Old Yorker

  • A Town Like Alice

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jack Lee (1956)

    This adaptation of Nevil Shute’s famous novel, with a screenplay by W P Lipscomb and Richard Mason, is impressively tough-minded.  In 1942, a group of British women and children, taken prisoner in Kuala Lumpur by the Japanese, are forced by their captors to trek through heat and jungle, from one Malayan village to the next, having to do what they can for food and water.   (The men with whom they were captured have been taken away by the Japanese to a POW camp.)  Some of these women aren’t young; only one of them, Jean Paget, who becomes in effect their leader, speaks Malay; none of the party of course has any experience of coping with such conditions; several of the women and children die.  Those who don’t survive are not minor characters.  You sense from early on that the director Jack Lee isn’t going to offer the comforts an audience might expect; you know it from the moment that attempts to save a young boy’s life by sucking the poison from a snake-bite prove unavailing.  Later on, the main male character, an Australian POW called Joe Harman, is assumed – by the female lead, Jean, and by the audience – to be dead:  the miracle that he isn’t and the concluding post-war reunion of Joe and Jean feel earned because this isn’t a film that tends inevitably towards a happy ending.  (Nevil Shute’s novel takes the story further, into the early years of Joe and Jean’s marriage.)

    Although the presentation of character isn’t innovative, the picture acquires the quality of a true human drama.  The placing of the figures in the landscape and Geoffrey Unsworth’s lighting of these images give a documentary feel to A Town Like Alice and the conventionally suspenseful moments are brought off in ways that make them sharp and fresh.  The film succeeds in doing what films often aren’t good at doing:  Lee gets across the effects on people of time passed in arduous circumstances, and this isn’t just a matter of good make-up (by George Blackler).  The characters aren’t transformed suddenly but they develop.  Nora Nicholson plays Mrs Frith, an elderly hypochondriac with an iron constitution:  deprived of some of her jealously-guarded medications, which are desperately needed by others in the group, the old lady is asked to care for one of the children, and she does – even though she never loses interest in her own state of health.  There’s more to Mrs Frith than you realised – the same goes for the battleaxes played by Marie Lohr and Renee Houston.   Lee also directs the children (Margaret Eaden, Geoffrey Hawkins, Peter John and Cameron Moore) with great skill.   Jean Anderson, as a schoolteacher, is, as usual, conscientious if limited – within those limits, though, her acting is strongly felt and she’s sometimes affecting.  Occasionally, Anderson makes a movement that’s stagy and, in the world of this film, conspicuously artificial; the same is true of Virginia McKenna as Jean Paget but, for the most part, this is by miles the best acting I’ve seen from her.  McKenna – because she tends to be self-aware and pretty wooden – is the prime example of how the actresses in A Town Like Alice are transformed under Jack Lee’s intelligent direction:  when the camera concentrates on McKenna, she’s expressive without moving or speaking or appearing to do anything.

    There’s a moment when Jean Paget is urged by the others to make a wish.  She says she can’t think of what to wish for but her face tells you it’s to see Joe Harman again.   Virginia McKenna has a real, natural connection with Peter Finch, who is superb as Joe.  I couldn’t get the hang of what Joe and his fellow Australian Ben (well played by Vincent Ball) were and weren’t allowed to do as POWs of the Japanese:  one moment they’re driving a jeep, the next they’re with  a crowd of other prisoners behind barbed wire.  But, from the moment Joe first appears, working under the jeep (and bumping his head on it as he and Ben hear English voices and come out from beneath the vehicle), Peter Finch lifts the film.  He makes it a more personal and accessible drama without violating the other elements.  When Joe is crucified by the Japanese, the very form of the execution has an unusual and inescapable power – this is increased by Jack Lee concentrating on the agony of those watching rather than on Joe himself.  Finch – handsome, charismatic, and emotionally agile – doesn’t have that much screen time but his impact is such that, when Jean, thinking Joe is dead, recounts the moments she shared with him, they’re vivid in your own mind too.  Lee must have been tempted, given that Finch is pure gold in the role, to make more use of him but the director’s self-discipline is richly rewarded in this moment of Jean’s recollection.   There’s a fine performance too from Kenji Takaki as the middle-aged Japanese soldier who is the only guard assigned to the women and children on their journey – and who seems almost dazed by the conflict between his military duty and his compassionate instinct.   The effective score is by Matyas Seiber.

    24 January 2014

  • A Thousand Times Good Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Erik Poppe (2013)

    An Irish-Norwegian co-production, A Thousand Times Good Night means to dramatise the dilemma of a war photographer who is also the mother of two young children.  How does Rebecca Thomas (Juliette Binoche) reconcile her responsibilities as a wife and parent with the moral imperative of bringing to public attention what’s going on in conflicts around the globe?  A serious question:  in case the audience forgets how serious, the director Erik Poppe shows a good deal of what Rebecca’s camera records – in the form of live action as well as photographs.  This is a dubious tactic but it makes sense from Poppe’s point of view.  If he didn’t exploit these grim situations and, as a result, wipe the smile off viewers’ faces they might well be laughing at the feebleness of Harald Rosenlow Eeg’s screenplay, which assumes Rebecca’s predicament is so inherently dramatic that it doesn’t need character development or believable plotting to sustain it on screen.

