Old Yorker

  • The Devil Wears Prada

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Frankel (2006)

    I saw it on its original release.  The main difference, two-and-a-half years later, was a consequence of Anne Hathaway’s performance in Rachel Getting Married.  Because that proved what she’s capable of, I found myself seeing more substance now than in 2006 (or than there might actually be) in her portrait of Andrea (Andy) Sachs – a recent university graduate and would-be journalist, who gets a job as junior PA to Miranda Priestly, the legendary, fearfully admired editor of ‘Runway’, a New York fashion magazine.  Andy’s appointment comes as a surprise to her and everyone else:  she doesn’t take pains with her appearance and doesn’t know the first thing about the world of fashion.   Miranda explains to Andy her disappointment with a succession of eager, soigné incompetents –‘So I thought, hire the fat, smart girl’.  Since she’s lovely from the start, the fact that Anne Hathaway is supposed to be a klutzy plain Jane amounts to the film’s best joke about fashionista standards – although it’s true she looks even more spectacular once she’s been persuaded to dress for the job.

    The ice queen/dragon lady/boss from hell is allegedly based on Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue.   Miranda Priestly is a pretty good name for the character (in contrast to ‘Runway’ – a weak, unfunny title for the magazine).  At the time Prada was released (and since), Meryl Streep has lamented the dearth of good parts for film actresses of her age.  (She’s exactly the same age as Wintour – 57 when she made the film.  That’s about the age she looks too – so that Miranda’s twin daughters seem improbably young, even allowing that their mother would have concentrated for longer than usual on making a career rather than a family.)  In theory, it’s a pity that Streep’s skills aren’t being put at the service of something more stretching; in fact, her complete, relaxed confidence as Miranda is very satisfying and makes this one of her most enjoyable performances.  You can sense – and share – Streep’s pleasure in what her vocal and gestural repertoire allows her to do here.  Miranda, in the act of dismissing someone and about to signal this manually, decides at the last moment to do something else with her hand – as if even the smallest physical effort isn’t worth wasting on the person being dismissed.  She hardly ever raises her voice:  she doesn’t need to, she’s utterly in charge.   Miranda occasionally uses phrases to suggest bewildered helplessness (‘I just don’t understand … can someone please help me?’):  she’s being sarcastic – but there’s also a hint of vulnerability in Streep’s tone, which comes to make sense as the plot unrolls.   When Andy delivers proofs of the magazine to Miranda’s home, she inadvertently departs from the prescribed route in and out and interrupts a tense conversation between Miranda and the husband who’s about to divorce her:  Streep’s incredulity at this world-shattering invasion of territory has a charge – Miranda, in this moment, really is helpless.  And I bet Meryl Streep liked the one scene in which we see Miranda wearing no make-up as much as all the power-dressed ones put together.

    It’s not a surprise (or necessarily a problem) that the filmmakers bite the hand that feeds them – confirming the audience’s preconceptions of the fashion universe, letting us enjoy its brittle, bitchy allure but having a heroine who then emerges as superior to it.   Besides, Miranda and her loyal art director Nigel are both given opportunities to explain the power of fashion and Streep and Stanley Tucci deliver these messages with wit and integrity, making them funny and convincing you that the characters mean what they say.  For Nigel, secretly looking at fashion magazines in his bedroom as a boy was an escape from the life dictated by his jock brothers (in the way literature has often been for children in a family that never had a book in the house).  Miranda scorns – with freezing passion – Andy’s delusion that she’s not part of the fashion world, explaining how her thoughtless choice of a ‘cerulean’-coloured sweater has actually been dictated by a chain of events within that world.  But it becomes too obvious that Andy is going to see through and rise above the self-serving, self-defeating rivalries and power games she encounters in and around ‘Runway’:  as a result, the film is going through the motions in its last half hour.  In this respect, it’s very different from – and thinner than – Working Girl, where the heroine’s dual determinations to get her man and the job she knows she deserves in big business converge irresistibly.  (It’s also a presumably unintentional joke that Andy’s higher professional calling is to journalism.)

