Old Yorker

  • Breathe In

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Drake Doremus (2013)

    Breathe In opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival:  Drake Doremus, Felicity Jones and Dustin O’Halloran, who wrote the score, were all there for the screening.  It was a really enjoyable occasion – because it was Edinburgh and an opportunity to applaud the people behind Like Crazy – but this latest from Doremus is a disappointment after its predecessor.  Felicity Jones again plays an English girl on a period of study in America; good actress though she is, Jones is less persuasive here than in the earlier film.  More than two years after Like Crazy, she’s playing someone younger – a high school rather than a college student.  It’s true that Jones, who’s now nearly thirty, is petite enough to pass for someone younger and innocent but the naivete of Sophie in Breathe In is wafer thin.   It’s clear almost as soon as she arrives to stay with the Reynolds family in a small town in upstate New York that Sophie has her eye on the paterfamilias Keith (Guy Pearce), a high-school music teacher who’s still not given up hopes of a career as a cellist in an orchestra.   As Jones plays her, there’s no mistaking Sophie’s intent – or, at least, her fantasy – and Keith must see it in her eyes.   Doremus and his actors are good at social details.  When Sophie has her first meal with the Reynolds – Keith, his wife Megan (Amy Ryan) and their teenage daughter Lauren (Mackenzie Davis) – the scene expresses how a newcomer can feel all the more excluded by hosts who are welcoming and whose affability reinforces, to an outsider, their easy familiarity with each other.  For the first half hour or so the central story is strong too.  Their shared interest in, and talent for, performing classical music give Sophie and Keith a kinship that sets them apart from the homebody Megan, with her collection of cookie jars, and Lauren, who’s a swimming champ and, by implication, a philistine.  For as long as it’s not obvious that Sophie’s interest in Keith is reciprocated, the film is absorbing.

    Although it’s hardly an original idea, the passion in the music does function as a sublimation of sexual feelings that Sophie and Keith know shouldn’t be expressed – particularly a piece of Chopin that Sophie plays for the rest of the high-school class when Keith asks her to introduce herself to them.  Guy Pearce’s reaction to this is very striking.  Keith seems discomfited by Sophie’s playing:   Pearce suggests this is something he hadn’t bargained for either as a fellow musician (and one who feels thwarted – and vulnerable to younger competitors) or in terms of its emotional effect on him (as someone whose family life is unfulfilling too).  But what follow-up there is to this powerful moment is artificially delayed.  We have to wait until Megan, Lauren and Sophie go to a concert at which Keith is playing and, when they meet him afterwards, he introduces Sophie to his orchestra colleague as a ‘fantastic pianist’.  (This moment plays out simply as a crude exclusion of Lauren.)  As Keith’s and Sophie’s feelings for each other start to register in the real world outside their heads (although it’s not clear that the relationship is ever fully consummated), Breathe In becomes conventional and melodramatic in a rather mechanical way, and the screenplay turns lazy and absent-minded.  Lauren happens to be walking just where she can see her father and Sophie lying together by a lake; the serial humiliations for her that follow aren’t sequenced convincingly – it’s as if all that matters is that they climax in the car crash Lauren’s in.  There’s a lack of clarity too about how much Keith’s professional fortunes matter to him relative to his new preoccupation with Sophie.

    Of course Sophie is meant to expose the fissures of family life that routine and evasion have kept hidden but Doremus and his co-writer Ben York Jones (who also worked with him on Like Crazy) supply that family life only with qualities that make it vulnerable.  They fail to suggest enough of what kept it going until now (and there’s no suggestion of earlier ruptures having occurred).  You actually get a better sense – in one short scene – of how an imperfect marriage survives when the Reynolds, with Sophie, visit their friends Peter (Kyle McLachlan) and Wendy (Alexandra Wentworth).  You get it in what Peter confides to Keith over the barbecue, in Wendy’s vivid chatter about interior decorating and freezing food.   Guy Pearce, like Felicity Jones, is good at creating edge and tension but he also makes it too evident too soon what lies beneath the surface.   The film starts and ends with Keith, Megan and Lauren posing for a family photo:  these bookend sequences are very well played (even though by the end we know just how forced the smiles for the camera are) but Keith’s capacity for dissimulation doesn’t go beyond this momentary and obvious example.   Pearce makes him too remote and pissed off.

    Amy Ryan has a pretty wretched role – the cookie jars are too obviously symbolic and, of course, get shattered in due course – but Ryan plays it empathically.  You can just about believe in Megan’s jolly determination to hold on to her happy family, or the idea of one.  The moments of credibility that Amy Ryan achieves tend, however, to reveal the implausibility of other elements of Breathe In.  Although she’s been playing piano since she was five years old, Sophie is now undecided about a musical career:  she reveals this to Keith when they’re alone in the house together, after an old-fashioned Hollywood rainstorm that requires a change of clothes, but you know that Megan would have been cheerfully inquisitive enough (and sufficiently effective as an inquisitor) to get this sort of information out of Sophie in less meteorologically heightened circumstances.  (The rainstorm is such a cliché you feel almost surprised that neither of these clever, cultured people comments on it.)

    Breathe In, for all its faults, is much better than A Late Quartet but it gradually sinks into the same misapprehension that the classical music context necessarily confers depth on the material, when the effect of the music is, for the most part, merely melodramatic.  And the sexual dimension is disappointingly tame – Felicity Jones’s actual age blurs the potentially controversial generation gap between Keith and Sophie (she is presumably a minor).  By the end, the movie has become so predictable that I hoped Keith would ignore the crucial phone call, informing him that Lauren’s in hospital, and go ahead with eloping with Sophie – just so as to defy the requirements of this kind of story.  (He doesn’t.)  Whereas the music often seems too loud, it’s sometimes hard to make out what the voices are saying – even when everything else about an exchange between characters is telling you that their words are full of significance.

