Old Yorker

  • The Invisible Woman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ralph Fiennes (2013)

    The first half is excellent, thanks to the freedom of the camera movement and the fluid naturalism of the acting, which is well orchestrated by Ralph Fiennes.  His own playing of Charles Dickens is a particular highlight, as are the descriptions of Victorian theatre.  For as long as the developing relationship between Dickens and the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan is conveyed in hints and moments – a look between them that’s held a fraction too long, Dickens’s wife’s expressions of unease – the tension is absorbing.  But two things combine to make The Invisible Woman increasingly hard work.  The first is purely visual – the natural light interiors (and much of the action takes place indoors) become punitive.  The reliance on natural light made dramatic sense in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011) – the dark spaces of Thornfield expressed the house’s secrets – but it’s just an eye strain here.  It’s frustrating too because the DoP Rob Hardy’s composition and colouring of the outdoor sequences often have the quality of period paintings come to life – Doncaster races, a London hill where Dickens and his young mistress bump into his son Charley (who is older than Nelly), the beach at Margate.  A greater problem is the shape of Abi Morgan’s script, based on Claire Tomalin’s 1991 biography of Ellen Ternan.  We know from the start of the film that Nelly, now a  headmaster’s wife and a mother, lives in Margate and her seemingly daily routine there is too striking not to be noticed:  Nelly paces along the shore in such agitation that she must be as locally conspicuous as the French lieutenant’s woman was on the Cobb at Lyme Regis.   There’s no real traction between the present (the 1880s) and the flashbacks to Nelly’s life with Dickens (in the late 1850s and early 1860s), which form the major part of the story.  And Nelly’s unhappiness is eventually resolved in a too easy and mechanical way.  She tells a local clergyman about her past, although he’d already worked out who she once was, and, in so doing, gets it out of her system.

    At the start, we watch Nelly and this clergyman, the Reverend Benham, rehearsing a group of schoolboys (at Nelly’s husband’s school) in a play – No Thoroughfare, co-written by Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins.  (The acting in the school play is at just the right level.)  Benham is a Dickens enthusiast; it’s a conversation with him that triggers Nelly’s memories.   The first flashback features another Dickens-Collins collaboration:  the former is directing, and appearing in, the latter’s play The Frozen Deep in Manchester.  The Ternans, mother and three daughters, are touring actresses, also appearing in the production.  Nelly is the youngest and regarded as a minor talent within the family but she soon catches the director’s attention.  Dickens chooses her to speak the play’s epilogue over the dead body of the character he’s playing.  The juxtaposition of the two plays, and especially the deferral of Nelly’s delivery of the epilogue until the very end of the film are obvious but effective enough; and Fiennes’s dramatisation of Dickens as the centre of attention, on and off stage, is very well done.  You see not only how exhausting this is for his wife Catherine but also how Dickens needs to perform to keep more troubling thoughts and feelings at bay.

    In his playing of Dickens, Fiennes shows more vitality and greater emotional precision than I’ve seen from him since the 1990s roles that launched his film acting career.   Without any harsh words between them, he and Joanna Scanlan, in a fine performance as Catherine, describe a marriage that’s died inside:  the couple are miles away from each other.  Catherine’s physical heaviness is important – it expresses how his wife has become an implacable problem for Dickens:  a dead weight.  For her part, she seems self-conscious about her plumpness (there’s a confounding moment when he interrupts her getting ready for bed and she’s unclothed:  he apologises for his mistake) – yet there’s a slight suggestion too that Catherine Dickens understands that her bulk is a reminder to her husband that she’s there.  When Dickens’s affair with Nelly has become the subject of public rumour and he writes to The Times denying it, Charley (well played by Michael Marcus) reads the letter out to his mother, and she breaks down.  Joanna Scanlan is very moving in this moment, which also gets across a good sense of Catherine’s being the heart of the family.  One of the younger children, playing in an adjoining room, listens curiously to her sobs.  Compared with his wife, Dickens, for all his taking the lead in boisterous games with the children when he’s at home, is a celebrity who belongs to others.

