Old Yorker

  • Captain Phillips

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Greengrass (2013)

    Films like this and Gravity (which remains to be seen) will probably soon be – perhaps already are – the best that big-budget Hollywood has to offer.  Even though the size of domestic screens is jeopardising the idea of a movie that must be seen in the cinema to be properly appreciated, that idea isn’t yet obsolete.  Besides, home entertainment, whatever the facilities, still means real or potential distractions – although they exist in a cinema too, of course.  When we saw Captain Phillips a pair just ahead of us talked continuously until a man in the same row bravely and politely asked them to stop, and they more or less did.  The fact remains that Paul Greengrass’s movie is all about sustained tension and depends very considerably on a captive audience – something that only the audience in a darkened theatre can be.  Captain Phillips isn’t a 3D or CGI extravaganza or a work of conspicuous breadth or depth but it is a good reason for going to the cinema and, put in a small screen at the Richmond Odeon presumably to make way for school half-term treats on larger ones, it attracted a full house.  The movie is based on the true story of merchant mariner Richard Phillips’s capture by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean in 2009.  The screenplay by Billy Ray (who also wrote Shattered Glass and adapted The Hunger Games) is based on Phillips’s own account of his experiences in his laboriously titled memoir A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea.

    Paul Greengrass essentially does only sustained tension – whether he’s directing a Jason Bourne movie or United 93.  An early exchange in Captain Phillips, between Tom Hanks as Phillips and Catherine Keener as his wife, is proof of why Greengrass is right to play to his strength for as much of the film as possible.  Phillips is preparing to fly to Oman, where he’ll take command of the cargo vessel Maersk Alabama on its journey to Mombasa through the Gulf of Aden.   It’s fine to show his routine preparations but the dialogue as the couple drive to the airport – about things in the world changing too fast, and nothing feeling certain any more – is not only clumsily written but too emphatically shot by Greengrass.  Even if you didn’t already know what the film was about, you know now this won’t be just another job for the captain.  (Catherine Keener has just this one scene – it’s both sad to see her so briefly, and pointless to cast her in the role because she gives it shadings that count for nothing.)  Greengrass then cuts to the preparations and competition among the Somali pirates for their next marine hijacking.  Your immediate reaction is that revealing their intentions is counterproductive, will mean that the film is marking time until the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama actually occurs.  In fact, it makes things more interesting – because you immediately know what the Somalis are up to, you start to look at them more as characters.

    Once Richard Phillips is on board his ship, you start taking an interest in him as a character too.   The captain’s friendlessness among his crew goes beyond his unique authority – Phillips is humourlessly efficient and his conversations with the other men are perfunctory.   Tom Hanks gives a fine performance throughout; it’s entirely right that the film is named for the character he’s playing.  Even with the excitement that Greengrass’s film-making generates, Captain Phillips needs a human centre.  Hanks supplies both that and a star magnetism – but he doesn’t stand out from the rest of the cast in an attention-seeking way:  his playing is well integrated with the unshowy, naturalistic style of the actors in smaller parts.  The captain does the right thing:  when the vessel is hijacked, that means doing all that he can to protect his crew – and, in due course, putting his own life on the line – but not, you sense, because of any tender feelings towards them.  Like Phillips’ crew in the movie[1], you admire his courage and competence and ability to keep his wits about him in extremis, but you don’t warm to him.  It’s to Tom Hanks’s credit that he doesn’t trade on the warmth that has helped make him an enduringly popular actor.   This is a good example of how audience rapport can be used effectively without reminding the audience that you’re someone they usually like.  It’s also to Hanks’s credit that there’s not much overtly dislikeable about Phillips yet his narrow-eyed sizing up of the situation, his refusal to buckle and his impatience with his captors (which has a slightly racist flavour) are a forbidding combination.  When Phillips eventually loses control, you feel that he’s angry with himself for that.  Hanks is astonishing in the film’s final sequences after the captain has been rescued – he expresses each emotion as if a raw nerve has been hit.   He deserves this bravura finale after more than two hours of admirable control.

