Old Yorker

  • Twenty Feet from Stardom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Morgan Neville (2013)

    This Oscar-winning documentary has a catchy title and a good subject but the title is slightly misleading, the film repetitive and verging on tedious.   Morgan Neville’s subject is backing singers; he and the producer Gil Friesen, a music industry executive, have assembled a group of principals whose various ambitions and experiences supply a range of life stories.  There’s reference to how the late Luther Vandross moved from the background into the spotlight but, except for Oren Waters, part of a trio with his two sisters, the backing singers featured in Twenty Feet from Stardom are otherwise all women, while most of the mega-star talking heads who share the screen with them here are men (Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Sting).  There are a few mentions of exploitation of the faces and bodies of girl backing singers in times past although Neville doesn’t make a big sexist deal of this.

    Darlene Love has gone through the familiar dramatic vicissitudes of a show business career.  She was, for years, unjustly denied fame by Phil Spector:  it’s Love’s voice that’s heard on several huge Spector hits but it was someone else’s name on the record and face on television.  At one stage, she tells Morgan Neville, Love worked as a domestic cleaner to pay the rent; her sustained comeback was sealed with induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.  Merry Clayton had a much more supportive producer in Lou Adler but her solo career never took off in the way her talents deserved.   Claudia Lennear enjoyed unusual celebrity as a backing singer in the late 1960s and early 1970s but left the music industry to become a language teacher.  Lisa Fischer, a generation younger, won a Grammy as a soloist but returned to session singing because she enjoyed it more; she’s been part of every Rolling Stones tour since 1989.  Tata Vega has, also for decades, doubled as a soloist and a backing singer.  Judith Hill, still only in her late twenties, attracted global attention when she sang at her mentor Michael Jackson’s funeral in 2009 but she’s struggling to establish a solid career.  (Shortly after Twenty Feet from Stardom premiered at Sundance, Hill was a contestant in The Voice in the US.  She didn’t win.)

    All these women have great voices and several of them are jolly company on screen.  Most have their singing roots in church gospel choirs; they’re aware that this kind of background is a cliché (although Morgan Neville explores it nicely).  Beyond this, though, it’s clear there isn’t a unifying backing singer biography.  A larger issue is that several of those featured are big enough names in their own right to mean that Neville is hardly giving unprecedented exposure to performers who’ve spent a lifetime in the shadows of celebrity.  At the very start of the film, Bruce Springsteen suggests that the ‘twenty feet’ can be a long way to travel because of the ‘conceptual distance’ it represents to some backing singers.  Lisa Fischer is the prime example of this mindset and she is by some way the most engaging personality in Twenty Feet.   A vocal phenomenon, she has no interest in the calculations and complications which she recognises are essential to sustaining a solo career.  Fischer is candid about her unconventionality:  not only does she lack driving personal ambition; she eventually tells Neville she’s never really missed getting married or having children either.

    Merry Clayton is the polar opposite to Fischer.  She says that, when Lou Adler was promoting her career in the early 1970s, she firmly believed that, if she put her heart and soul into her singing, solo success was bound to follow.  Another contributor, who sees Clayton as unlucky, says her problem was that, in those days, there could only be one big African-American female soul star and the position was already filled by Aretha Franklin.  When you watch Clayton, then in her mid-twenties, on a television show, however, you can see there was more to it than that:  she’s a peculiarly self-absorbed performer, who lacks any connection with a studio audience close enough to touch.  In her mid-sixties, Merry Clayton is a grande dame and knows it.   Morgan Neville sometimes presents his protagonists in more or less staged settings.  Where this involves performing a song the technique is fine; when he films Clayton sitting in a hotel room and looking around her, Neville is merely encouraging her self-awareness.

    Except for Lisa Fischer, whose vocal versatility is matched by a revelation of personality that deepens as the film progresses, it’s clear within a few minutes of their first appearance on screen who all the principals are.  There are few surprises to follow.  The singing is bound to be a major part of Twenty Feet from Stardom but I think Neville becomes excessively dependent on it to keep things going.  I guess I enjoyed the film less than I expected because I prefer pop to soul and R&B – there’s not much pop in evidence after ‘He’s A Rebel’ and the other Phil Spector hits that Darlene Love voiced but The Crystals et al got the credit for.

