Old Yorker

  • The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Hettie Macdonald (2023)

    Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent) spent his working life in a white-collar job at a brewery.  His retirement is no less routine and uneventful until the post arrives one fine morning at the suburban home in Kingsbridge, Devon that he shares with Maureen (Penelope Wilton), his wife of many years.  It’s a letter addressed to Harold and postmarked Berwick-on-Tweed – from Queenie Hennessy, a former work colleague, who informs him she’s terminally ill in a Berwick hospice.  Harold struggles to write a brief, regretful reply, though Maureen wonders why he can’t ‘use email like everyone else’.  He goes out to post the letter.  At the first postbox he comes to, he has second thoughts.  He walks on to the next postbox and the same thing happens.  He goes into a garage shop, where he’s served by a friendly, blue-haired young woman (Nina Singh) who finds the idea of snail mail amusingly quaint.  When Harold explains the background to his letter the blue-haired girl tells him her aunt had cancer but that ‘faith’ gave her hope; when Harold admits he ‘never really got the hang of religion’ the girl says she doesn’t mean religious faith.  Harold phones the hospice from a call box with a message for Queenie – he’s on his way to see her, she ‘must keep living’.  He then embarks on his journey to Berwick – on foot.

    It’s hard to disagree with the adjective in the title of Hettie Macdonald’s film of Rachel Joyce’s best-selling 2012 novel of the same name.  Perhaps Joyce in her book (which I’ve not read) contrived to make the reader believe in the tale she was telling but, although she has also written this screen adaptation, the result never gets close to working similar magic on the viewer.  It’s harder in cinema than in literature to put the audience inside the mind of a character without showing the world that they actually inhabit but realistic probability is far from the whole problem here.  Even though the protagonist isn’t driven by religious conviction, the spiritual connotations of ‘pilgrimage’ set up expectations of something more than naturalism.  And Jim Broadbent is the right man to elevate Harold’s story into a crazy romantic quest:  he’s eccentric and (as Meryl Streep, accepting her BAFTA for The Iron Lady, described him) soulful.  As Harold Fry sets out, he has the benignly dotty, fervent air of an OAP Don Quixote but Broadbent gets little chance to exploit his special qualities.  The film he’s in is a clumsy, literal-minded plod.

    The arrival at the start of an unexpected letter that upsets the apparently settled existence of an elderly couple evokes Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015) – and Harold’s baffling determination to walk to a faraway destination the David Constantine short story In Another Country, which inspired Haigh’s film.  An improbable means of transport for a cross-country marathon (which proves to be driven by a compulsion to make amends) also brings to mind David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999).  But these resemblances don’t go much further.  Whereas Mr Mercer in the Constantine story really is mentally confused, Maureen Fry, in a vain attempt to get someone to abort her husband’s expedition, fibs to a GP (Andrew Leung) that Harold has incipient dementia, citing as (her only) evidence that he left his mobile phone in the house.  In response, the doctor assures her that Harold hasn’t got Alzheimer’s, that what he’s doing is a wonderful thing and, absurdly, that walking is good for you:  it isn’t if, like Harold, you normally hardly walk at all and are now intending to walk 627 miles.  Alvin Straight’s insistence on travelling less than half that distance on his riding lawnmower (plus homemade travel-trailer) seems a modest, reasonable undertaking in comparison.  I never really understood why Harold – with cash and credit cards on his person (he posts the cards home to Maureen midway through his trek) and desperate to reach Queenie post-haste – didn’t just get the train.

    Harold’s tediously familiar backstory is a drag on the remarkableness of the long walk to Berwick.  Very early on, a kindly farmer’s wife (Claire Rushbrook) who gives him a glass of water, asks if he had children:  he answers yes, one, a son.  It’s striking the woman uses the past tense, as if she already knows Harold is childless now – this is even before Jim Broadbent’s stricken face signals as much.  The farmer’s wife then inadvertently rubs salt in the wound with a dollop of homespun rustic wisdom:  a-man-needs-a-son-and-heir-otherwise-he’s-the-end-of-the-line stuff.  It’s clear from this point that Fry junior is no longer in the land of the living but Hettie Macdonald and Rachel Joyce eke out the tragedy of his decline and death in flashbacks that extend through most of the narrative:  David (Earl Cave, Nick’s son) wins a place at Cambridge University, self-harms in the bath, gets into drugs and drops out, finally hangs himself.  It’s a terrible role for Earl Cave, nearly silent except when David is yelling ‘I fucking hate you!’ at his father.  Yet the film needs this standard-issue tragedy, which wrecked Harold and Maureen’s relationship, just as it needs slowly to reveal Harold’s unpaid debt to Queenie and for his odyssey to become a media sensation.  Without them, Harold Fry is too boring for words.