    Paul Greengrass is expert at fusing quasi-documentary description of physical and logistical details with a drive to keep the audience on edge.  The film editing (by Christopher Rouse) and sound editing (by Oliver Tarney) are terrific – and the silence that eventually follows sustained high-volume sequences is powerful.  I don’t, as I guess many people will, find the film almost unbearably exciting but it is fully absorbing.  Once Phillips has become the pirates’ sole hostage, there’s a brief lowering of the tension because you assume that he’s bound to come through unscathed yet the tension returns:  if you don’t know or can’t remember what actually happened, you may experience real doubts about whether Phillips will survive.  (I continued to expect him to do so mainly because I reckoned that, if he’d died, he would have been presented heroically in a less qualified way.)   Among the pirates, Barkhad Ali, as their leader, and Faysal Ahmed, the most scarily hot-headed of his accomplices, are outstanding.  With their molten eyes and extraordinary facial bone structure, they’re remarkable camera subjects; they’re also very good at conveying the warring imperatives of honour and profit that drive the hi-jackers.  It is ironically true that, as Phillips tells the pirates at one point, the Maersk Alabama’s cargo included relief supplies bound for Kenya, Uganda and Somalia.

    30 October 2013

    [1] Although not like his crew in real life, according to Wikipedia:  ‘In a New York Post article, some of the crew members accused the film of being inaccurate in facts and the portrayal of Phillips. Eleven crew members have sued the Waterman Steamship Corporation and Maersk Line for nearly $50 million alleging “willful, wanton and conscious disregard for their safety”. The article states that Phillips received seven e-mails about the increasing threat of piracy near Somalia, but that Phillips ignored all the warnings and kept them from his crew.’

  • The Great Gatsby (1974)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jack Clayton (1974)

    It was vigorously hyped by Paramount and eagerly awaited but the critical reception was lukewarm-to-negative and my recollection is that the film, at the time, was viewed as a failure – although it eventually made a handsome profit and won two Oscars (for Theoni V Aldredge’s costumes and Nelson Riddle’s musical arrangements).  I also recall that I thought the film better than it was cracked up to be – and I must have seen it a couple more times subsequently:  watching it last night, I was able to anticipate a lot of the lines and the line readings – even in 1974, I wouldn’t have retained those from a single viewing.  Nearly forty years on from its release, Jack Clayton’s Gatsby has acquired a patina of respectability – and a layer of nostalgia on top of the layers that the original material had already grown.  Fitzgerald’s novel is itself an elegy for romantic hope; although it was published during the Jazz Age (in 1925), the Great Depression followed so soon after that the book, with its beautiful prose, came to be regarded as a swan song of Roaring Twenties optimism.  What happened to Fitzgerald himself reinforced the tragic myth of Gatsby.  And the Clayton film – with a screenplay credited to Francis Ford Coppola[1] – is capable of making people of my generation nostalgic for a golden age of American cinema (and for the infancy of my own filmgoing).  This year will see Baz Luhrmann’s remake[2], with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, a prospect that may increase feelings of regret.   Yet this latest viewing of the Clayton version made me think the feelings of anti-climax that it caused in many in 1974 were the right feelings.  It really isn’t a very good movie.

    Apart from the stiff, too-heavy wig that Mia Farrow wears as Daisy Buchanan, the look of The Great Gatsby can hardly be faulted:  the clothes, the lighting (Douglas Slocombe) and the production design (John Box) are superb.  The atmosphere and movement of the film are another matter.   There are a few sequences with atmospheric strength – like the lunch at the Buchanans’ on a day of ominous, sweltering heat – but the great parties at Gatsby’s are a disappointment.  You don’t get any sense of the shifting moods these nights pass through.  The proceedings, although hyperactive, lack emotional life:  the guests’ party pieces seem just that – it’s as if the action began when the director called for it.   Jack Clayton created a remarkable spirit of place in The Innocents; the admittedly much larger challenge of doing so in the houses and the grounds of houses of West Egg and East Egg is, for the most part, beyond him.   He sets up the relationships between the main characters – the tensions in the Buchanans’ marriage, Tom Buchanan’s affair with the garage owner’s wife, Myrtle Wilson – very obviously, either through letting the actors telegraph their characters’ feelings or through the way in which he’s cut the scenes to create that impression.  Most of the sequences lack rhythm and the supposedly climactic ones are particularly overextended.  Although there are effective elements in George Wilson’s shooting of Gatsby and the prelude to it, the whole passage takes so long that it’s less powerful than it should be.  There are too many shots of the quay light (of hope, as Gatsby sees it) winking on and off on Daisy’s side of the bay between East and West Egg – accompanied by beeps of Nelson Riddle’s music.   When Nick Carraway finds a dead gull by the water’s edge, the discovery is staged so baldly that you almost expect him to tell Gatsby there’s a harbinger of his death washed up on the rocks.