    19 June 2013

  • Becket

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Glenville (1964)

    There’s no point my pretending that I approached Peter Glenville’s best-known film with unbridled enthusiasm.  I think I’d twice tried watching it on television and given up – and it was on BBC2 earlier in the same day that I’d booked to see it at BFI.   It still made sense to watch Becket in a cinema in order to stick it out – although, in the event, I recorded the last twenty minutes of the television screening and left NFT3 before the end so that I could get an earlier train home.  Adapted by Edward Anhalt from Jean Anouilh’s stage play Becket ou l’honneur de Dieu (which Glenville had directed on Broadway), Becket was well received:  it made money at the box office and was nominated for twelve Oscars (Anhalt’s screenplay was the only one that it won).  Laurence Rosenthal, who wrote the film’s score and introduced the BFI screening, mentioned, however, that the film was criticised for having insufficient action.   Rosenthal defended Becket as being full of ‘moral action’ but Glenville’s direction (very possibly influenced by the wishes of Paramount and the producer Hal Wallis) is more half-hearted than Rosenthal implied.  Glenville keeps inserting bits of physical activity or, more often, spectacle; whenever he does so, he dilutes the drama.  Laurence Rosenthal also praised the quality of the film’s production, especially John Bryan’s reconstruction of the interior of Canterbury Cathedral in a Shepperton hangar.  This is a remarkable achievement but it swamps, and doesn’t connect with, what’s meant to be the heart of the picture.  It has to be said that Rosenthal’s elaborate music has a similar effect.

    The loyalty to king vs loyalty to God argument gives Becket an obviously similarity to A Man for All Seasons (staged as a full-length play for the first time in 1960 – the year after Anouilh’s Becket opened – although Robert Bolt had written Thomas More’s story as a radio and television play several years previously).   The personal tensions within a dysfunctional royal family – and the presentation of these as if they were relationships de nos jours – anticipate James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter.  Perhaps the modernised family squabbles are meant to compensate for the difficulties that a late-twentieth-century audience is likely to have in relating to the protagonist’s religious dilemma.   The play’s dialectic may be compelling in the theatre but it isn’t in Glenville’s movie.  This is partly because he’s just not a good film director – although I don’t much care for A Man for All Seasons, Fred Zinnemann keeps it moving very crisply.  In comparison, Becket, even with Geoffrey Unsworth as DoP, is visually rhythmless:  Glenville seems merely to be photographing the lavish sets.  A rather ludicrous example of his giving the audience a big-screen experience for the sake of it occurs when Thomas Becket and King Henry II, both on horseback, are seen from a God’s-eye view – tiny figures gradually approaching each other on a seashore in France (where Becket has been in hiding and Henry appears to have gone on a day trip).  It’s like an equine parody of the cliché of long-separated lovers running towards each other from opposite ends of a field.   (The sequence was more enjoyable in retrospect – after I’d read the BFI programme note, in which the editor Anne V Coates recalls that Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, both the worse for wear after a night’s heavy drinking, struggled to control their horses.)  There are several sequences involving a crowd of extras and they always seem to react in the same, mechanical way – whether the multitude is expressing delight or despair, support or hostility.

    There are other, major problems in the film of Becket which are not the fault – or not so explicitly the fault – of the director:  there’s no real substance to what are meant to be crucial elements of the material.   Once Henry has made him Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket’s allegiance to God arrives on cue for the moral dilemma to get underway but it comes out of nowhere and Richard Burton doesn’t suggest that it’s taken Becket by surprise.   It’s impossible too to believe that Burton’s Becket was a libertine and a wencher alongside the young king; if this Becket did ever enjoy himself, it must have been long, long ago – his jadedness seems ingrained.   The only thing that Burton sounds as if he means – except for Becket’s surprisingly passionate excommunication of the baron responsible for the death of a misbehaving priest – is his admission to Gwendolen (Sian Phillips), the long-term mistress he’s about to lose, that he’s never really cared for anyone.   Does Henry really love Becket as the audience is repeatedly told?  He clearly likes him (even though the charms of Burton’s Becket are elusive) but the monarch’s awareness that he’s in charge gives a manipulative, almost cruel edge to the intimacy between them.   As Henry, Peter O’Toole shouts very entertainingly – he’s great at insulting Queen Eleanor (Pamela Brown) and the Queen Dowager Matilda (Martita Hunt).  He excoriates his wife’s efforts at tapestry.  In answer to his mother’s question ‘And I – have I too given you nothing?’ he replies, with weary acidity, ‘Life. Yes. Thank you’.  O’Toole’s physical verve and unpredictability give his performance a charge – even if you sense sometimes that the actor is as impatient with the lines he has to get through as the character is with the people to whom they’re delivered.  O’Toole is also impressive at the climax of the film – here you believe in Henry’s love for Becket and you begin to wonder if it includes a sexual element.

    John Gielgud is enjoyable in his brief appearance as the French king – largely because he’s witty in such a modern way and his being dressed up in period costume makes it all the funnier.   Apart from the eccentric Pamela Brown and Felix Aylmer (Becket’s predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, who kicks the bucket too early), few of the supporting cast are up to much.   An actor called David Weston is very dull in the sizeable role of a monk who becomes Becket’s devoted assistant and after Donald Wolfit’s first couple of scenes I dreaded his every reappearance as the Bishop of London.   There’s a sequence in Rome involving the pope and one of his cardinals; they are played by Italians (Paola Stoppa and Gino Cervi – and Stoppa has a great, foxy face) but, because Gielgud’s Louis VII is so beautifully spoken and makes no attempt to sound French, the effect of their accented Engleesh-a is ridiculous.

    2 November 2013

     

     

     

     

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