    And it’s hardly rich in images.  About to set off, Harold looks out from high on a hillside and murmurs wonderingly, ‘Who knew?’  It seems he’s referring to the lovely, sunlit Devon landscape; if so, it’s just about the last time he voices such appreciation, as distinct from occasional vague stuff about sleeping under the stars, etc.  In the early stages, obliviousness to his surroundings might be ascribed to grim single-mindedness – he trudges along head down, chanting ‘You will not die … you will not die’.  But Harold soon gives that up:  the minor attention paid to the variety of place and terrain he encounters comes to express, rather, a lack of visual appetite on the director’s part.

    As Hettie Macdonald has shown in television drama (including the Kenneth Lonergan-scripted version of Howards End (2017) and Normal People (2020)[1]), she is, though, a fine director of actors and Harold Fry confirms this.  While getting a strong performance from Jim Broadbent or Penelope Wilton isn’t a big ask, it’s only fair to note that Macdonald’s sensitive handling helps others in the cast, in much smaller and sketchily written parts, to register.  A few, like Claire Rushbrook, are familiar faces, others not.  Daniel Frogson plays a young man who joins Harold during the journey:  Wilf is a former drug addict, estranged from his family, who says he’s now clean.  When he first arrives on the scene, he’s also an enthusiastic born-again Christian; after one night in the woods, where he’s spooked by foxes barking in the darkness, Wilf appears to lose his faith – at least he never mentions it again.  Soon after, he’s back on drugs and exits the film.  It’s another shoddy role, in other words, but Daniel Frogson gives it authentic feeling.

    Maureen isn’t much of a part either but Penelope Wilton’s skill and conviction animate this emotionally shrivelled, querulous woman.  It’s instantly clear – thanks partly to the overdone bleak, minimal decor in the Frys’ home – that their marriage is dead.  They don’t have much to say to each other; they don’t touch at all.  The lack of communication turns out to give a bit of credibility to Maureen’s otherwise puzzling under-reaction to her husband’s disappearance:  his first phone call to tell her what he’s up to appears to cause Maureen not alarm but more than usual irritation with Harold.  It emerges that Maureen, wrongly suspecting he was having an affair with Queenie Hennessy (Linda Bassett, a potent though wordless presence), failed to pass on to Harold the latter’s parting message to him when she left Devon all those years ago.  This element – introduced as something Maureen confides in Rex (Joseph Mydell), the Frys’ widowed neighbour and a reliably sympathetic ear during Harold’s absence – seems meant to be important although when Maureen finally admits to her husband what she did it doesn’t have any obvious effect – or get in the way of the couple’s final reconciliation.  Maureen feels strongly, as Harold does, that he let David down but she’s also angry that her husband has never dared to do anything.  He shares this view too, even though it’s not quite accurate:  a flashback describes how Harold went briefly bonkers and set about trashing the brewery, although it was Queenie who willingly took the rap and lost her job there.  Whatever, the pilgrimage is an act of courage and Maureen realises she loves him after all.  The film’s closing words, spoken by Harold to his wife, who has joined him in Berwick, are ‘Let’s go home’.

    When it comes to lead roles in British springtime heart-warmers, Jim Broadbent seems to have cornered the market – Roger Michell’s The Duke last year, now Harold Fry.  It’s ironic, given the actor’s naturally genial spirit, that a highlight of his work in this new film is the playing of his character’s less warm-hearted moments.  Television and press coverage of Harold increases as he accumulates, without trying, a horde of mostly young, banner-waving acolytes, who seem to think his journey represents a radically new and refreshing philosophy of life.  The looks on Broadbent’s face eloquently convey Harold’s discomfort with his cheerleaders.  He manages to give them the slip, after which they’re never seen again.

    Nor are the media:  by the time Harold’s north of the Midlands, he’s such a celebrity that passers-by who spot him want to shake his hand; by the time he reaches Berwick-on-Tweed and enters a cafe with a ‘no beggars’ sign on the door, to beg a glass of water, the waitress and her stroppy manager don’t have a clue who he is.  I’d like to think this is intended as a sharp comment on the fickleness of press and TV interest but it probably says more about the film-makers’ narrative attention span.  A more persuasive development involves a canine rather than a human character.  Harold and Wilf are accompanied by a stray terrier that never gets a name but stays with Harold after Wilf and the other youngsters have vanished.  The terrier’s very likeable and gives proceedings a lift (except in worrying sequences where Harold, walking along the edge of a motorway, stupidly lets it trot along without a lead).  In a north-east town centre, Harold tells the dog, ‘Not long to go now’ and doesn’t realise how right he is.  The terrier has spotted a fellow waif-and-stray – an abject-looking young woman.  He makes his way over to her, receives a grateful reception and, when her bus arrives, jumps onto it with his new companion.

