Old Yorker

  • Maleficent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Stromberg (2014)

    Although it’s been billed as a prequel to Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent deals relatively briefly with what happened before the birth of Princess Aurora – this isn’t much more than a prologue to a retelling of the familiar story.  There are hints from an early stage that this retelling will be mildly subversive:  the scene-setting voiceover introduces the audience to two countries, neighbours and enemies:  one, a human realm, is ruled by a vain, unkind king; the other, a magical land called the Moors, doesn’t need a head of state, monarch or otherwise – everyone there just gets along.  Once the rather long-winded narrator (voiced by Janet McTeer) has said her opening piece, we meet the protagonist Maleficent, a fairy child (Ella Purnell) with dark clothes and large, dark wings but whose eyes are bright and whose attitude towards the world around her is light-hearted and benign.  A somewhat older Maleficent (Isabelle Molloy) takes a shine to a young peasant boy, Stefan (Michael Higgins), but he tells her that he dreams of living in the royal palace on the hill and his extraordinary careerism soon takes him away from her.  When the dying king (Kenneth Cranham), who wants rid of Maleficent, announces that whoever kills her will become the next king, the ambitious Stefan renews his acquaintance with her.  Having drugged Maleficent, Stefan can’t bring himself to kill her but, while she’s unconscious, he burns off her wings and presents them to the old king as proof of her death.  Stefan duly accedes to the throne; his queen (Hannah New) gives birth to Aurora; the christening takes place and is gatecrashed by Maleficent.  Years pass but it’s slow going from this point onwards as the Sleeping Beauty story is padded out and qualified by Robert Stromberg and the screenwriter Linda Woolverton.  At the business end of the film, the kiss of true love to awaken Aurora from her sleep is administered not by a prince – although there is one, named Philip (Brenton Thwaites) – but by Maleficent, whom Aurora gets to know well before her fateful sixteenth birthday and whom she calls ‘fairy godmother’.  King Stefan is killed, and Aurora and Philip live happily ever after – with Maleficent, in the kingless realm of the Moors where the latter was once happy and is now happy (and winged) again.  The narrator eventually identifies herself as Aurora in later life.  ‘So you see’, she concludes, ‘the story is not quite what you were told’.  Maleficent was neither hero nor villain but a bit of both.

    Her name is therefore baffling.  Even if Maleficent is a catchier handle for a big-budget protagonist than Ambivalent, its plausibility cynically depends on the young target audience not understanding the meaning of the word.  Reading about the picture after seeing it, I was reminded that the bad fairy in the Disney animated film of Sleeping Beauty (1959) was also called Maleficent:  this live-action movie is a Disney production too and I assume that clinched the choice of name, in spite of the fact that the 1959 character was entirely malign.  It’s something of an irony, though, that Carabosse, which this character has been called in several versions of the story, including the Tchaikowsky ballet, captures well the Manichaean personality that’s crucial to Maleficent (the ‘cara’ has lovely connotations, ‘bosse’ brings to mind the French for ‘hunchbacked’ and the equation in fairy stories of moral evil and physical deformity).  According to Wikipedia, Linda Woolverton’s screenplay went through at least fifteen drafts but these weren’t enough:  the moral scheme of the film is muddled.  Why, when she’s a happy-go-lucky young fairy, does Maleficent dress in forbidding colours and boast menacing wings and the beginnings of devilish horns?  Both wings and horns keep growing even before their owner is cruelly wronged by Stefan and, embittered, turns nasty.  Her magical powers are extensive:  why, when Stefan has burned off her wings, doesn’t she (as a woman behind me in the cinema whispered) magic up a replacement pair?   The answer is evidently that her powers mustn’t get in the way of the film-makers doing things more traditionally when it suits, or staging big CGI battles.

    Early on, the old king confronts Maleficent and bellows at the massed ranks of his infantry to kill her: she still has her wings at this point so the royal command seems daft but Maleficent likes a good fight so she gets involved in the scrap.  Later on, she’s caught in a net by King Stefan’s men – she can’t metamorphose herself in order to escape from it yet she manages to transform her acolyte Driaval into a huge dragon to take out Stefan’s henchmen.   (Driaval is originally a raven whose shape Maleficent changes into Sam Riley and sundry other things along the way.)  Maleficent’s backstory describes how she was fucked-up-in-her-turn and the script momentarily psychologises King Stefan – the narrator suddenly, and jarringly, announces that he is becoming ‘more paranoid’ – but the film can’t work out how to reinterpret Stefan beyond this so he just reverts to the manic villain you’d expect in a fairy tale.  Perhaps Stromberg and Woolverton are offering a more coherent political take on the original than I’m giving them credit for.  Perhaps it’s part of a subtle and penetrating critique of monarchy that Stefan has a warped ambition to become king and Prince Philip is an ineffective kisser. But I doubt it somehow.  (You can only conclude that, since he fails to wake Aurora, Philip doesn’t truly love her, so it’s rather anti-climactic that he gets the girl in the end.)  I don’t know how bright children who know Sleeping Beauty well will take all this but their parents could be in for some difficult questions.

    Angelina Jolie in the title role is much the best thing about Maleficent.  She looks wonderful – her cheekbones are so great anyway they hardly need the exaggeration the make-up people have given them but the effect is to make her appearance amusingly alarming as well as beautiful.  Her acting is impressive too, especially as she’s playing such a confused character.  She’s particularly funny talking in a clipped, bitchy English accent, in the bits where Maleficent is a witty troublemaker-for-the-sake-of-it; but Jolie also brings off the moments where she’s meant to be feeling pain or depth of emotion – when Maleficent loses her wings or realises she cares for Aurora – without being a pain.  Elle Fanning is probably too real an actress to play Aurora but she’s nuanced and likeable.  (The baby Aurora is Vivienne Jolie-Pitt and Eleanor Worthington Cox plays her as a young girl before Fanning takes over.)  As a trio of klutzy, bickering fairies – miniature digitised entities at first, then human size as the ‘aunts’ who raise Aurora in a woodland cottage (supposedly out of harm’s way) – Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville and, to a lesser extent, Juno Temple manage to be fairly amusing in spite of the dim comedy routines they’re put through.  Apart from Kenneth Cranham, the male actors are boring:  it probably sums things up to say that Sam Riley, although his casting is inexplicable, is the best of them.

