Old Yorker

  • The Dark Knight

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Nolan (2008)

    Multiply depressing.  The story is bleak; the carnage is humourlessly orchestrated and very protracted; the film marks the last appearance of Heath Ledger[1] – and his performance as the Joker may become what he’s best remembered for.   It’s evidently taken as read that mayhem in comic book-based material is, by definition, harmless – the film has a 12A certificate (the Odeon website warns of no more than ‘mild violence and sustained threat’) and the audience I was part of audibly approved of the most spectacular fights and ravishing explosions (notably the Gotham City hospital complex).  But what are you supposed to make of the unreality when most of the cast seem to have been encouraged to give glumly realistic performances (and oblige)?   It’s hard to translate these characters into death-defying creatures of fantasy, who’ll live to fight another day whatever the visual evidence here.  (Batman and the Joker are the only exceptions – and the fact of Heath Ledger’s death is made more distressing by that irony.)    It may be axiomatic that in this kind of film the director is more interested in the technology than he is in the actors but – because of the disjuncture between the drabness of the people and the authority of the special effects that, in every way, dominate them – this has its own dehumanising effect.

    The Batman material obviously taps into persisting psychic fears in order to retain its grip on the imagination:  if New York and other metropolitan audiences have become a bit less concerned about ‘cleaning up’ their city it’s probably only because this anxiety has been overtaken, by either a vaguer unease of things getting out of control environmentally or the dread of invasive terrorism.   (When Bruce Wayne is puzzled as to why a criminal can’t be bought, his butler-adviser Alfred Pennyworth tells him – in one of the best lines in the script – that ‘some men just want to see things burn’.   This refers to the Joker but it rings a bell with the feelings some people have that Islamist terrorists are effectively anarchists – because their religious-political demands seem out of the question to a Western sensibility.)  In order to eclipse your awareness of the fears on which the material feeds and to enjoy what’s on the screen, the components of a Batman film need to be (especially at this stage – this is the sixth film since the first Tim Burton one in 1989) more engaging than most of them are here.  The screenplay, by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, is serviceable but strenuous – and wordy in laying out the moral dilemmas of a vigilante trying to defeat a villain.  The score, by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, is used for obvious ominous effect and often played so loud that it drowns out the actors’ words.  The visuals (the cinematographer is Wally Pfister, the production designer Nathan Crowley), although sometimes beautiful, are impregnated with gloom.

    The Joker’s make-up, however, is truly extraordinary – a ravaged Pagliacci with a gash of a mouth out of Francis Bacon – and Heath Ledger repeatedly takes you by surprise in revealing the whites of his eyes from out of the blue shadows they dwell in.  It’s no surprise that this actor gives a dazzling performance.  It is startling, given his previous work on screen, that he gives this kind of dazzling performance – especially in the early scenes, in which he builds up a breathtaking momentum and poise in vivifying the comic book dimension of the Joker – at the same time as he creates a frightening, believable psychotic.   (As time goes on, his performance seems to become more of a turn – but this may be simply because its initial impact is so great.)   This is a powerful example of how a mask can give a performer greater emotional and physical freedom and originality.

    The same process seems to be at work, in a smaller way, later in the film, when the crusading DA of Gotham City, is burned and horribly disfigured.  Until then, Aaron Eckhart is competent but blurred in the role – losing the left-hand side of his face (the remains of which also evoke Bacon) sharpens up his acting remarkably.    Compared with both these two, Christian Bale, reprising his lead role from Batman Begins, is vacuous:  his Bruce Wayne is a disagreeable, wanly sarcastic presence – with no connection to (or even a striking disconnection from) his alter ego.    Gary Oldman, as a police lieutenant, appears to think he can play a decent man effectively by making himself look dreary then relying on his interior strength as an actor to transform the dreariness – a plan that is bound to fail dismally.   As the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, Morgan Freeman – who has the luminous humanity, as well as the natural authority, that Oldman completely lacks – is relaxed and polished and, once again, manages to command respect without pomposity.  Michael Caine is adequate but rather monotonous as Pennyworth – although you do sense an increasing discomfort in him that his partner in the master-servant double act is such a negative.  When Caine gets the chance to hug Maggie Gyllenhaal – she plays the DA’s partner, who is also Wayne’s ex – his sense of relief is palpable.  Gyllenhaal is really good (and it’s perhaps no coincidence that Ledger is especially riveting in his encounter with her):  she gives off a slight sense of indifference to what she’s doing but her instincts and humour see her through.  If more of the performances were pitched at this level, The Dark Knight would be a much less unpleasant experience.

