Old Yorker

  • George Harrison:  Living in the Material World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Scorsese (2011)

    I don’t remember much of No Direction Home (2005), Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan, except that it was interesting and enjoyable.  So is this new film about George Harrison (which, according to Wikipedia, is exactly the same length as No Direction Home – 208 minutes).  The crucial difference for me is an emotional connection with the Beatles that I don’t have with Dylan – good memories not only of their songs and celebrity during their life as a group, in my childhood, but of the accumulation of TV interviews and documentaries with and about them that it’s been great to watch in the decades since.  Of course George Harrison’s death from cancer, at the age of fifty-eight, in 2001 wasn’t shocking in the way John Lennon’s assassination had been more than twenty years earlier but, because it resulted from natural causes (and because I always preferred George to John), it was more saddening to me.   If Living in the Material World wasn’t up to much I’d probably still feel well disposed to it because of its subject and the music that it’s bound to feature.   It’s almost a bonus that Scorsese’s film is a fine piece of work.

    George Harrison and Martin Scorsese connote, for me, almost entirely separate eras – yet the film takes its title from an album that Harrison made in the same year that Mean Streets was released.  The film screened as a two-part Arena on BBC2; Sally and I watched it in four instalments.  I felt particularly up for watching the third hour but that’s only a small part of the explanation of why this part has the greatest impetus.  Scorsese not only describes but conveys through the increased dynamism of the film’s rhythm at this point how much George was raring to go as a songwriter and solo artist in the last days of The Beatles and the years that immediately followed.  You know it from ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ from The White Album (1968), from ‘Something’ on Abbey Road (1969), from his solo album All Things Must Pass (1970), with tracks like ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘What Is Life?’  I don’t think anything Harrison wrote subsequently comes within a mile of any of these (or that anything from Lennon or McCartney post-1970 stands comparison with Lennon & McCartney in the decade before).  The fact that George Harrison is an intriguing and appealing character – more so than either John or Paul – makes the creatively leaner later years much less of a problem than they might otherwise be.  Scorsese organises the narrative very skilfully: during much of the first hour it seems to be another film about the Beatles before turning decisively into a biography of George.  This too reflects how gradually, at the time, he emerged from behind the stronger public personalities of Paul and John.

    The film begins with recollections of George by a good few of the many talking heads we’ll see and hear in the course of what follows.  These fragments go on for some time, making you impatient for things really to get going before giving you a sense that Scorsese is acknowledging from the outset the limits of documentary biography:  the fact that George meant different things to these people seems to imply his ultimate unknowability.   It must be said that some of the most prominent interviewees – Eric Idle, Jackie Stewart, especially Eric Clapton – are not interesting in themselves.  But the effect that George Harrison had on them is.  His widow Olivia – they were married for more than twenty years – is something else.  Her blend of religious conviction and acerbic honesty (when asked ‘What’s the secret of a long marriage?’ she replied ‘Not getting divorced’) chimes with George Harrison’s own personality – which evidently combined convinced spirituality and undying determination to beat the Taxman.  When you see Harrison at work in the studio he’s evidently passionate about the music he’s making; when he grins at the camera, he’s clearly amused by it too.

    The tensions that developed with Paul McCartney are present in clips from the sixties, in the determined affability of later reunions, and in McCartney’s reminiscences from today.  It’s unsurprising but still striking that John Lennon is such a minor character in Living in the Material World.  Ringo, who I see I’ve not mentioned until now, is inherently a minor character but his affection for George makes his recounting their last conversation one of the most emotionally powerful moments in the film.   Among the other witnesses, Joan Taylor, the widow of the Beatles’ press officer Derek, is incisive, nuanced and very likeable.  The most compelling reminiscences are those of Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann from the Hamburg days.  Among the many wonderful still photographs in the film, perhaps the finest is one of George and John, taken by Kirchherr shortly after Stuart Sutcliffe’s death and beautifully described in the interview that she gives here.

