Old Yorker

  • Me and You and Everyone We Know

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Miranda July (2005)

    I enjoyed the film on its original release but spent much of this repeat viewing wondering why.  Miranda July’s debut feature was shot in suburban Los Angeles and the DoP Chuy Chavez’s lighting emphasises appealingly bright, fresh colours:  red roofs; clear blue skies and sky blue trainers in the shoe shop where the main male character Richard (John Hawkes) is a salesman; a candy-striped top worn by the female lead Christine (July); the brilliant orange of a goldfish in a plastic bag of water.  Other aspects of that fish’s cameo illustrate why watching Me and You and Everyone We Know is often a pain.  Christine – an unsuccessful performance artist who pays her bills working as a driver for a firm called Elder Cabs (transport for geriatrics) – is in her car with a regular client, Michael (Hector Elias), when they spot the plastic bag containing the fish sitting inexplicably and precariously on the roof of another car travelling at speed.  The creature’s prospects don’t look good:  Christine suggests that something should be said to mark what may be its last moments of life and launches into an ontological burble, telling the fish that, if its existence is about to end, ‘I want you to know you were loved’.  (Christine and Michael then yell and point out to the couple in the other car their odd conveyance – you assume the fish survives.)  Me and You and Everyone We Know has an innocent, sweet-natured quality – reflected in Christine’s premature tribute to the fish as much as in the newly-minted look of the film’s world – but its title is a warning:  the calculated eccentricity of the characters that Miranda July has written, expressed in many of the lines they speak (there are several attacks of existential musing), soon becomes oppressive – as does Michael Andrews’s score, although it captures the moods of the story very appropriately.

    Richard is recently separated from his wife Pam (JoNell Kennedy) and looks after his two sons, the teenage Peter (Miles Thompson) and the much younger Robby (Brandon Ratcliff).  Just as Christine wishes to commemorate the goldfish, so Richard, in the film’s opening sequence, feels compelled to perform a ceremony for Pam’s departure:  he pours fuel on his left hand and ignites it, forgetting, as he explains later, that he should have used alcohol instead.  (His hand is bandaged for much of the movie’s ninety-minute running time.)   Christine takes a shine to Richard from their first meeting, when she takes Michael to the shoe shop for some new footwear; she also takes to stalking Richard but in such an unquestionably kooky way that he can hardly take offence (although he does at one point).   Christine’s and Richard’s relationship is the main one in Me and You but there are plenty of others:  between Michael and the old woman (Ellen Geer) whom Christine drives him to visit in a retirement home; between Richard’s saddo work colleague Andrew (Brad William Henke) and two teenage girls, Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend), both keen to make a start on their sex lives but with more interest in Peter than in Andrew; between Peter and Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), a neighbour’s daughter, a pre-teen who’s already conscientiously assembling items for her hope chest.  There’s also an online relationship between Richard’s kids – eventually Robby solo – and an ‘untitled’ interlocutor, who turns out to be Nancy Herrington (Tracy Wright), the humourless boss of a contemporary art centre, to whom Christine sends her performance video when Nancy declines to accept it in person.  (The arty-farty satire – around found objects and so on – is pretty weak.)  Miranda July sees all these various relationships as based in need – usually, sexual need.  The people involved are presented as essentially innocuous even if they tend to make a mess of things.  (July also presents the minors as almost sadder and wiser than the adults.)

    The effect of the juxtaposition of this innocuousness and the sexual explicitness of some of the encounters – a verbal rather than physical explicitness – is more queasy than amusing.  This is the case with the cyber conversation involving Robby, who, once he gets the hang of what his elder brother has been writing as ‘Night Warrior’, suggests ‘pooping back and forth’ to ‘untitled’ (who replies, ‘You are crazy and making me very hot’).  It’s also the case with the notes that Andrew pins to his window, telling Heather and Rebecca what he’d like to do with them (although he’s really timid and harmless).   In spite of all this, Miranda July and John Hawkes get some emotional depth into their exchanges:  the urgency and uncertainty that Hawkes gives Richard cuts through a lot of the grating tweeness.  I’d not seen Hawkes before I saw Me and You and Everyone We Know and I think he was the main reason why I liked it the first time.  Even if some of Miranda July’s other achievements here are questionable, she certainly helped to propel the career of a fine actor.

