Old Yorker

  • All Is Lost

    Old YorkerFilm review

    J C Chandor (2013)

    All Is Lost is all about Robert Redford.  It has to be:  the film has a cast of one and Redford’s character has neither name nor biographical context.  He’s a yachtsman, sailing his craft, the ‘Virginia Jean’, alone in the Indian Ocean.  The writer-director J C Chandor begins his second feature (the first was Margin Call (2011)) with a voiceover, spoken by Redford, which supplies little information beyond the fact that there are people – presumably the sailor’s family – to whom he wants to send a valedictory message.  (When you first see the man, you notice he wears a strikingly large ring, with a big blue stone at its centre, on his wedding finger.)  Approaching what he thinks is the end of his life, he expresses in this message regret for what he’s failed to do.  After this ‘all is lost’ (the man’s own words) prologue, a legend on the screen reads ‘Eight days earlier’.  The man wakes one morning to find the ‘Virginia Jean’ holed below the water line, following a collision with an errant shipping container.  In spite of swift, resourceful efforts to repair the damage, he’s soon in perilous difficulty as he tries to keep the boat afloat and himself alive.  You naturally want him to succeed in doing so – because he’s a human being/Robert Redford up against it rather than because he’s an individual you’ve decided is worth rooting for.  The sailor might be a serial killer or a Tea Party member; you’ve no idea why he’s on his own in the Sumatran Straits.  The gravity of that opening voiceover immediately suggests that All Is Lost means to be a very serious movie.  The implication that the man won’t outlive it, that an extended flashback will describe eventually unavailing attempts to survive, warns you not to watch those attempts in the way that you watched Tom Hanks marooned on his desert island in Cast Away.

    A central theme of Chandor’s movie is impending death – the character’s situation and Robert Redford’s advancing years naturally call to mind the lines in The Dry Salvages:

    ‘There is the final addition, the failing
    Pride or resentment at failing powers,
    The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
    In a drifting boat with a slow leakage …’

    It’s only when the action moves beyond the point at which his farewell message-in-a-jamjar has been dispatched that you get a sliver of hope that Redford may survive.  (In one of the most expressive moments in the whole film, he makes to throw the jar as far as possible but then drops it limply into the waters.)  Even in the closing stages, Chandor shows Redford, after he’s set his inflatable life raft on fire to try and attract the attention of a distantly passing craft, floating down and away underwater, as if to death.  Finally, he comes to and realises the other vessel is miraculously close.   He rises to the surface; you see a hand reach out and he grasps it before the screen goes dark and the closing credits come up.

    Redford is being praised for the performance of his life and this role is certainly a career-defining one – in the sense that it’s a statement of his fundamental qualities as a movie actor.  He has always seemed happy in his own company on screen, letting the camera get closer to him than any fellow actor but still not too close.  The last moments of All Is Lost are ambiguous – perhaps the man is losing consciousness and merely imagining salvation – but they provide an entirely happy ending for Redford:  taking the life-saving hand is as near as he gets to interacting with another human being.   Redford has had some famous screen partnerships – with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men, Meryl Streep in Out of Africa.  Redford doesn’t really connect with any of these co-stars; since the relationships with Newman and Hoffman are absolutely straight and the films in question depend on a combination of star quality and an engaging plot rather than character, this lack of connection doesn’t much matter.  The movies with Streisand and Streep are, I think, more memorable because Redford is just the right actor to play men who are fascinating but infuriatingly inaccessible to the women who love them – and because the actresses, trying to spark Redford as an actor, share something of the plight of the characters they’re playing.  (Redford’s mysterious reserve also holds your interest in The Great Gatsby although you don’t believe in his passion for Mia Farrow’s Daisy.)

    In All Is Lost, there are several reasons for wanting Redford to beat the odds.  He’s always been interesting to watch and you’re grateful to him for that; you also admire what he must have put himself through physically to make this movie.  He reads the opening words very well – his voice supplying what is, for Redford, a surprising depth of feeling and tension.  After this, what he says consists of:  a brief, abortive attempt to communicate an SOS message over the boat’s wireless; a moment of anguished frustration when he yells ‘Fuck!’ (the film’s certificate warns of ‘a single use of strong language’ and it feels like the single such use in Redford’s long career:  it’s an unusual pleasure even to hear him shout); unheard cries of ‘Help!’ in the direction of a Maersk vessel.  (This sequence was briefly disorienting as it was a Maersk ship Tom Hanks was in charge of in Captain Phillips a few screen weeks ago – and I’d watched Cast Away in preparation for seeing All Is Lost.)   There’s no further dialogue.

    Is the rest of what Redford does great acting?   No: much of the movie is virtually documentary description of how the sailor tries to survive – any halfway decent actor could do this.  David Edelstein, in lauding the performance, is right that Redford can convince you in a way few other actors can that he’s thinking – although it seems to me that he brings a magnetic quality to looking intelligent rather than tells you specifically what is going on in a character’s mind.  Edelstein is right too that when the sailor in All Is Lost is running out of options and thought appears to give way to emotion the impact is strong but I think this is simply because the dominance of emotion is so unusual to see in Redford – not because he’s overwhelmingly expressive.  What is remarkable is that Redford is both old to be playing the role at all and in amazing physical shape for a man of his age.  His good looks have survived without any evidence of cosmetic aids and he looks much younger than his seventy-seven years.  He gives J C Chandor – and the audience – the best of both worlds, a combination of everyman vulnerability and movie star immortality.  There’s some very beautiful submarine photography by Peter Zuccarini, especially configurations of fish and the climactic image of the ring of fire that was once the life raft.  Up above the water, Frank G DeMarco captures some equally wondrous cloud formations and sunsets, especially one that, through a slow fade, suggests the ending not just of a day but of a life.