    19 November 2011

     

  • Crimes and Misdemeanors

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1989)

    In the film’s opening sequence, Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), an eye specialist, is attending a public dinner in his honour, seated beside his wife of twenty-five years, listening to a speech praising his good works and philanthropy.  In his own speech to the gathering, Judah explains his religious upbringing and how, although he’s no longer a believer, he’s never forgotten his devout father’s words to him as a boy:  ‘The eyes of God are always upon you’.  “Perhaps”, says Judah, “that’s how I came to be an ophthalmologist”.  The dinner guests chuckle politely.   As he heard his praises sung, Judah seemed a little uneasy and preoccupied.  We, like his wife Miriam (Claire Bloom), assumed he was apprehensive about the prospect of the speech he’d have to deliver in response.  But Judah has more on his mind than that:  Dolores (Anjelica Huston), the mistress he’s had for the last few years and whom he’s managed to keep secret from Miriam, is an increasing problem.  Judah thinks it’s time to end the affair; Dolores thinks it’s time she got some reward, and to discuss the situation with Miriam. One of Judah’s patients is Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi who is rapidly going blind.  Judah confides in him more than once about the difficult woman in his life.  Doctor and patient (but which is which?) have morally searching conversations in more and more tenebrous settings – expressing the increasing physical darkness in which Ben lives and the spiritual dark night of the soul in which Judah doesn’t believe but which he can’t get out of his mind.  Although Ben’s eye condition might symbolise the declining moral authority of Judah’s religion, things aren’t as simple as that.  Judah becomes so desperate that he asks his disreputable brother Jack (Jerry Orbach) to help him out.  (Judah and Jack appear to represent what Jewish parents see as the dream and nightmare of what their sons could grow up to be – or what a Jewish writer assumes to be specifically Jewish:  surely they’re the dream and nightmare of any moderately ambitious parents.)   Jack arranges for a hit man to murder Dolores and the hit man does his job. From this point onwards, the eyes of God are on Judah in a way they haven’t been for years.   But Judah doesn’t get found out or punished, except by his conscience, and he gets the crime and his guilt out of his system. The film ends with the wedding of Rabbi Ben’s daughter.  In the closing shots, black-spectacled father and the daughter now invisible to him dance together while the band is playing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’.

    In other words, the ocular imagery in Crimes and Misdemeanors is strong, not to say obvious.  Woody Allen knows perfectly well how obvious.  He is letting us know that he knows when Judah delivers that mild joke at the dinner about what led to his interest in eyes.  He’s doing a similar thing when he cuts from a row between Judah and Dolores to a scene in a black-and-white movie in which Bette Davis is complaining to a man in the same terms as Dolores has been complaining (though in a different register); Allen is acknowledging that we’ve heard it all before – that, in a sense, he’s being unoriginal – but the knowing wit is meant at least to compensate.  The movie clip introduces the other main part of the story.  Its viewers in the cinema include Cliff (played by Woody Allen), a minimally successful documentary filmmaker, and his teenage niece (Jenny Nichols).  Cliff promised the girl’s father, his dying brother, that he would educate her culturally, although it turns out to be in one art form only:  they go to the movies just about every day.  The tone of the Cliff part of the story is cautiously comic; that of the Judah part almost straight drama (if not quite Interiors).  Cliff is hired by his brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), a successful television producer, to make a documentary about Lester’s triumphant life.  In doing so, Cliff tries to expose Lester’s egomaniac idiocy but he not only fails; Lester ends up engaged to one of his associate producers Halley (Mia Farrow), with whom Cliff had earlier fallen in love.  Cliff is dismayed by the cosmic injustice of Lester’s unstoppable success but, until Judah and Cliff get into conversation at a party near the end of the film, their two stories don’t really complement each other.

    Woody Allen uses as a tragicomic bridge between them the character of Professor Levy, a moral philosopher whom Cliff reveres and about whom he’s making a documentary at the same time as he’s working for Lester.  Before Cliff’s film is complete, Levy commits suicide.  (The character – or at least his death – may be based on Primo Levi.)    The intersecting figure of Levy is one of the most interesting elements, certainly the most puzzling, in Crimes and Misdemeanors.   He’s played by Martin S Bergmann, in real life an eminent academic clinical psychologist (who, according to Wikipedia, will celebrate his hundredth birthday in February 2013).  Bergmann’s heavily accented English might suggest, in a Woody Allen movie, a parody Jewish intellectual; and the final clip of Levy, extolling the supreme importance of love in human life, seems to have been exposed as a pious delusion by what we’ve watched happening on screen.   Yet Allen appears to admire what Levy is saying as completely as Cliff does.   The bifocal structure of the movie is mirrored in the selection of music – jazz as usual, Schubert more unusually.  In a splendid cast, Anjelica Huston is outstanding:  her combination of size (which emphasises how big a problem she is for Judah) and fragility is powerful.  I’m not sure what the ideas in Crimes and Misdemeanors add up to but it’s wonderfully entertaining.

    13 November 2012

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