    12 September 2014

  • The Chalk Garden

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ronald Neame (1964)

    An elegant, elderly woman on a walking stick looked as if she might be someone important as she hovered uncertainly around the front rows of NFT3.  Sure enough, she was introduced by the BFI curator Jo Botting as Julie Harris – the British costume designer rather than the American actress.  This Julie Harris, who won an Oscar for dressing Darling (1965), is now in her ninetieth year.  (The other Julie Harris is coming up for her eighty-fifth birthday.)  Botting explained that Harris was one of the prime movers behind the Deborah Kerr retrospective at BFI – and this conversation with Harris was one of the best things about going to see The Chalk Garden, an adaptation of the stage play by Enid Bagnold.  The guest of honour rambled a bit but she was very conscious of that.  I also liked the fact that she was rather irritated to be introducing a film that gave her more of a budget than an opportunity for creative costume design:  as she said, the clothes she put Deborah Kerr in (although Harris had obviously loved dressing her in other pictures) looked a bit too expensively tailored for a governess earning £12 a week.

    Miss Madrigal (Kerr) comes to a big house in Sussex, close to the chalk cliffs, to be interviewed for the job of governess to Laurel (Hayley Mills), the teenage granddaughter of the lady of the house, Mrs St Maugham (Edith Evans) – a widow, who is estranged from her daughter Olivia (Elizabeth Sellars), Laurel’s mother.  As the butler-cum-handyman Maitland (John Mills) explains, Laurel goes through governesses like loaves of bread and we soon see why:  she’s a self-dramatising dissembler with a caustic tongue that she uses to wound herself and others.  Mrs St Maugham treats this maladjusted girl largely indulgently – or self-indulgently:  the old lady’s one aim in life appears to be to ensure that Olivia doesn’t take Laurel away.   Mrs St Maugham is a keen but unsuccessful gardener:  none of the plants in her care – including the granddaughter named for an evergreen – will grow.   (Julie Harris dressed Edith Evans in some enjoyably colourful outfits – I wasn’t sure if the choices of fuchsia, lilac etc were ironic, given Mrs St Maugham’s horticultural failures.  Otherwise, The Chalk Garden, as photographed by Arthur Ibbetson, is visually toneless.)  The symbolism, and the fact that Mrs St Maugham must, in the nature of morally conventional theatre, get her comeuppance, are so obvious so soon that your attention quickly switches to the governess who arrives in the household without references or, it seems, a past.  (But she has green fingers!)  It emerges – after a series of heavy hints (Laurel has a ghoulish appetite for true crime, the governess isn’t keen on locked doors etc) – that Miss Madrigal has just been released from prison, having served many years for the murder of her stepsister:  she was sentenced to be hanged but the sentence was commuted because of her tender years.  One of Mrs St Maugham’s old flames is a judge and she invites him to lunch in the hope that he can ‘do something’ to ensure that Laurel’s mother can’t get her hands on her daughter.   It turns out that the judge is the same one who donned the black cap at Miss Madrigal’s trial.   (I’m not making this up.)