    The Devil Wears Prada – adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna from a novel by Lauren Weisberger – isn’t much of a picture and, apart from Streep, Hathaway and Tucci, the performers aren’t as entertaining as you might hope.  Emily Blunt, as Miranda’s senior PA Emily, gives the impression that she’s auditioning for a bigger career in pictures:  it has proved to be a successful audition but Blunt makes Emily too desperately bossy and obviously insecure – she’s clearly a loser from the outset so that her demotion has very little impact:  you just feel mildly sorry for her.  The men in Andy’s life are very dull.  As a hot-property magazine writer who seduces her, Simon Baker gives a smiley-vulpine, one-note performance.  Andy’s warm-hearted, gentle boyfriend (Adrian Grenier), a chef, is innocuous.  Rich Sommer (from Mad Men) plays Andy’s best girlfriend’s boyfriend; he at least suggests brains enough to challenge Andy about going native on planet ‘Runway’.  (Andy’s fealty to Miranda seems to materialise, and be set in stone, in the course of a dinner with her father (David Marshall Grant), who’s evidently disappointed that his highly educated daughter is, as he sees it, wasting her time in an innately frivolous occupation.)  The director David Frankel does an adequate job of keeping the action lively, even if his means of doing so are largely uninspired – weakly satirical montages, an unsurprising (though enjoyable) pop soundtrack.

    13 June 2009

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The L-Shaped Room

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bryan Forbes (1962)

    There are things in The L-Shaped Room that point up Bryan Forbes’s persisting limitations as a film-maker.  When his camera moves round Notting Hill, where the story is set and the movie was shot, he conveys no sense of real life going on there.   The streets may be actual London streets (and the cinematography is by Douglas Slocombe) but the details the camera picks up – the signs outside shops, a News of the World advertisement on a hoarding – have the quality of set dressing.  (The scene-setting introduction compares unfavourably with Ken Hughes’s The Small World of Sammy Lee, which I saw a couple of weeks before The L-Shaped Room.)   The participants in a CND march taking place at the margins of a later sequence come across not as political activists but as banner-waving movie extras.  The central relationship of the film is between Jane, a young, unmarried mother-to-be who rents a room in the attic of a grotty boarding house, and Toby, a saturnine would-be writer and tenant on the floor below.  When he finds out Jane is pregnant by another man, the relationship starts to founder.  We notice a headline in a newspaper – ‘KEEP SMILING’ – in the mess of Toby’s room.  We can’t fail to notice the irony:  Bryan Forbes’s bald overemphasis makes sure of that.   Although John Barry wrote a score for the film, it’s upstaged by the Brahms Piano Concerto No 1, played by Peter Katin.   The Brahms is too much:  it comes across mostly as a rip-off of David Lean’s use of Rachmaninov in Brief Encounter, occasionally as a means of stressing the gulf between its own sublimeness and the story’s unlovely locale.  The music plays, for example, while the camera lingers on the walls of the greasy spoon where Jane gets a waitressing job in order to pay the rent.

    Yet his handling of the relationship between Jane (Leslie Caron) and Toby (Tom Bell) also shows the best of Bryan Forbes.   I don’t know how much of the couple’s dialogue is his invention and how much has been retained from the source material, Lynne Reid Banks’s 1960 novel of the same name, but Forbes’s screenplay for The L-Shaped Room includes some very well-written conversations, and the two main actors are admirable.  I was puzzled by the heroine’s forename, when it’s made clear from the start that she’s French.  There seems no good reason for this other than that Reid Banks’s heroine, who’s English, is also called Jane but it’s hard to fault Leslie Caron’s characterisation.  The Frenchness is effective:  Jane’s nationality and Caron’s sophistication and naturalness as a screen performer – she expresses emotions more fully, more physically than the rest of the cast – combine to suggest that Jane is a cut above.  (We learn she’s from a middle-class family.)  When she views the room in the boarding house and first moves in, Jane is careful to keep her distance and her cool, even though she’s naturally upset by her circumstances and angered by the unscrupulous nerve of the landlady, Doris (Avis Bunnage), in charging what she does for the damp, cockroach-infested, L-shaped room.    As Jane gets to know Toby and Johnny (Brock Peters), a jazz musician and the tenant on the other side of a paper-thin partition between the two top-floor rooms, she gradually becomes more easily communicative.  You never notice Leslie Caron indicating this change; you simply register, and believe, that it’s occurred.  Tom Bell imparts, from the beginning, the brittleness of Toby’s character – he does so even when Toby is (as he often is) witty and charming.   The way Bell moves and the set of his facial muscles intimate a young man tense with a sense of rejection, weighed down by the chips on his shoulder.  Toby’s inability to accept that Jane is carrying another man’s child (even though that man is definitely an ex-boyfriend) doesn’t come out of nowhere.  The potential for Toby’s selfishness and insecurity to express themselves, in a crisis, as cruel unreasonableness is always there in Tom Bell’s portrait.  And the character’s writing ambitions are a useful pretext for Toby’s occasionally purple turn of phrase.