    30 July 2008

    [1]  Not quite – see The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

  • Mr Arkadin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Orson Welles (1955)

    Orson Welles’s judgment, as quoted in his official biography by Barbara Leaming, was that:

    ‘More completely than any other picture of mine has been hurt by anybody, Arkadin was destroyed because they completely changed the entire form of it:  the whole order of it, the whole point of it … Ambersons is nothing compared to Arkadin!’

    Not only is The Magnificent Ambersons notorious as a film maudit – Welles’s moviemaking from that point onwards might be termed an oeuvre maudit.  In describing Mr Arkadin in the above terms, he knows whereof he speaks.  The picture was released in Britain (with the title Confidential Report) and Spain in 1955 and in other parts of Western Europe the following year.   It didn’t get an American release until October 1962.

    The film has two main characters:  the eponymous Arkadin, a mysterious business tycoon and socialite, and Guy Van Stratten, a small-time American smuggler, working in Italy in the aftermath of World War II.  On the Naples waterfront one night, Van Stratten witnesses the death of a man called Bracco who, before he expires, gasps out to Van Stratten two names, one of which is Gregory Arkadin.  Van Stratten, motivated (as I understood it) by self-interest rather than the pursuit of justice, resolves to track Arkadin down.  Mr Arkadin was made largely in Spain but also includes sequences shot in London, Paris, Munich, the French Riviera and Switzerland.  That list of locations hints at the international scope of Arkadin’s influence and Van Stratten’s detective work (although both extend beyond Europe:  there’s a Mexican episode too).

    I assume the version of Mr Arkadin screened by BFI this July was what’s described by Wikipedia as the ‘Criterion edit’ of 2006:

    ‘Whilst no version of the film can claim to be definitive as Welles never finished editing the film, this is likely to remain the closest version to Welles’ original vision. … It uses all available English-language footage, and attempts to follow Welles’ planned structure and editing style as closely as possible, incorporating his comments over the years on where the other edits went wrong. However, it still only remains an approximation …’

    The film I saw was often visually impressive.  The camerawork can be strongly disorienting, through the angles Welles favours and the speed at which the camera moves.  The repeated shots down flights of stairs and alleyways are arresting – so too the opening and closing images, involving an unpiloted aeroplane.  Mr Arkadin lacks narrative rhythm but one’s naturally inclined to blame the studio butchers for that, rather than its writer-director.  It’s harder, though, to absolve Welles of responsibility for the characters in the story and the way most of them are played.   Robert Arden as Van Stratten is embarrassingly inexpressive.  The cast also includes, among others, Akim Tamiroff, Grégoire Aslan, Michael Redgrave, Mischa Auer, Katina Paxinou, Suzanne Flon and Jack Watling.   That’s to say, some of the heavily accented English is genuine but, whether it is or not, most of the playing is too busy.  The result is characterisation that is often described as ‘delicious’ but which I find indigestible.  (Katina Paxinou and Suzanne Flon are honourable exceptions to this, and Jack Watling is OK in a pretty feeble role.  Paola Mori, who plays Arkadin’s daughter and who became Welles’s third wife, is an exception too but only because, like Robert Arden, she doesn’t seem up to acting, let alone overacting.)

    Orson Welles’s story and screenplay were inspired by episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime radio series, a spin-off to Carol Reed’s The Third Man, in which Welles famously played Harry.  As well as casting himself as Arkadin, Welles reads the voiceover at the start of the film:

    ‘On December 25th, an airplane was sighted off the coast of Barcelona.  It was flying empty.  … Investigation of this case reached into the highest circles … and the scandal was very nearly responsible for the fall of at least one European government.  This motion picture is a fictionalized reconstruction leading up to … the appearance last Christmas morning of the empty plane.’

    This has flavours of both the radio War of the Worlds and the newsreel framework of Citizen Kane and, when Arkadin eventually appears, he looks a cross between the elderly Charles Foster Kane and Mephistopheles.  Unfortunately, Welles’ bizarre hair and make-up, his calculated air of mystery and his richly diabolical laugh (heard too often) turn Arkadin into a ludicrous rather than a charismatic figure.  Whatever others may have done to disfigure Mr Arkadin, you get the feeling that Orson Welles was a major contributor too.  On this occasion, he seems less a cinema auteur than a man playing his greatest hits in hope rather than expectation.

    31 July 2015

     

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