Old Yorker

  • Carnage

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roman Polanski (2011)

    In the theatre, when the action throughout is in a single location, you may not be convinced by the plotting that keeps it there but you still at one level accept the premise:  if the characters leave the stage there’s no play.  Of course it’s not the same on screen and Carnage is an example of how silly a film-of-a-play can be when the situation is basically implausible.  When, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, ten-year-old Zachary Cowan whacks Ethan Longstreet in the face with a stick and damages his teeth, Zachary’s parents Nancy (Kate Winslet), an investment broker, and Alan (Christoph Waltz), an attorney, are invited, or summoned, to the other couple’s apartment – to sort things out in a civilised way.  The summoner is Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster), who once co-authored a published book and now works part-time in a bookshop (though she says she’s writing again).  Her husband Mike (John C Reilly) is a household goods salesman (pots, pans, toilet flushes).  At the start of the film, the Cowans seem anxious to get out as quickly as possible.  Yasmina Reza, who, with Roman Polanski, did this adaptation of her stage play God of Carnage, supplies no good reason for their being detained:  the Longstreets offer coffee as the Cowans are on their way out of the door and the offer is inexplicably accepted.

    The supposedly reluctant guests also have more than one helping of Penelope’s refrigerated apple and pear cobbler, which Nancy eventually throws up.  She says she feels nauseous a good few screen minutes before she’s actually sick, during which time she drinks from a can of Coke that Penelope offers as a surefire anti-emetic and Nancy’s queasiness is a continuing topic of conversation.  It’s an age before anyone suggests Nancy go to the bathroom; even then she doesn’t and, in what must be the most forcefully wide-ranging projectile vomiting seen in cinemas since The Exorcist, manages to spew over Penelope’s cherished art books on the coffee table and over Alan’s trousers.   Things have already got fractious between the two couples by this point, as they debate what Zachary did to Ethan, and, of course, they go from bad to worse.  The Longstreets and the Cowans trade increasingly nasty insults, exposing not only the thinness of their polite veneer but also, once the Scotch is flowing and their tongues really cut loose, how corroded their marriages are too.  Yet Nancy and Alan never get angry enough just to storm out.  ‘Why are we still in this house?’ yells Nancy at one point.  As all four remain there when the curtain falls – sorry, when the film ends – there’s an implication that the Longstreets’ place may be hell nor are the Cowans out of it.

    I hated Carnage but I came out trying to do no more than dislike it.  It seemed to me that, if I felt more strongly than that, Polanski and Reza would somehow have won.  These feelings were irrational but I couldn’t help suspecting the filmmakers would be smiling at my antipathy, satisfied that I was unable to take the misanthropic truth they were laying bare and that made me react so negatively.  It’s the shallowness of the misanthropy that I can’t take – that and the unwarranted (if we’re all shits) self-satisfaction in the film’s contempt for the people in it.  Carnage seems to be designed for those who think that women are fools because they’re worriers and try futilely to make peace and that men are selfish, callous bastards, and that everyone’s just about the same once they’re pissed enough.  The audience in the Curzon Richmond was small but these views seemed to be well represented within it, judging from the regular titters (which turned into more full-bodied laughter when Kate Winslet spewed up).  I also loathe Carnage because it’s so badly written – this is farce of a remarkably uninventive kind.  The characterisation of the cynical lawyer Alan, the strenuously politically correct Penelope and the bluff regular guy Mike is as lazily clichéd as the repeated perfunctoriness of getting Nancy and Alan towards the exit then making them turn back into the living room (!) for more mayhem.  Nancy stands out from the others only because she doesn’t seem to be a character at all, not even a cartoon.

    The tensions in Carnage are so obvious so immediately that the exposure of what lies beneath the foursome’s practised exteriors isn’t much of a striptease and the largely disappointing acting makes matters worse.  This is the first uninteresting performance I’ve seen from Kate Winslet:  she looks the part but she telegraphs unease at the start (this may be her own unease).  Nancy’s mortified feelings about throwing up in public don’t persist long enough – but then nothing much does in the first half of the film.  One character will say something caustic to another and then they carry on as if nothing had happened.  (If the idea of this is to suggest the essential dissimulation of middle-class social discourse, why can’t the characters keep it up indefinitely – or part company when the pressure to do so gets too much?)  I think Kate Winslet came unstuck here because Nancy is a hollow role and Winslet is an actress with a nose for the truth of the character she’s playing.  She’s still preferable to hypertense Jodie Foster as Penelope, who gives a more characteristic performance.  Foster was an exceptional, eccentric child actress – in Taxi Driver especially but also in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, and incomparably more accomplished than the other kids in Bugsy Malone.  I’ve found her a little monotonous in most of her adult roles, including The Silence of the Lambs, and she certainly doesn’t have the variety to make Penelope Longstreet even slightly surprising.