    30 December 2013

  • The Day of the Jackal

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fred Zinnemann (1973)

    It begins with a scene-setting voiceover in an English accent so clipped and pompous that you wonder for a moment if it’s supposed to be a self-parody.  It isn’t but is a sign of what’s to follow.  Perhaps the success of A Man for All Seasons left Fred Zinnemann starry-eyed about British actors or perhaps he was much more sensitive to the performances of Americans.  It’s hard otherwise to understand how the man who made From Here To Eternity – or High Noon for that matter – could have tolerated what he gets from most of the British cast.  It’s the same clumsy doing-a-character routine that mars parts of even something like Lawrence of Arabia – but it’s more relentless here, and more jarring because the Brits are playing the French (or, in a couple of cases, Italians), as well as the English.  The effect is weird:  the dead, stiff delivery of the lines makes it sound as if the actors think they’re reading a translation.  This kind of bad acting – mechanical, self-aware, theatrical in the wrong way – seems to be an occupational hazard of a character’s working in the military or the police or government.   Of course The Day of the Jackal, an adaptation (by Kenneth Ross) of Frederick Forsyth’s bestseller, is in many respects plot-driven rather than character-based but the awkward playing is so insistent that it detracts from the superb fluency of Zinnemann’s storytelling and from the absorbing realism of much of the location filming in the picture.

    The scene in which the Jackal (Edward Fox) is offered and accepts the job of trying to assassinate De Gaulle on behalf of the OAS (the Organisation de l’armée secrète – a right-wing nationalist-militarist group opposed to Algerian independence) is a good bad example of the stilted rhythms of the acting.  There’s never a moment of overlapping dialogue, however heated and fractious the exchanges are supposed to be.  From that point onwards, there are a good few sequences which describe the Jackal’s largely solitary planning and preparations in silence and these are fine, if a little monotonous.  The picture is very well edited by Ralph Kemplen.  (One moment seems wrong, though:  Colette de Montpellier (Delphine Seyrig), with whom the Jackal subsequently has an affair, makes her first entrance walking down a flight of stairs.  The Jackal reacts to Colette even before her legs come into view.)  The climax is the Jackal’s attempt to assassinate De Gaulle in Paris on Liberation Day 1963.  The marksman’s lookout point is high up in an apartment block.  It’s hard to avoid thinking of what really happened in the Texas Book Depository less than three months later but this long sequence is very well staged and genuinely exciting.  I could remember at a distance of thirty-five years (I’d seen the film on its original release but never again until now) the moment when the Jackal shoots and De Gaulle moves his head at that split second.  It’s a pity that the very end of the film is so bathetic:  as the Jackal’s coffin is lowered into an unmarked grave, a (British) voice on the soundtrack cornily asks, ‘But if the Jackal wasn’t who we thought he was … who the hell was he?’

    It’s hard to know what to make of Edward Fox’s performance at this distance in time:  his oddly emphatic speech patterns and the timbre of his voice – he speaks in a kind of shouted drawl – became so familiar in the years that followed.  This Jackal, dressed in light-coloured shirts and trousers and usually wearing a cravat, is rarely an inconspicuous figure:  he walks briskly with a distinctive carriage and almost exaggerated arm movements.  Fox is compellingly charmless; he makes you believe in the Jackal’s cold-bloodedness.  When Michael Lonsdale arrives on the scene as Lebel, the dogged police commissioner put in charge of tracking down the Jackal, it’s refreshing to see a fully developed characterisation.  Lonsdale’s Lebel is physically very convincing:  this man seems uncomfortable in his body even before he’s aching from nights on a camp bed in the office.  The Jackal’s end is all the more startling because it’s brought about by the clumsy, sleep-deprived Lebel, who suddenly becomes an action hero.

    Cyril Cusack is good, as usual, as the elderly gunsmith who supplies the Jackal’s firearm for the attempted assassination.  Cusack’s natural eccentricity contrasts effectively with the man’s straightforward craftsmanship. There’s a good exchange between him and Fox when the gunsmith presents the Jackal with his weapon and explains the finer details of how it works; you get a sense of the two men’s mutual professional respect, in particular the Jackal’s contained admiration for the gunsmith and sense of excitement at the gun’s potential.  As the French cabinet minister in charge of the police’s pursuit of the Jackal, Alan Badel’s dynamic suavity makes him very watchable. Ronald Pickup’s overdone portrait of an Italian forger, who tries to be too clever with the Jackal and pays the price, is at least more flamboyant and engaging (for a few minutes anyway) than what we get from most of the rest of the cast.   But these enjoyable performances are greatly outnumbered by the contributions of (to name a few) Maurice Denham, Edward Hardwicke, Anton Rodgers, Donald Sinden, David Swift and Timothy West.  The accent of Tony Britton, as a police inspector, goes on a tour of the British Isles until it settles for the Midlands.   And you wonder, when you see Eric Porter playing an OAS man or Derek Jacobi as Lebel’s undistinguished sidekick, what was the point of casting this kind of actor in this kind of role.

    12 January 2010

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