    Rebecca is critically injured in a suicide bomb explosion in Kabul; once out of hospital, she returns home to Ireland.  (I think she’s meant not to be Irish:  that’s what you infer anyway, both from Binoche’s accent and from a remark Rebecca’s friend makes to the effect that Ireland is claiming her for its own.  It’s not clear what her nationality is – probably all that counts is that she’s a citizen of the world.)  Her husband Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a marine biologist who looks after the house and the kids, tells her he can no longer stand living in fear that Rebecca will be killed doing her dangerous work:  he says he’ll stay around only until she’s fully recovered from her injuries.  Rebecca and Marcus don’t have any discussion about this – about what it would mean, for example, for their two daughters, Steph (Lauryn Canny) and Lisa (Adrianna Cramer-Curtis), to lose the parent who provides the stability in their lives.  And Marcus isn’t even giving Rebecca an ultimatum – certain what her priorities are, he simply says that he’ll leave.  Rebecca treats it as an ultimatum nevertheless and decides to give up war photojournalism.   (She’s meant to be a big name in the field but her decision attracts remarkably little interest outside the family circle.)  Needless to say, Rebecca has no other interests in life and she’s no good at domestic stuff, making a hopeless attempt to make breakfast for her daughters on (it seems) just one occasion.   The world of the film includes only two positions for Rebecca:  if she’s not on the front line she’s in an absolute backwater.

    The elder girl Steph, who’s prickly and distant from Rebecca when she first comes home, is doing an ‘Africa project’ at school.  Mother and daughter both want to get on better and Rebecca’s photographs, which Steph can use for the school project, are the key to developing their relationship.  When, in order to get further material, they visit Steve (Mads Ousdal), an old colleague of Rebecca’s at the Norwegian Refugee Council, he offers Rebecca an assignment in Kenya.  She refuses but Steve assures her the area in question is perfectly safe and those words register with Steph.  Not only does she think Rebecca should take the job, she wants to go too and, when Marcus says no, Steph turns on her father.   It’s implausible that Marcus changes his mind – he appears to do so because he and Rebecca have discovered a new closeness now that she’s given up work – but Rebecca never questions his volte face.  It’s clear by this stage that Erik Poppe and Harald Rosenlow Eeg have no interest in grounding their story in credible motivation.  They just want to keep their repetitive description of Rebecca’s dilemma going and they’re not fussy how they get from A to B to C.  The area in Kenya that Rebecca and Steph go to is, of course, not safe and, as the refugee camp is attacked by an armed group, Rebecca plunges headlong into the mayhem, even though Steve orders her, and the terrified Steph begs her, to get back into their car.  (This is essentially the same movie scene as the reformed alcoholic falling off the wagon as soon as temptation arrives.)  Mother and daughter get back safely to Ireland, Steph having decided that Rebecca should say nothing to Marcus about what happened.  The girl doesn’t smile or speak once they’re home.  After what seems ages, Marcus notices ‘there’s something wrong with Steph … I don’t know what’:  he stays in the dark until the moment arrives when he comes across footage, shot by Steph, of the violent incident at the refugee camp.

    By this point, the characters have developed collective amnesia or a collective inability to express remorse.  Marcus never voices regret that he changed his mind about the trip to Africa (although you’re meant to think Rebecca wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t).  Steph’s resentment of her mother now comes out in full bloom but the girl seems to have forgotten that she dissuaded Rebecca from coming clean with Marcus about what happened in Kenya.   The lack of follow-through extends even to minor elements of the story.  After a distressing exit from the family home and spending the night with friends, Rebecca returns while the others are out and discovers the younger child Lisa’s lost kitten, which she rescues from a tree and puts indoors.  When Marcus returns with Lisa, he opens the door (I wanted to shout at him to shut it in case the cat got out again) and Lisa goes inside.  You never even get her reaction to the kitten’s return; perhaps this is too happy an event for the ponderously glum film to accommodate.  The climax of A Thousand Times Good Night is a sandwich designed both to confirm Rebecca’s commitment to war photojournalism and to resolve the tensions between her and Steph.  (Marcus barely appears at the business end of the picture.)  In between the hard crusts of the admission that work comes first is a sentimental spread:  when Steph makes a presentation at the conclusion of the school Africa project, showing her mother’s photographs and acknowledging her courage, Rebecca, who turned back from the airport at the last moment in order to be there, stands tearfully in the shadows of the school hall.

    It looks as if Erik Poppe thought he needed only to keep the camera on Juliette Binoche and all would be well.  There are few actors whose facial intelligence and expressivity could hold your attention for as long as Binoche does but she’s playing an idea and this inevitably defeats her.  The same is true of Lauryn Canny, good as she is, as Steph.  Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is pleasantly sensitive as the dreamboat husband although anger doesn’t seem to come easily to him.   (He resembles Aaron Eckhart in this respect, as well as facially.)  There’s a lot of solemn-pretty music by Armand Amar and the bleakly beautiful beaches and cloudscapes of the Irish coast provide a suitably elegiac physical correlative to Rebecca’s unhappy situation.   The script does include one strong line, when Steph tells her mother, ‘It would be easier if you were dead:  then we could all be sad together, once and for all’.  Although Steph later says she didn’t mean it, you know that a part of her did.  The line can’t be unsaid and its resonance overpowers the mechanical ending of A Thousand Times Good Night.

    7 May 2014

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