Old Yorker

  • Infamous

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Douglas McGrath (2006)

    Rachel Portman’s score is all over the place – it faithfully reflects the film’s lurches in mood.  There’s wry guitar music, suggesting a Woody Allen comedy; conventional scary music for the Clutter family murders; twinkly bits to accompany Truman Capote’s more reflective and sentimental moments.  Bennett Miller’s Capote, released the previous year, turned harshly judgmental:  Miller presents Capote’s use of real-life events (and of Perry Smith and Dick Hickok) in order to write In Cold Blood as causing the end of his literary career – an irony that is a also a case of just desserts.  The movie is reduced by this point of view (at least it is on a second viewing:  first time round, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliance as Capote obscures its limitations).  Although a more sympathetic treatment of Truman Capote is therefore welcome in theory, Infamous is weak and shallow:  perhaps Douglas McGrath has the wrong temperament for the material – he may be too good natured.   The early scenes, when Capote (Toby Jones) and Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock) visit Holcomb, Kansas, where the killings took place, and socialise over Christmas with Sheriff Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels) and his wife (Bethlyn Gerard) and friends, are sharply entertaining.  McGrath shows how Capote is exploiting these connections for the book he has in mind and enjoying being the centre of attention in a new social world – so that he’s not too homesick for New York.  You wonder how the writer-director will make a successful transition to the darker side of the story and he simply doesn’t.  At one point Capote says to Perry Smith, ‘You did a terrible thing’, but you feel that Douglas McGrath, like Smith, struggles to grasp the fact emotionally.  There are flashbacks to the murders but they are indifferently staged:  this is the first time (after seeing In Cold Blood, and Capote twice) that I’ve not been horrified by the reconstruction of these crimes.  The killings in Infamous are carried out by actors giving bad performances – Daniel Craig (Smith) and Lee Pace (Dick Hickok) – rather than by bad men.

    McGrath’s screenplay is based on George Plimpton’s 1997 book Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.  Compared with Capote, Infamous includes much more coverage of Capote’s socialite circle in New York – McGrath stages a series of interviews with Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), Slim Keith (Hope Davis), Marella Agnelli (Isabella Rossellini), Gore Vidal (Michael Panes) and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich), as well as Harper Lee.  McGrath never really works out whether he wants this to be a faux-documentary about Capote or a drama about the creation of In Cold Blood; nor does he manage to get a consistent style of playing from Capote’s acquaintances.  Hope Davis has a good scene when Slim Keith has drunk too much but still doesn’t trust Truman enough to give too much away.  Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini are more or less wasted.  Juliet Stevenson’s desire to show off eclipses any kind of interpretation of Diana Vreeland.  Peter Bogdanovich is wooden.  Michael Panes’s appearance is mercifully fleeting.  After a while, the witnesses to Capote’s life become something to fall back on – when it’s easier for what happened to be described in this way rather than dramatised.  Back on death row, Perry Smith’s intelligence and vulnerability are served straight:  McGrath is disinclined to grapple with the fact that he murdered people – and doesn’t allow Capote to do so either.  Clifton Collins Jr was a rather colourless Smith in Capote but that almost made Capote’s fascination with him more intriguing.  Daniel Craig is dead wrong here – his acting is self-conscious and the character he creates merely hollow.  (Lee Pace is also weak as Dick Hickok – I wasn’t sure whether it was intentional that Austin Chittim, who plays the Clutter son, physically resembles Pace.)  The flashbacks to Smith’s childhood and youth are perfunctory.

    The quasi-sexual relationship between Capote and Perry Smith presented in Infamous is, as Douglas McGrath has acknowledged, his own invention.   This may be an easy way of realising Capote’s infatuation with Smith but it’s counterproductive in that it detracts from the mystery of the relationship.  The physical proximity, let alone physical intimacy, of the two men in Smith’s cell leaves nothing to the imagination:   Toby Jones says much more when prison bars are separating him from Perry.  Jones is often fascinating to watch – as, for example, when Capote stands in silhouette, listening intently while one of the Holcomb locals imparts information that is addressed entirely to Harper Lee.  At the very beginning of the film, Capote and Babe Paley are in a New York club where a singer (a cameo from Gwyneth Paltrow) is performing; halfway through the number (‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’) she seems to lose concentration and suddenly to be on the verge of a breakdown.  Jones’s face and body express the room’s collectively holding its breath and giving a sigh of relief when Paltrow recovers and resumes.  The early part of Infamous makes you realise how carefully and expertly Bennett Miller and Philip Seymour Hoffman had to conceal the latter’s height.  Because he’s so short, Toby Jones can do things that Hoffman couldn’t – Jones has a real freedom of movement, is more exuberantly camp and androgynous (and also more extravagantly dressed).  He’s very good too at suggesting how Capote uses his persona – for effect or to get results – but perhaps the overall effect is a little too benign.  He makes Capote a gossip of a less malignant kind than Hoffman did.

    Infamous, photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, includes some impressive (if  not unexpected) shots of the flat Kansas countryside.  The colour seems to have drained out of the land – the effect of this is more striking because elsewhere the film often seems too brightly coloured.   This feels wrong no doubt partly because Richard Brooks’s movie of In Cold Blood is in black and white (and the narrative of the book is somehow monochrome too).   Sally and I had to check whether Capote was in black and white too:  it’s not but the palette is certainly much more muted.   There never seems to be any depth to the images in Infamous – all in all, the visual scheme increasingly reflects what’s wrong with Douglas McGrath’s approach.   Sandra Bullock gives an intelligent performance as Harper Lee – she’s by far the best interviewee and good in a scene in which Harper Lee stands up to Capote in an argument, even if the writing of the exchange is a bit obvious.   Bullock is convincingly ambivalent although, by the closing stages, she’s showing signs of strain at being so subdued.  (There’s also one reference too many to Harper Lee’s attempts to write a second novel.)  John Benjamin Hickey is convincing as Capote’s boyfriend Jack Dunphy and Jeff Daniels is excellent as Sheriff Dewey.