    There’s one early shot of Gatsby looking out over the bay then a lengthy build-up to Robert Redford’s first proper appearance.  (It would have more impact if he was a less visible presence in that previous shot.)  Two of Redford’s most effective performances are in films, both directed by Sydney Pollack, in which he plays a man adored by, but ultimately inaccessible to, the heroine (The Way We Were and Out of Africa).   The combination of his good looks and charismatic reserve can certainly amount to mystique.  In that sense, he’s well equipped to convey Gatsby’s shady glamour; as an actor, he has the right temperament to play a man who throws spectacular parties in which he’s reluctant to participate.  Redford has the ability to suggest thoughtfulness and an opacity that tends to prevent you reading his thoughts: the combination of the two holds your attention.  It would be well nigh impossible for a dramatisation of The Great Gatsby to reproduce the first person narrative of the novel to the extent that we never saw Gatsby except in the presence of Nick; yet if this adaptation had done so, I think Robert Redford would be more impressive.  As it is, there are scenes of Gatsby and Daisy alone together and they are underwhelming (the images of them together, their mouths moving but their words unheard, are stronger).   Since it’s Gatsby who’s obsessed with Daisy and loves her deeply, whereas her feelings for him are more elusive and inconstant, the balance of power in The Way We Were and Out of Africa is virtually reversed.  Redford is naturally less comfortable in that situation – he’s required to do the emoting that Barbra Streisand and Meryl Streep did in the Pollack films.  Being partnered with Mia Farrow makes matters worse.

    When you’re reminded who might have played Daisy (Robert Evans bought the rights to the novel in 1971 with his then wife Ali MacGraw in mind for the role), you should be relieved it was Mia Farrow yet her effortful performance is nearly disastrous – especially vocally:  at first it seems that she’s decided to sing rather than speak the part.   When Daisy exclaims about the beauty of a flower or her infant daughter (six-year-old Patsy Kensit), Farrow seems to be trying for a piercing intensity – so that we feel both Daisy’s fervid romanticism and her sense of imprisonment.   She looks very beautiful, although it’s only in the scenes when the wig’s come off and is replaced by one of those twenties headdresses that are like beaded skullcaps that she seems physically free – and she’s acting so hard that she never moves easily enough.  Farrow gets nowhere near the character’s incorrigible shallowness – she may have little aptitude for playing someone as unpleasant as Daisy Buchanan.  Fitzgerald, through Nick Carraway, strongly implies that the Buchanans were made for each other:

    ‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…’

    Jack Clayton seems to take Daisy at her word when she tearfully tells Gatsby, ‘Rich girls don’t marry poor boys’.  He makes Tom the villain of the piece and, with Bruce Dern in the role, Tom turns into a slob.  Scowling and sneering, Dern is disastrously wrong because he puts the grossness of Tom’s soul on the surface.  Redford is arguably too refined as Gatsby anyway (at least with Leonardo DiCaprio in the role it’ll be possible to believe that money can’t buy you class); Dern’s portrait of Tom completely messes up the social nuances of the situation.  His having an affair with a working-class woman means very little when he’s as coarse-grained as she is.   As Myrtle, Karen Black is overpowering – her extraordinary looks and her forceful emotionality make her altogether too challenging a prospect for Tom Buchanan.  If Black and Lois Chiles, as Daisy’s friend, Jordan Baker, could pool and equally divide their histrionic energies, both would give better performances.  Chiles’ quiet, low voice does occasionally hit a surprising and affecting note but the halting relationship between Nick and Jordan is pared away to the extent that Chiles has little to work with anyway.  Sam Waterston does very creditably in the difficult role of Nick – he reads the voiceover sensitively and, as he listens to the more voluble and extravert personalities around him, he registers often silent responses of considerable emotional variety.   Edward Herrmann (as Gatsby’s long-term house guest Klipspringer), Howard de Silva (as his business associate Meyer Wolfsheim) and Roberts Blossom (as Gatsby’s father) all do well in smaller parts.  The best acting in The Great Gatsby is Scott Wilson’s, who plays his namesake, the hapless garage owner.  George Wilson is brimming with desperation from an early stage but the other characters don’t notice.  Scott Wilson ensures that we in the audience do – and that we understand why no one else does.

    20 April 2012

    [1] According to Wikipedia: ‘Truman Capote was the original screenwriter but he was replaced by Francis Ford Coppola, with some scenes re-written first by Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. On his commentary track for the DVD release of The Godfather, Coppola makes reference to writing the Gatsby script at the time, though he comments: “Not that the director paid any attention to it. The script that I wrote did not get made.”’

    [2] The following year, as it turned out …

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