    22 June 2014

     

  • Jubilee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Derek Jarman (1978)

    Queen Elizabeth I, with the help of her occultist adviser John Dee and through the agency of the spirit guide Ariel, time-travels with them both to visit the realm of her namesake as queen of England, in the year of the latter’s Silver Jubilee.  Elizabeth II is dead, however, a recent victim of the urban violence that’s rife in the London of 1977 that the writer-director Derek Jarman puts on screen in Jubilee.  The first Queen Elizabeth, as incarnated by Jenny Runacre, is more beautiful than you might expect yet she’s anxious and weary too.  Her lady-in-waiting (Helen Wellington-Lloyd), who accompanies her on the journey to the twentieth century, has a glumly fascinated air.  As John Dee, Richard O’Brien speaks deliberately but hypnotically.  Ariel (David Haughton), wearing a silver suit and entirely black eyeballs, is beauteously artificial in appearance as well as in voice.  The sixteenth-century Elizabethan introduction to Jubilee is altogether arresting but Derek Jarman loses no time in transporting the queen and her retinue into the dystopia of late 1970s London – the waste lands, the sexual permutations, the anomie and anarchy – which they observe rather than interact with.  The end of the film sees the quartet return to the first Elizabethan England.

    Jubilee makes extensive use of punk aesthetics and the eclectic cast includes plenty of punk rock icons and/or performers but Jarman seems to have a larger interest in the dynamics between the sexes and between different sexual orientations.   The prime movers are young women:  Amyl Nitrate (Jordan), Mad (Toyah Willcox), Crabs (Nell Campbell), Chaos (Hermine Demoriane) and Bod (Jenny Runacre again).   Amyl Nitrate is an avowed admirer of Myra Hindley; Bod has killed Elizabeth II and appropriated her crown; but the female violence in the film – often avenging violence – is mostly directed at men or, in one case, a man dressed as a woman.  (This character, Lounge Lizard, is played by Wayne County, who went on to become, as Jayne County, rock’s first transgender singer.)   The male victims include two men who have casual sex with Crabs, whose relaxed promiscuity is disparaged by Mad and Bod in particular.  The first of these Victims is asphyxiated; the second is blown up by a homemade incendiary device.   He is one of a pair of Special Branch policemen, who have shot dead Angel (Ian Charleson) and Sphinx (Karl Johnson), incestuous brothers who inhabit the same squat as the five main women.  (The other Special Branch man has acid thrown in his face before being castrated by the women.)  The gay Angel and the bisexual Sphinx are unaggressive and (therefore) likeable males – the same goes for the young punk rocker Kid (Adam Ant).  The other key male character is the lavishly camp impresario Borgia Ginz (Orlando) with whom the female principals eventually sign a recording contract.

    This is another film I didn’t see when it first appeared and which it’s now just about impossible to see for what it started as.  In retrospect, Jubilee is affecting in various ways:  it seems both politically naive and prophetic.  The aggressive, cauterising energy of the female characters in the poxy, rundown London envisaged by Derek Jarman is a bizarre anticipation of the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher little more than a year after Jubilee was released (so are the pearls worn by Amyl Nitrate).  Yet the film doesn’t foresee Thatcherism in a substantial or considered way and it certainly can’t predict another scourge of the coming years:  AIDS claimed the lives of Jarman, in 1994, and, four years earlier, Ian Charleson, the most gifted member of the Jubilee cast.  Sphinx, an artist called Viv (Linda Spurrier) and Angel lie in bed together – Angel is slightly separated from the other two, whose bodies touch, and sings ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’.   Charleson’s singing – he had a beautiful voice – expresses love and lust.  The moment is very poignant.

    Although he has to work quite hard to sustain his Cockney accent, Charleson, with his combination of authority and delicacy, is a remarkable presence in Jubilee.  The odd variety of players and performing styles works well, for the most part.   Jordan’s primitive acting as Amyl Nitrate is more effective than Toyah Willcox’s more conscious insistency as the pyromaniac Mad.  (And Jordan’s ‘Rule Britannia’ number is one of the musical highlights.)  I don’t think it was simply hindsight that made me feel that Willcox conventionalises the spirit of punk.  (Perhaps that’s what Jarman wanted:  it fits with the punk girls’ eventual surrender to the capitalist Borgia Ginz but Mad’s surrender, because of the way Willcox plays her, has relatively little impact.)  Karl Johnson gives Sphinx an ordinary reality that’s very distinctive in this rampantly eccentric world.

    The BFI screening of Jubilee was preceded by Punk Can Take It (1979), a short directed by Julien Temple.  It’s done in the form of a parody World War II documentary, with punks presented as heroic English patriots, resisting the attempts to do them down of establishment enemy factions.   After recently suffering (as much as I could take of) Temple’s Absolute Beginners, I wasn’t hopeful but Punk Can Take It is amusing, particularly the spoof narration, which is read by the veteran BBC broadcaster John Snagge.  According to a good but anonymous summary on IMDB, this was ‘a theatrically released promo for the UK Subs’ and clips of the Subs in concert are the pulse of the piece – although I found them rather upstaged by the other newsreel footage and the staged war comedy sketches that Temple has put together.

    29 September 2015

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