Old Yorker

  • 127 Hours

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Danny Boyle (2010)

    Changing the title of Aron Ralston’s autobiographical story Between a Rock and a Hard Place to 127 Hours may not have been Danny Boyle’s decision but it exudes commercial anxiety – as does his direction throughout the movie’s 94 minutes.  (As far as the title is concerned, surely – after the huge success of Slumdog Millionaire – the people behind this film could have been confident it would get an audience?  What’s more, the name they’ve ended up with would immediately have given away the story even if the picture hadn’t already achieved notoriety.)  There’s a kind of empathy between the director and his hero or, at least, traction in their predicaments:  Aron Ralston (James Franco), trapped at the bottom of Bluejohn Canyon in Utah with his right arm pinned by a boulder, has to keep thinking of ways of trying to escape; Danny Boyle is continuously driven towards finding new means of catching the eye.  The latter is increasingly impatient for the 127 hours to be up – he seems more frightened than his protagonist of standing still.  Boyle, who adapted Ralston’s book with Simon Beaufoy, isn’t prepared to try and dramatise the snail’s pace passage of time for Aron or how hard it is for the young man not to give up the struggle and the ghost.  (He has Aron say, at one stage, ‘Keep it together, keep it together’ and, later on, ‘Time’s passing very slowly’, and that’s about it.)    127 Hours is already known as that-film-where-the-bloke-cuts-his-arm-off, as if there were nothing else in it (and it’s likely this is all it will be remembered for).  It’s quite a bad film but it’s a bad film not because a man self-amputates but because of Danny Boyle’s mania for screen pyrotechnics.

    In fact the confusion of horror, pain and hope that charges James Franco’s face and upper body as he carries out the operation makes this one of the strongest moments in 127 Hours for reasons other and better than shocking gory grisliness.   I didn’t feel especially squeamish or disgusted when Aron turns surgeon (although audiences are now prepared in a way that those at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals where the movie premiered were not).  The film is of course a one-man show and Franco is the positive reason for seeing it.  In the few minutes of screen time before the accident happens, he establishes Aron Ralston’s cocky charm so strongly that you never lose the memory and allure of it while he’s stuck down the canyon.   We see how Aron’s father (Treat Williams) introduced him, as a young boy, to the mountains where the accident occurs; we’re told that the terrain is a ‘second home’ to him.  (I found it amazing that not only Aron but the two girl hikers (Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara) he meets and shows off to shortly before his unexpected exile were so fearless in this terrifying, treacherous place.)   The fact that he was an enthusiastic and experienced mountaineer and ‘canyoneer’ (which, according to a legend at the end of the film, he’s continued to be since this ordeal) was obviously an important ingredient in his survival; you get the sense that the ‘supreme selfishness’ with which Aron charges himself had a lot to do with it too.   Franco’s portrait is never sentimental:  as he showed in Milk, he can convey emotional depth and sincerity but these qualities are more or less absent here.  It seems right, given the character that Franco’s created, that, when Aron tells the family he doesn’t expect to see again how much he loves them etc, there’s a hollow ring to his words – as if he can’t quite get the hang of feeling deeply.   (It makes sense too that Aron, although he loses plenty in the course of 127 Hours, is never parted from his camcorder and never stops using it – his determination to leave this record for posterity shows his resilient egoism.)  His experience in Bluejohn Cayon in April 2003 must of course have had a powerful effect on Aron Ralston but it’s a relief that he’s not obviously presented by the end of the film as A Changed Man.

    Thanks to Franco, I was more engaged by 127 Hours than I expected to be, and there were plenty of things that went down well with me.  Aron’s constrained physical situation means he couldn’t devise all manner of ingenious escape strategies for me to fail to understand.  Playing ‘Lovely Day’ on the soundtrack at the start of another 24 hours down in the canyon for Aron may be lead-weight irony but there’s never a bad time to hear Bill Withers’ song.   It’s also interesting to be made conscious, in the way you’re made conscious here, of your divided feelings as a viewer who knows what’s going to happen.  You want Aron/Franco to be free but you also want an easy time:  it’s a reprieve when he abandons his first two attempts on the right arm with his blunt, cheap Chinese penknife.   It’s always tantalising – that is the operative word – that so little of his body appears to be trapped, so utterly, by the chockstone.  The film’s colouring is very effective too.  The intense orange and blue of the landscape and sky are easily contrasted with the down-the-canyon palette: it’s cruelly apt that Aron’s T shirt is orange while his complexion gets to be colour-coordinated with the greyish rocks that surround him.   When, during the arm surgery, his face is splashed with his own blood, Aron acquires the look, as Ryan Gilbey pointed out in The New Statesman, of a Francis Bacon painting.