    Perhaps Enid Bagnold’s crude symbolism and melodramatic plotting might get by in the theatre, where the stage is the world and you’re willing to accept the scope for human interaction as being limited to the people who appear before us.  In other words, it’s a small world; watching The Chalk Garden as a play, you can maybe suspend disbelief in the improbability of the judge’s going back a long way with both Mrs St Maugham and Miss Madrigal.  The virtually inevitable visual aids of cinema, and the external reality in which the film’s action is set, make these mechanics ridiculous.  As if we hadn’t already got the point, Ronald Neame displays the garden’s rows of moribund shrubs as the characters walk among them.  At the lunch with the judge, it might be possible on stage for the actors to generate the tensions of the situation; on screen, the intensive close-ups of Miss Madrigal and Laurel, as she cottons on, merely expose its falsity (and Malcolm Arnold’s madly energetic music, here and elsewhere, hardly helps).  Besides, given the way the main parts are played, the moral scheme of The Chalk Garden doesn’t make sense.  The destructively possessive Mrs St Maugham is meant to be a monster but Edith Evans’s acting is so much richer than anyone else’s that’s not how she comes over – you see the neediness in the old woman’s selfishness.  Because of this and because Mrs St Maugham is less prone to moralise than most of her household and visitors, she had my sympathy.  Elizabeth Sellars, one-dimensional and delivering her lines in an elocuted coo, is ghastly as Olivia:  gruesome as Laurel is, you wouldn’t wish this mother even on her.  Miss Madrigal can ‘see myself’ in Laurel but there’s not a hint of emotional kinship between Deborah Kerr and Hayley Mills.   (If we could be persuaded that Miss Madrigal’s perception was deluded that might solve the problem but we’re not.)  Kerr, in spite of her tidy, by-the-book style of acting, is interesting in her early scenes; less so once the governess’s secrets begin to be revealed.    Felix Aylmer looks very right as the judge and gives you the sense that, although the old man’s manner is faintly gaga, he’s taking everything in.  As a result, you’re left feeling flat by the scene in which Miss Madrigal admits to him who she is and it turns out he hadn’t already realised this.

    I struggled to make sense of the enthusiastic audience in NFT3.  An atypically young(ish) man sitting next to me laughed decisively whenever a character said something outrageous or epigrammatic and applauded ostentatiously at the end.  But most of the people there were much older than him – quite a bit older even than me.  They must have been in their early twenties when the film was released.  It doesn’t seem to be material that age group would enjoy, unless their tastes were remarkably old-fashioned; and were many people now in their mid-sixties big fans in their twenties of Deborah Kerr or Edith Evans or John or Hayley Mills?  Is it rather that some people, once they reach a certain age, become nostalgic for the films of their youth, and the performers that go with them, because, even if they didn’t particularly like them at the time, these movies represent a lost golden age?   (I’m one of these people to an extent but I’m not yet desperate enough to think that something like The Chalk Garden is any good.)  Edith Evans is playing the villain of the piece yet, from the delighted tittering reactions, she might as well have been saying ‘A handbag?!’ every time she opened her mouth.  As Maitland, John Mills gives a familiar, complacent performance.  (I felt the character needed to be much more drily bitter in act one – to get across the difference that the advent of Miss Madrigal makes to his regretful life.)  Hayley Mills’s Laurel is grotesquely artificial – perhaps the audience lapped up her clumsy, charmless histrionics because her immutable image in their memory is that of Infant Phenomenon.

    In a sense, the film’s ludicrous ending – Laurel goes home to mother, Miss Madrigal agrees to stay on with Mrs St Maugham (and cultivate, as well as the garden, a budding romance with Maitland) – fulfils the audience’s quest for cosiness.  The minor characters are played by Toke Townley (a shopkeeper), Tonie MacMillan (cook) and Lally Bowers, who overacts as a short-lived applicant for the governess job.  I used to enjoy Bowers on television and remember her making a good Miss Prism in a BBC Play of the Month production of The Importance of Being Earnest in the 1970s.  One of Miss Prism’s best-known lines is:  ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means’.  In The Chalk Garden everyone ends happily:  Mrs St Maugham has learned her lesson and changed her spots; Laurel has gone through an experience which has solved her emotional problems.  It’s as if they deserve this outcome because they’re stalwarts of British stage and screen.  They are the good.

    12 October 2010

Posts navigation