-wavering accent superbly.

    The production design team, headed by Judy Becker, has done a fine job – the interiors of Irving’s dry cleaning shop are particularly atmospheric – and the screenplay has lots of good dialogue.  It’s clear that American critics have found the film exceptionally entertaining; some of the praise being heaped on it almost suggests that reviewers think David O Russell, by realising the decade with verve, has emulated the glories of American cinema of the 1970s.  I can’t share this level of enthusiasm.  I don’t want to be a killjoy but, like Russell’s earlier films, American Hustle would benefit from more discipline:  if it were twenty minutes shorter – perhaps shorn of some of the improvised bits – it would be more sustainedly enjoyable.  And the denouement rather undermines the democracy of the movie.  This isn’t only because Irving and Sydney come out on top and it’s a disappointingly familiar outcome to a crime comedy to see the professional lawbreakers prevail.  It’s also because Bradley Cooper’s Richie, with his simmering mania and eagerness to please and succeed, is especially engaging:  you feel sorry he ends up utterly thwarted.

    2 January 2014

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