    The film starts with a triple split-screen effect that Boyle uses persistently.   The whizzbang editing and loudly pulsing music on the soundtrack give the impression that 127 Hours is simply picking up where Slumdog Millionaire left off – especially as one of the trio of images is an Indian crowd (as one of several illustrations of teeming humanity).  With its breakneck speed and flashy privileging of the instant impact over the meaning of its images, the beginning of 127 Hours comes over like a trailer rather than a film proper but it’s shallowly dazzling.  The speed has its own exhilaration:  Franco is in perfect tempo with it, the sequences in which he and the two girls dive from a high ledge into a lake below are amusingly thrilling.    But, as soon as Aron has gone down the rabbit hole, Boyle hits problems.   The director wants hyperkinetic spectacle – he gets himself some just about legitimately through Aron’s flashbacks, fantasies and hallucinations during the coming days but he has to cheat in other respects.  He sometimes shows the awesome, turbulent qualities of the landscape not from Aron’s point of view or imagination and barely to show us what the captive is missing – just to keep the show on the road.   And the split screen comes to seem inappropriately heartless for the matter-of-life-and-death story Boyle is telling.  Aron eventually climbs out of his prison and sees an apparent mirage of other human beings who can help him.  Of course you’re rooting for him and yelling with him at the three walkers shimmering in the distance – it would take a heart harder than the wretched boulder not to well up when they turn out not to be a mirage, when they hear and turn to him.   Even here, though, Danny Boyle refuses to calm down and uses sharp cutting and aggressive music.  The sequence might have been more powerful if it had been simpler, quieter – with fewer cuts and with Aron’s desperate calls the only sound against the silence.

    Boyle is congenitally overactive:  his films seem to be taking place in the mind of someone on speed.  This works satisfyingly in Trainspotting and effectively, in the context of the movie, in Slumdog Millionaire (although I don’t like the film).  Boyle is the wrong director for this material, though – although perhaps there isn’t a right director.   Boyle has been quoted as saying that, as soon as he read Aron Ralston’s book, he knew it would make a great film but, apart from the uplifting human endurance aspect, I’m not sure why.  I imagine that Ralston’s book describes what he thought and felt, as well as what he did and fantasised about, during the five days he spent alone:  there are inherent challenges to dramatising those thoughts and feelings.   James Franco uses his eyes very expressively to convey Aron’s shock and fear (and the determination to hold onto his fear because any strong emotion will help keep him going) and I wouldn’t have wanted a continuous voiceover speaking Aron’s thoughts.  But there’s no way that Franco can convey through only his face, and without anyone to interact with, all that’s happening inside Aron’s head.  An inherent advantage of the material, however, is that we get to know Aron as a physical presence very well – the sense of him as a human organism trying to stay alive is powerful.  As with Slumdog, the score is by A R Rahman and Anthony Dod Mantle (this time with Enrique Chediak) is the cinematographer.   The editing is by John Harris.

    11 January 2011

     

  • A Late Quartet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Yaron Zilberman (2012)

    A Late Quartet currently holds a 74% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes so I can’t be the only person who thinks it’s moldy.  But it’s taken an alarmingly long time to locate a negative review.  Just as I embark on this note, I’ve found one:  Ryan Gilbey in The New Statesman calls it ‘a terrible film—it’s like an idiots’ [sic] Amour’.  Philip Kemp’s review in Sight and Sound just about qualifies as unfavourable but Michael Nordine in The Village Voice and David Denby in The New Yorker, although lukewarm, are well disposed to the film, and there’s a good deal of outright enthusiasm.   The British broadsheet reviews praise Yaron Zilberman’s first dramatic feature (he made a prize-winning documentary feature called Watermarks in 2004) for being ‘complex’ and ‘grown up’.  This praise and/or the reluctance to give A Late Quartet the mauling it deserves is because of the centrality in the film of what’s recognised as a complex and grown-up piece of classical music:  Beethoven’s Opus 131, one of his ‘late quartets’.  The film’s title, which is warning enough, couldn’t be clearer.  It’s set in New York:  there’s snow in Central Park; the weather in the souls of the members of the twenty-five-year old quartet – whose future is threatened when Peter (Christopher Walken), their recently widowed senior member, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s – is increasingly inclement.  The encroaching melancholy means there’s barely any light in the film’s interiors except on the stage of the concert hall.  Cellist Peter’s illness destabilises the lives of his three colleagues:  the sudden removal of decades of routine exposes deep-rooted but long-suppressed tensions between Daniel (Mark Ivanir) and Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman), first and second violin respectively; it opens up fissures in the marriage of Robert and the viola player Juliette (Catherine Keener).  Years ago, the intense, competitive Daniel was in a relationship with the gravely lovely Juliette.  Although she married Robert, Daniel finds that he still holds a torch for Juliette and a grudge against Robert:  his solution is to have an affair with the couple’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots).