    Kristin Scott Thomas has threatened in a recent interview to give up film acting because it’s too boring:  if she really is bored, it’s beginning to show on screen.   She has very little characterisation as Mrs Ternan and is too languid for a hard-working theatrical mother:  you can’t believe she ever had the energy for either histrionics or childbirth.  I’m not sure why Ralph Fiennes cast her unless for old times’ (English Patient) sake.  Both the older Ternan daughters (Perdita Weeks and Amanda Hale) seem right, though, and Tom Hollander is convincingly eccentric as Wilkie Collins.  In the Margate part of the story, John Kavanagh is properly shrewd and watchful as Benham and Tom Burke plays the difficult part of Nelly’s husband, George, intelligently – although some of the difficulty of the role exposes the weakness of Abi Morgan’s script.  There’s a suggestion late on that George, as well as Benham, may be aware of his wife’s past – but it’s not at all clear when he cottoned on or, if he did, why he said nothing.  If he’s just learned the truth, how has he absorbed it so easily?  There’s a similar lack of clarity in the earlier part of the story, with little indication of what Nelly’s family thought of her going off to France with Dickens (to have a baby, which is stillborn) or if this caused a rift with them.

    The Staplehurst train crash in 1865 is very well staged and upsetting in its traumatic effect on Nelly.  The accident is terrifying in itself but Dickens’s behaviour in the immediate aftermath shows his young mistress that he means to keep her a secret, whatever the circumstances.  Felicity Jones’s looking much younger than her thirty years works for her in this part.  She’s believable as the teenage Nelly; the fact that she retains an immature, though careworn, look in early middle age is an effective way of implying that Nelly hasn’t got beyond her youthful relationship with Dickens.  This is the second film running in which Jones’s character flirts with an older man but the interactions between her and Ralph Fiennes are more persuasive than those between Jones and Guy Pearce in Breathe In:  Fiennes is very good at registering Dickens’s shock at the extent to which he reciprocates.  The bits between them that don’t work so well are, unfortunately, the illustrations of the supposed climax of the relationship and the film’s rather forced linking of this to the plot of Great Expectations.

    10 February 2014

  • The Lion in Winter

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Harvey (1968)

    I saw The Lion in Winter in Sheffield on Saturday 6 December 1969, two days before my fourteenth birthday.  It was a memorable weekend for other reasons, which rather eclipsed the experience of the film – although, as I recall, I didn’t much enjoy it anyway.   I’d never seen The Lion in Winter since, until last night at BFI, and it made for a dismal ending to my engagement with the Katharine Hepburn season.  I’ve been very selective in what I’ve seen, knowing already that I liked Alice Adams and feeling pretty sure that Hannah McGill’s talk introducing the season would be worth hearing (as it was).  Even so, I’d not previously seen either Summertime or Long Day’s Journey into Night and both were great to watch; there seemed a fair chance that The Lion in Winter would have improved with age.   An immediate problem was that the years had brought about, in physical terms, a serious deterioration in the film.  The front-of-house man (the pleasant, competent one) explained that the colour had faded, that we could expect the images to have a ‘pinkish hue’ but that this was currently the best available print.  The ‘pinkish hue’ was an understatement:  Douglas Slocombe’s palette had been reduced to a virtually sepia colour range.  But although the look of the film compounded my irritation with The Lion in Winter, it wasn’t the root cause.

    The screenplay is an adaptation by James Goldman of his stage play, which opened on Broadway in 1966.  The principal characters are the first Plantagenet king of England, Henry II; his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine; and their three surviving sons, Richard, John and Geoffrey.  The time is Christmas 1183 – a few months after the death of Henry and Eleanor’s eldest son, Henry.   Eleanor, imprisoned by her husband in various locations in England for many years, is brought to the king’s castle in Chinon, Anjou for a ‘Christmas court’.  Eleanor wants Richard to succeed Henry as king when the time comes (as primogeniture would dictate); Henry prefers the youngest of the three brothers, John.  (If Henry has the authority to keep his queen under lock and key, I’m not sure why he has to argue the toss with her over the succession, but let that pass.)  There are also matters to settle with the young French king, Philip II (the son and successor of Eleanor’s ex-husband, Louis VII of France):  Philip has given his half-sister Alais, currently Henry’s mistress, to the future heir to the English throne, and is now demanding either a wedding or the return of Alais’s dowry.   The background is historical but the story James Goldman tells is largely fictional.  Pauline Kael described the dramatis personae as ‘a family of monsters playing Freudian games of sex and power’ but it’s the tone of the proceedings that makes The Lion in Winter unusual for a medieval historical piece.  Goldman translates the manoeuvring of the technically noble characters into a royally undignified and recognisably modern squabble.