    31 March 2014

  • 99 Homes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ramin Bahrani (2014)

    It’s good to have Andrew Garfield back after his Spider-Man exile.  In 99 Homes, he plays single parent Dennis Nash, a construction worker in Orlando, Florida.  A court confirms the foreclosure of the mortgage on Dennis’s house, where he lives with his mother, Lynn (Laura Dern), and his early teenage son, Connor (Noah Lomax).  They are ordered off what’s no longer their property and, after fruitless negotiation with the men evicting them, grab what possessions they can fit in their car and leave.  They find grotty rented accommodation, in a building full of people who’ve lost their homes for the same reason.  The man supervising Dennis’s family’s eviction is Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a real estate broker who buys up properties vacated as a result of foreclosure.  Carver is assisted in his heartless house clearance work by police officers and a team of workmen, and both groups address him as ‘boss’.  To add insult to injury, Carver’s workmen appropriate the tools of Dennis’s trade; he goes to Carver’s business premises to insist on reclaiming them; the fuss he kicks up there catches Carver’s attention and he offers Dennis employment.  Dennis initially refuses but he’s desperate to get his home back and building jobs are hard to come by in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.  Dennis goes to work for Carver, initially doing repairs on his recently acquired properties.   In a short space of time, he’s becomes Carver’s right-hand man.   Not much later, Dennis realises that Carver is not only a cold-blooded operator but an illegal one too.

    His first piece of work for Carver comes about when Dennis does what none of the other workmen on the team is prepared to do.  He enters a vacated house in which there’s sewage backup, holds his nose and clears the blockage, even though the stink makes him throw up.  This is an obvious yet effective foreshadowing of the story that follows.  The film’s moral scheme is familiar:  a conscientious but cornered man, in order to achieve what he sees as right, does wrong.  And Dennis Nash, in 99 Homes, must shoulder alone the ethical burden of corrupt behaviour that the director Ramin Bahrani implies is widespread in present-day America.   The story is nevertheless distinctive.  There have already been plenty of US movies featuring characters struggling with the aftermath of the global recession – Up in the Air, The Company Men and Blue Jasmine, to name but three.  I can’t, though, bring to mind another film in which the practical consequences of the financial crisis for homeowners are the dramatic centre in the way they are here.

    Ramin Bahrani conveys, in a series of eviction scenes, a powerful sense of what it must mean to lose the home you own; as Dennis Nash discovers for himself, getting to own a place different from the home you lost isn’t proper recompense.  When the people the other side of the front door plead for more time, Carver, the police officers who assist with evictions and, later in the film, Dennis explain that the property is now legally owned by the bank that foreclosed on it.  We see the fear and confusion of families; and, most poignantly, the shame that breadwinners, ordered to leave the premises immediately, feel in the presence of their incredulous dependants.  The playing in these eviction scenes is flawlessly naturalistic:  each brutal sequence is so well done that you look forward guiltily to the next one and another dramatic treat.  The evictions carried out by the empathetic, morally conflicted Dennis are the most upsetting.

    The screenplay, by Bahrani and Amir Naderi, relies on a couple of improbabilities.  Dennis’s mother asks no questions about the work he’s doing and, while it’s believable that Carver wants to give him a chance as a repair man, it’s harder to credit that Dennis would be entrusted with the crucial role he gets in the fraudster’s financially ambitious enterprise.  What is convincing, however, is that Carver is motivated to offer a hand-up to Dennis by the same anger that animates his whole life and his pathological if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them spirit; Michael Shannon gives Rick Carver the arresting combination of dead eyes and underlying urgency.  Richard Brody in the New Yorker describes Carver as ‘the Devil incarnate’, who ‘gets the best lines’.  I didn’t read the character so simply although Brody is right about the lines.  Carver’s big denunciation of ‘the system’ – ‘America doesn’t bail out the losers. America was built by bailing out winners … by rigging a nation, of the winners, by the winners, and for the winners’ – reads like (and is) too much but Shannon delivers this tirade expertly.  And Bahrani’s and Naderi’s less purple writing is often good:  as when Dennis asks Carver, about the racket he’s running, ‘Is it worth it?’, and Carver replies, ‘As opposed to what?’

    Dennis, after collaborating in doing bad and doing great harm to others, finally makes a very public confession – one that is cathartic both for him and for the film’s audience.  This outcome, although it’s predictable, is more qualified and downbeat than finales often are in crisis of conscience parables on the screen.  By this stage, Dennis is estranged from his family and he’ll now lose his freedom too but Ramin Bahrani is more ambiguous about the fate of Richard Carver.   Andrew Garfield is very convincing as a decent man undone by circumstance.  Pace Richard Brody again, the protagonist doesn’t quite sell his soul:  he remains both likeable and ambivalent but Garfield manages to make Dennis seem gradually more diminished, hemmed in by a guilty conscience.   He’s given fine support by Laura Dern, who’s especially impressive when Dennis’s funny, loving mother discovers what her son’s been up to:  Lynn doesn’t say much at first but Dern’s bright eyes are suddenly metallic and the set of her sunny face hardens with them.  Noah Lomax does well too as Dennis’s son – again not saying a great deal, but taking it all in.  Antony Partos’s score, although sometimes superfluous, has the good taste to avoid crass underlining of the moral of Ramin Bahrani’s compelling story.

    1 October 2015

Posts navigation