    In the film’s opening scene, Peter is lecturing a group of students.  We hear his voice reading the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’.  There’s a surprising and promising sense of humour in Christopher Walken’s reading of the lines; as a predictor of what’s to follow, this couldn’t be more misleading.  Philip French in his Observer review says that Walken reads ‘the first 10 lines’ of ‘Burnt Norton’:  in fact he reads the first five lines and appends to them a line from near the end of the poem.  T S Eliot is there to underline the film’s touch of cultural class – Peter describes Four Quartets as Eliot’s ‘take’ on Beethoven’s quartets – but Yaron Zilberman doesn’t, of course, want the poet to detain us too long.  I understand why people think A Late Quartet has a cachet that it would lack if the foursome were a well-established pub quiz team.  I don’t understand how the starring role in the movie for posh music can blind intelligent people to its feebly familiar treatment of world-shattering illness, bereavement and marital discord.  Late on in the film Peter sits listening to a recording by his late wife Miriam, a famous mezzo-soprano.  He is so moved by the music that Miriam appears before his eyes.  The moment is several notches down on the potter’s wheel bit in Ghost and having the wife materialise actually detracts from Christopher Walken’s expression of grieving love – but Miriam appears in the form of Anne Sofie von Otter, a real famous mezzo-soprano.  This is somehow meant to transcend the cliche (and of course it flatters those in the audience who recognise her).  Peter also imparts the following words of wisdom to his three colleagues:  ‘What are we supposed to do?  Stop?  Or struggle to continuously adjust to each other … even if we are out of tune?’   If this were a movie set in, say, the financial world and the scenarist produced corresponding lines with a corporate metaphor they would be roundly and rightly derided.   At least, David Edelstein, in his admiring review of A Late Quartet, seems more or less to admit why he sees merit in it – because it gave him information he didn’t previously have about the musical directions that Beethoven wrote.

    Zilberman is working from what is, technically, an original screenplay (which he co-wrote with Seth Grossman) but A Late Quartet  seems like an adaptation of a one-set stage play, given how often the characters say things – sometimes at considerable length – in improbable physical circumstances.  The script is remarkably shallow and the plotting entirely mechanical:  Alexandra hates her mother simply in order that she can come to realise that she’s always misjudged her; the affair with Daniel is terminated for no better reason than that the quartet will have to sort themselves out in time for their imminent final performance.  The rare moments of intended comedy – as when Daniel makes a swift exit from Alexandra’s bedroom down a fire escape – are pathetic but it’s a relief that A Late Quartet is sometimes laughable.  Alexandra resents the fact that Juliette put her career before her family but she’s a brilliant violinist herself and her mother reminds her daughter that she’ll do the same as Juliette did for the sake of her music.  Alexandra furiously denies this – ‘If I’d been you,’ she yells, ‘I’d have had an abortion!’ – and Alexandra is such a pain that you feel Juliette must regret not having done so.  Early on, Alexandra accuses Daniel of being ‘anal’.  Later on, he visits Robert, who’s now living apart from Juliette; ‘Come in, Daniel’, says Robert but Philip Seymour Hoffman slurs the line so that I thought at first he said ‘Come in, anal’.   Best of all is the moment when the affair between Daniel and Alexandra is announced to Robert during rehearsals and the two rival violinists start brawling.  From this point onwards, I was hoping for catharsis achieved by the quartet smashing each other over the head with their instruments – with Christopher Walken and his cello well equipped to deliver the coup de grâce.  (The words ‘weapon of choice’ naturally came to mind.)

    On paper, the casting looks imaginative.  Walken is not the first person you’d think of to play a decent, super-civilised elderly gentleman; Catherine Keener isn’t the obvious choice for a woman incapable of showing the kinds of love her husband and daughter need.  Keener seems miserably uncomfortable in the role, though:  forbidden to show real warmth, she’s monotonously mournful.   Walken is getting a lot of praise (even Ryan Gilbey thinks he’s marvellous); he has some fine moments but the praise is due more to the unexpectedness of seeing him in this role than to the quality of his work.  Philip Seymour Hoffman gives by far the best performance:  it’s uncanny – in the context of this film almost miraculous – how effortlessly he can inject energy into a scene and make it seem truthful, momentarily at least.  Mark Ivanir must have been thrilled to work in this exalted company but the role of Daniel is hopeless – his main problem, as in movies about performing artists from The Red Shoes to Black Swan, seems to be that he’s fanatical and, what’s worse, European.   To say that Ivanir is convincingly humourless is hardly a compliment.  You’d never guess from her excruciatingly self-aware playing that Imogen Poots is a good actress but she was responsible for the only thing in the picture that surprised me, apart from Walken’s tone reading Eliot.  Poots delivers her lines in such an odd, affected accent that she sounds vaguely exotic – I thought this might be a clue to the fact that she was really Daniel’s daughter.  On second thoughts, perhaps she is and their incestuous relationship is the explanation of the mystifying 15 certificate given to the film:  apart from a couple of fucks, both verbal and physical, it seems innocuous from a censor’s point of view.  But I’m forgetting:  it’s grown up and complex.    I wish Pauline Kael, a Parkinson’s sufferer herself, had lived to see and trash this film.

    7 April 2013

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