    It’s a pity that the least satisfactory scene between Caron and Bell is the big bust-up when Johnny has told Toby that Jane is pregnant and he turns on her.  You can understand why Bryan Forbes liked the idea of staging this showdown on a flight of stairs in the boarding house but it puts pressure on the actors to keep finding interesting ways of moving round in a constricted space and the effect is a little artificial.  On the whole, though, the interactions between Jane and Toby are exceptionally convincing.   In the early stages of their relationship, they’re relaxing happily in a public park, when a warden (Joan Ingram) warns them about canoodling.  Toby’s fury at this intervention and Jane’s hurt puzzlement at the intensity of his reaction are a foreshadowing of what will happen when something bigger comes between them.  Once it does, Bryan Forbes rather skates over how they manage to patch things up but the scenes between the couple on Christmas Eve dramatise very well the thin ice on which Jane has to skate with Toby.   His outbursts of anger, followed by self-recrimination and self-pity, make him dislikeable in a challenging way (and make him hate and feel sorry for himself all the more).   There’s an unusual consistency in his personality:  in the fine scene in which he visits Jane on the maternity ward after her child has been born, Toby’s sheepish contrition is modified by his anxiety to tell Jane that the short story he’s completed (and which he’s called ‘The L-Shaped Room’) is the best thing he’s ever written.  She, by this point, has decided to return to her parents in France.  Leslie Caron captures beautifully Jane’s calm, regretful recognition that it’s the sensible thing to do.

    The L-Shaped Room is, I think, a sincerely feminist film.   This comes across at an obvious level in the exchange between Jane and the obstetrician with a sideline in illegal abortions, who first confirms that she is pregnant and assumes she must want either to marry or to be rid of the baby.  It comes across more penetratingly in the arrogant assumptions of the younger men in the story, Johnny as well as Toby, about how few sexual partners a ‘decent’ woman should have.  Emlyn Williams overdoes the nasty suavity of the obstetrician but three other small male roles are excellently played:  by Mark Eden, as the man who made Jane pregnant; by Bernard Lee, as a regular visitor to the landlady’s quarters; and by Gerald Sim, as the humorous and sympathetic hospital doctor who eventually delivers Jane’s baby.  Brock Peters as Johnny is less satisfactory.  Best known for his role in To Kill a Mockingbird, Peters is too deliberate in everything he does and out of sync with the rhythm of nearly every scene in which he appears.  His lack of subtlety is more of a problem because Johnny’s moral attitudes are interestingly and believably confused:  although he inveighs against ‘the whores downstairs’ (Patricia Phoenix and Verity Edmett), he appears to decide that Jane is no better than them not because she’s single and pregnant but because she sleeps with Toby, and Johnny is jealous.  His subsequent reconciliation with Jane is implausible though this is probably the fault of the script rather than of Brock Peters.

    The key supporting parts for women are Doris, the prostitute Sonia (Phoenix) and the lonely, superannuated music hall entertainer Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge), who lives on the ground floor of the boarding house with her cat, her distant memories of a theatrical career and a photograph of the woman, now dead, who was the lesbian love of Mavis’s life.   Sonia, like many of her predecessors on screen, sits at her dressing table philosophising about her line of work.  Doris is quickly established as a mercenary bigot.  The obviousness of all three characters makes you fear the worst and there are times when the acting of Avis Bunnage and Cicely Courtneidge is overexplicit and stagy.   Yet they and Patricia Phoenix demonstrate what can happen when an actor really commits to a caricature.  There’s condescension in the conception and writing of these roles but the actresses find their own truth in them.   (Phoenix is especially good and Bunnage, with her darting eyes and aggressive snout, projects a remarkable brutal shrewdness.)  When the boarding house personnel gather for a knees-up on Christmas Day and Cecily Courtneidge’s Mavis dresses up in the soldier’s uniform she wore in the theatre, for a rendering of ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’, you know the sequence is going to be a big number in just the ways that it turns out to be.  Mavis forgets her words then recovers then her routine is interrupted by Jane’s going into labour.  Yet the actors’ verve and conviction – and Bryan Forbes’s belief in them and in what they’re doing – make the scene powerfully engaging.

    11 August 2015

     

     

Posts navigation