    As Alan, glued to his cell phone and alive only when he’s delivering unscrupulous lawyerly instructions down it, Christoph Waltz is such a malignant presence that you don’t believe this man could ever take part in a polite conversation.  (You certainly don’t believe he would call his wife ‘Doodle’, with reference to a phrase in a Guys and Dolls number, except in a spirit of sarcasm.  But then both these couples are incredible pairings – so the exposure of their hostile incompatibility means very little.)  It’s baffling, given the perverted charm Waltz gave to his Nazi character in Inglourious Basterds, that he doesn’t summon a glimmer of false amiability here – we see what Alan is like from the word go.  He’s also uncomfortable not only with the American accent but in his occasional attempts at broader comedy, either vocal (a vile snigger during a phone conversation) or physical (frozen horror when the wretched phone is drowned in a vase of tulips).  It’s perhaps because he’s the only person who seems both relaxed and affable at the start that John C Reilly as Mike comes off best – at least he has somewhere to go on the journey down to revealing he’s as bad as everyone else.  In fact, we’re clued into that very soon, when we hear Mike threw his daughter’s pet hamster out into the street earlier in the day, but Reilly makes that cruelty more troubling because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the personality we’re seeing and hearing at the time.  Unlike the other three, he also suggests a person who existed before he arrived on the film set.

    4 February 2012

     

     

  • The Truman Show

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Weir (1998)

    I didn’t get The Truman Show when I first saw it, a few years ago, and I don’t get it after a second viewing.  Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is a man who lives, and has always lived, in a constructed reality television show.  Selected for this unique role at birth and now in his thirties, Truman doesn’t realise that his wife Meryl (Laura Linney) is in fact an actress called Hannah Gill, playing Meryl; that every person he meets on the street or at work or wherever is pretending to be that person; that his home town of Sea Haven is a giant set.  The show’s creator and executive producer is a blonde-haired, vaguely android character called Christof (Ed Harris).  He controls Truman’s existence – Christof has, for example, devised various means of discouraging Truman from wanting to venture out of Sea Haven.  Truman Burbank’s life – ‘The Truman Show’ – is filmed by thousands of hidden cameras and broadcast live, around the world, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  All of a sudden, things start happening that cause Truman to become suspicious about the ‘reality’ of his world:  a theatrical light falls from the artificial morning sky; his car radio picks up a conversation in which the television show’s crew are talking about Truman’s movements.  While it’s surprising that no such technical issues have obtruded previously, during several decades of live transmission, it’s easier to accept this than other aspects of Truman’s troubled awakening:  why, for example, does he only now notice that Meryl tends to advertise – showily, as if to a television audience – the products she buys for their home?  His doubts grow, in spite of assurances from his best friend, Marlon (Noah Emmerich).

    The Truman Show was widely admired on its original release.  The powerful growth of reality television in the years since has conferred on Peter Weir’s science-fiction social comedy, written by Andrew Niccol, the added lustre of inspired prophecy – the words ‘It’s just like The Truman Show’ are not unknown, even though the show within the movie doesn’t at all suggest what you think of as the best-known examples of reality TV.   A major factor in the success of something like Big Brother ­– when it started, anyway – was surely its curious marriage of truth and falsity, the spectacle of ‘real’ people doing things both mundane and contrived.  The stars of this kind of show were unusual because they were ‘ordinary people’ – people hitherto deemed not interesting enough to absorb or entertain television audiences.  The arguments continue as to how much reality TV exploits those who appear on it but the participants do understand, at least superficially, what they’re involved in.  (They also tend to become less watchable as they become more aware of their public image and of the camera.)  At one point in The Truman Show, the increasingly suspicious protagonist, wondering if others in his world are fakes, admits, ‘It’s hard to tell – they look just like regular people’.  Of course, to him, they do – but, to the film audience and surely to a significant part of the television audience for ‘The Truman Show’, the typical inhabitants of always sunny Sea Haven, with their toothpaste smiles, look less like ‘regular people’ than like characters in a satire of hygienic small-town, white picket-fence suburban  America:  The Truman Show is filmed in the style not of a recording of real life but of a cinema movie making the satiric points about media manipulation and distortion that this one seems to be making.