    The Lion in Winter was turned into a movie hot on the heels of Becket and A Man for All Seasons, two other English history plays that had been hits on stage and successfully adapted (good box-office, critical plaudits, multiple Oscar awards and/or nominations) for the screen.  From the start, it’s clear that Anthony Harvey has decided to sacrifice the distinctiveness of the material in favour of assuring the audience that this is another prestige drama about kings and queens of England.  (Harvey’s decision was vindicated to the extent that The Lion in Winter was similarly ‘successful’.)  The scene-setting includes:  Henry training the hopeless John in swordsmanship in a lush, open landscape; Richard preparing to dispatch an opponent in the lists; Geoffrey on a cliffside, supervising the ambush of a group of horsemen on the beach below; and Eleanor’s arrival at Chinon on the royal barge.  There are Olympian camera shots of men and animals miles below; and the usual attempts to convey the primitive bustle of medieval life – dogs barking, hens squawking, and so on.  This introduction is as pointless as it’s protracted:  once the characters go indoors at Chinon, there’s little rationale for visual action and what camera movement there is, feels arbitrary.  From this point onwards, the actors might as well be on stage.  But although Anthony Harvey’s interest in the physical world of the piece slackens, he continues to encourage his cast to look for depth in their lines – as if this was a logical consequence of acting royalty playing historical royalty.

    It turns out to be a wild goose chase.  Although individual lines are clever, the structure and flavour of Goldman’s dialogue is samey.  It’s one Machiavellian barb after another; every so often, the barbs are punctuated – and the high style is punctured – by knowing bathos.  (One of the best-known lines in the script is Eleanor’s ‘Well, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs’?)  The lack of variety in the writing does no favours to the unique timbre and rhythm of Katharine Hepburn’s voice, which has the effect of emphasising the sameness of what she’s saying.  Hepburn also semi-anglicises her accent and this gives an artificial edge to her readings.  She’s a notoriously patrician actress yet here she seems to be pretending to be grand.  She has a striking moment when the queen, alone in her chamber, looks in her mirror and mocks her aging features.  In the company of others, her wit and combativeness feel mechanical – and more like an assertion of superiority to fellow actors than a quality of the character she’s playing.

    When she made this film Hepburn was sixty-one, just as Eleanor of Aquitaine was in 1183.  Whereas Eleanor was Henry’s senior by eleven years, Peter O’Toole was twenty-five years younger than Katharine Hepburn and it shows, to his disadvantage.  O’Toole had already played the younger Henry II in Becket and one of the highlights of that performance came in his tirade against Eleanor and his mother Matilda; in Henry’s opening outburst in the sword-fighting instruction to John, O’Toole picks up where he left off in Becket.  He’s occasionally amusing in later exchanges too but even he becomes tiresome – both in delivery of the flamboyant invective and when he tries for something beyond it.  Anthony Hopkins conveys, with brimming eyes, a sense of the anguish felt by the supposedly gay Richard (Coeur de Lion-to-be) yet the ‘truthfulness’ of Hopkins’s acting is embarrassing – especially since the staging of the scene in which Richard’s homosexual feelings for King Philip are revealed is farcical (Philip hides first Geoffrey and John, then, when Henry drops in for a discussion, Richard, behind curtains in his chamber).   John Castle is a good and, I think, underrated actor but he’s monotonous as Geoffrey.  Timothy Dalton manages to make Philip a reasonably amusing combination of dashing and callow, and his movement sometimes has a naturally kinetic quality that’s in short supply elsewhere in the film. Jane Merrow is woodenly elocutionary as Alais.

    Given these complaints, I should have been grateful for Nigel Terry, whose hapless, petulant John looks like a village idiot from a Carry On film.   In fact, I found Terry’s very basic caricature harder to watch than anything else – I felt embarrassed for him because, in this case only, Anthony Harvey gets the actor to be simply comical.  It makes Terry look painfully limited in the exalted company around him.  John Barry’s score manages to fuse fake grandeur and humour successfully but nothing else in the film does.  It was my reaction to Peter O’Toole that made me realise I wouldn’t like The Lion in Winter however it was played, but that playing it for real was worse than playing it for camp laughs.  Since (a) my elder sister and her husband took me to see it in 1969, (b) I didn’t know my way around Sheffield and (c) I wouldn’t have dared speak my mind anyway, of course I stayed put during the film and I’m sure I kept shtum afterwards.   More than forty-five years on, fury and boredom converged so strongly in NFT1 that I felt I couldn’t and shouldn’t stand The Lion in Winter any longer.  I walked out an hour before the end.

    16 March 2015

     

     

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