    23 February 2013

     

     

     

  • Mistress America

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noah Baumbach (2015)

    In Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, the title character was trying to build a life in New York City.  In Mistress America, Tracy, a college freshman in New York, feels isolated and contacts Brooke, the daughter of the man whom Tracy’s mother is soon to marry.   Brooke has been in New York for some time and knows her way around the place.  Frances was played by Greta Gerwig, who now plays Brooke – Gerwig looks to have switched from the role of rookie to that of the mentor who will show neophyte Tracy (Lola Kirke) the New York ropes.  That first impression is deceptive.  By the end of Mistress America, which covers just a few weeks in the protagonists’ lives, Tracy, who wants to be a writer, has been accepted as a member of the college lit society she was desperate to get into.  She feels she’s learned things about life from Brooke and has also quickly put her to good literary use.  Brooke, on the other hand, has emerged as a congenital loser in love and in money-making:  she’s packing up her life in New York and moving to Los Angeles.  Her decision has a back-to-square-one dimension beyond the narrative frame of Mistress America.  Frances in the earlier film was a native Californian; so is Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote this film, as she co-wrote Frances Ha, with Noah Baumbach.

    Brooke has just turned thirty and Tracy is eighteen.  Their ages matter, to Brooke and to viewers of the film.  Brooke regularly visits a psychic (Seth Barrish) and Tracy tags along a couple of times.  When the psychic refers to Tracy as ‘the young one’, Brooke insists that there’s ‘Only ten, twelve years between us – we’re contemporaries!’  Brooke has a point – and not only in the sense that it’s important to the film’s dynamic that the younger girl is revealed to be the less naive of the two.  Brooke’s protest also brings to mind the moment in Frances Ha when the heroine is told that, compared with her friend and actual contemporary Sophie, ‘You seem a lot older but less grown up’.  A difficulty I had with Mistress America was in the casting and performance of Lola Kirke.  She is actually twenty-four and that’s what she looks; her voice is low-pitched (I often found it hard to make out what she was saying) compared with Greta Gerwig’s.  But it’s only these external elements that confuse the relative ages of Tracy and Brooke.  (Gerwig was thirty-one when the film was being made.)  Lola Kirke doesn’t suggest any kind of inner maturity or express Tracy’s capacity to use people – a capacity totally lacking in her older stepsister-to-be.  Kirke’s  performance is dull beyond what’s required of a foil to the more comically adventurous Gerwig.

    Greta Gerwig makes a great entrance, as Brooke comes down a flight of steps to meet Tracy for the first time, in Times Square.  You smile at this first sight of Gerwig’s exuberant awkwardness (and at first hearing of Brooke too, on the other end of Tracy’s phone).  She kept me smiling for a good few minutes but Mistress America is excessively dependent on her charm and skill and, although neither is in doubt, Gerwig isn’t showing much here that she hasn’t shown before.   I laughed only once:  when Brooke gets angry with Tracy for using her as short story material, Tracy says that’s what writers do and asks what Tennessee Williams would have amounted to if he’d not  done the same, and Brooke yells, ‘I don’t give a shit – Tennessee Williams isn’t my friend!’   (Tracy’s short story is called ‘Mistress America’, referring to a super-heroine dreamed up by Brooke, not her.)  Brooke’s outburst is by far the best moment in an overlong sequence at the spectacular Connecticut home of her former boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus) and Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), his new partner.   Mamie-Claire stole, as well as Dylan, Brooke’s two cats and the commercial idea that’s paid for the spectacular house.  Brooke has come to ask Dylan for money to start up a restaurant (her subsequent boyfriend has deserted her and this enterprise) and the showdown in Connecticut involves several other people:  Tony (Matthew Shear), Tracy’s fellow freshman who also writes fiction and who’s chauffeured her and Brooke to Dylan’s; Tony’s pathologically possessive girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who has just that one characteristic; Karen (Cindy Cheung), a lawyer friend of Mamie-Claire; and a disgruntled neighbour (Dean Wareham).   This plays like one of those scenes in the theatre when a writer has contrived to get virtually the whole cast together but isn’t sure what to do next, and has to keep giving everyone the odd line to justify their presence on stage.

    As you’d expect, Baumbach and Gerwig have written plenty of smart dialogue and the players are never less than proficient.  (I liked the actor – uncredited on the IMDB listing – who plays Brooke’s neighbour Karim, with a graceful deadpan humour.)  But Mistress America is thin and has an acrid flavour that reminded me more of Margot at the Wedding than of any of Baumbach’s three intervening films.  Exploiting a personal relationship for creative writing purposes is obviously a theme of Margot too; the forthcoming wedding that sets the story running doesn’t happen in Mistress America either.  The marriage between Tracy’s mother (Kathryn Erbe) and Brooke’s (unseen) father is just a mechanism to get Brooke and Tracy together – nothing in their interactions conveys a sense of what either one feels about the prospect of a lifelong familial relationship.  The tone of Tracy’s final voiceover is elegiac; she suggests that zany, romantic individuals like Brooke are a dying breed.  It’s hard to see how Tracy knows this and odd that she’s nostalgic for a type of person she’s experienced only in Brooke but perhaps it’s the (artificial?) narrative voice of Tracy the writer, rather than the voice of Tracy the character, that we’re hearing.   The trailer for Mistress America is to be thoroughly recommended.  Unfortunately, it contains most of the best bits of a disappointing film.

    20 August 2015

     

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