    Weir cuts occasionally to viewers of ‘The Truman Show’ – a man in his bathtub, the regulars in a place called Truman’s Bar – but it’s not very clear, if they’re watching Truman’s life continuously, what they think, for example, of his suspiciousness and growing resistance – and when, in due course, he wants to escape from the world in which he comes to realise that he’s trapped.  These viewers cheer when he eventually does escape but is that an expression of their own resistance to the concept of the show or just rooting for their favourite TV character?   As the crisis around the show grows, one of its producers says, ‘We can’t let him die on live TV!’, although that’s surely what the audience would expect in the fullness of time.  It seems meant to be a telling satirical moment when, at the height of Truman’s rebellion, the show’s ratings go through the roof but I couldn’t understand why.  It would be natural – when Christof decides he has no option but to halt transmission temporarily, for the first time in the show’s long history – for this to attract people who didn’t normally watch the programme.  It’s harder to understand why there’s little indication in the film that ‘The Truman Show’ has been the subject of cultural and moral controversy and debate.

    The answer may be that Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol want to concentrate on the follies and evils of mass entertainment but the picture they paint of these is very incomplete.  At the close of the film, when the plug has finally been pulled on ‘The Truman Show’, two dumb-looking men arrive on screen; one says expressionlessly to the other, ‘What’s on the other side?’, or words to that effect – a cheap shot at gogglebox mindlessness.  Weir and Niccol never acknowledge, however, that consumers of mass entertainment are capable of fickleness:  the show appears to have been an uninterrupted hit, without significant changes to its format, for generations of TV viewers.  Another oddity of the film is that, although it may appear to address mass-media manipulation, it often feels to be more about ganging up on a single individual.   Everyone but its leading man knows how ‘The Truman Show’ works; virtually everyone except Christof – including some other members of his production team – appears to exult in Truman Burbank’s eventual freedom.   In defence of his brainchild, Christof claims that the show ‘gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions’.  Putting these words in his mouth may be effective in exposing Christof as a pretentious charlatan but doesn’t fit with Weir’s and Niccol’s more persistent implication that Truman Burbank’s extraordinary life has become merely part of the ordinary life of the audiences who watch him round the clock.

    A concept like ‘The Truman Show’ might seem welcome in hugely increasing the employment rate within the acting profession although it’s remarkable that, during the show’s three decades or so, there seem to have been fewer problems of cast members wanting to leave and try something different than in the average successful TV soap.  The playing in the film is a curate’s egg.  Almost needless to say, the hyperactive Jim Carrey’s Truman seems less ordinary than anyone in Sea Haven:  dressed, for reasons I didn’t get, in clothes more eccentric than those of the other townspeople, Carrey dominates The Truman Show but his presence contradicts the concept of ‘The Truman Show’.  He stands out from the crowd so emphatically – and there’s no rationale for his doing so – that it’s hard to believe Truman Burbank would be popular, except among television viewers who never ceased to enjoy the sophisticated oddness of observing a real life being lived by someone who seemed less real than all the people pretending to be real around him.   Laura Linney, even though she’s made up as if for a comedy sketch spoofing bright-and-shiny American consumerism, has a naturalness that places Meryl Burbank/Hannah Gill more convincingly on the cusp between fiction and reality.  (Have the names Meryl and Marlon, which do have a certain cinematic connotation, been deliberately chosen?  If so, what does this signify?)   Natasha McElhone is Sylvia, cast in the show as Truman’s first and truest love, Lauren.  Sylvia is quickly kicked out when she tries to reveal the truth of his life to Truman – she starts a ‘Free Truman’ campaign, which doesn’t appear to catch fire.  It’s ironic and unfortunate that it’s when Sylvia is trying to get the message across to Truman, that McElhone seems most like an actress in a standard TV drama.  Ed Harris has undeniable sinister authority but his best, most surprising moment comes in his expression of Christof’s keen interest – when Truman tries to break out of Sea Haven – in what’s going to happen next.  Paul Giamatti, keeping his feelings from his bosses but giving the viewer an idea what they might be, is outstanding in his small role as the TV control room director.

    14 September 2014

     

     

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