    Since this isn’t a piece of 1940s Hollywood whimsy, we never expect Queenie to recover even when we’re encouraged to hope otherwise.  At one point en route, Harold makes another call to the hospice and speaks to one of the nursing nuns on the staff.  She tells him that, when Harold first phoned to say he was coming, she doubted the patient would survive long enough for him to see her alive, but that Queenie, after receiving the postcards Harold has been sending, has rallied remarkably:  ‘Maybe that’s what the world needs right now – a little less sense and a bit more faith’, says the nun.  At the business end of the story, this sentiment, like other things in Harold Fry, is simply discarded.  The blue-haired girl informs Maureen that her aunt died.  When, eighty-seven days after leaving Kingsbridge, Harold finally arrives at the hospice and meets Sister Philomena (Joy Richardson), who answered his phone calls, she tells him Queenie, at death’s door, can no longer speak.  He doesn’t even ask when her miraculous revival went into reverse.

    Yet the story is still meant to be life-enhancing – because Harold dared and because the people he met on his journey were, as he tells Maureen, ‘so nice’.  As a reminder of this, one or two decent souls – like Martina (Monika Gossmann), a Czech doctor who can only get work in England cleaning toilets but who tends Harold’s badly-blistered feet and lets him stay in her home a couple of nights free of charge – feature in a feeble closing montage.  This is accompanied, as is most of the action, by generic ‘hopeful’ music.  It made me think:  why don’t the people who make films like this save time and money by using exactly the same music every time – a rent-a-score arrangement – instead of reinventing the wheel?  Since no one seems to be credited on IMDb with the music for The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, perhaps this idea has already been put into practice.

    4 May 2023

    [1] Macdonald and Lenny Abrahamson each directed six of the twelve episodes of Normal People.

  • Air

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ben Affleck (2023)

    The true story of how in 1984 Nike tried to persuade Michael Jordan – an eighteen-year-old rising star of basketball and already a commercial hot property – to endorse their sports shoes.  We know from the start of Air that Nike will succeed – even those of us who, like me, sit down to watch it in almost complete ignorance of Jordan and the brands he represented during his stellar career.  We know because it’s instantly clear that Air itself is a well-known movie brand – an underdog story leading to eventual, unlikely triumph:  on-screen text at the start explains that, in 1984, Nike, though hardly a minnow in other departments, enjoyed only a 17% share of the basketball sneakers market, way behind Converse (54%) and Adidas (29%).  As a sports-based drama, Ben Affleck’s is somewhat distinctive because the achiever of against-the-odds success is, rather than an athlete, a basketball talent scout.  The film has a few things in common with Moneyball (2011) (both demonstrate, for a start, that a sports movie is easier to enjoy if you know nothing about the sport in question so have no idea if the film-makers are getting things wrong).  Affleck’s protagonist, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), isn’t as complex or interesting a character as Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane, the baseball coach whose story Bennett Miller tells in Moneyball.  Thanks chiefly to its predestined storyline, Air as a whole doesn’t stand comparison with Miller’s unusually rich exploration of success and failure in the world of team sport.  But Affleck has made a brisk, highly entertaining picture that raises the spirits for reasons beyond Sonny’s finally sealing the deal with the Jordan family.

    The measly market share means Nike is on the verge of shutting down its basketball shoe operations.  In a last shot at changing their fortunes, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Phil Knight (Ben Affleck), gives Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), his head of marketing, $250,000 to invest in three names from the current year’s National Basketball Association draft, names to endorse and advertise Nike shoes.  Sonny, a member of Rob’s team, argues hard for them instead to concentrate on a single player, Michael Jordan, even though his senior colleagues are sure Jordan is an unrealistic proposition:  it’s well known he’s keen to hook up with Adidas who, unlike Nike, can offer bigger bucks and additional inducements to sign with them.  Sonny’s stubbornly convinced not only of Jordan’s exceptional potential but also that Nike can offer something different from their competitors by designing a shoe specifically for him.  After talking with his friend George Raveling (Marlon Wayans), one of Jordan’s coaches on the US team in the recent Los Angeles Olympics, Sonny is sufficiently encouraged to go above his bosses’ heads:  he gets on a plane, turns up at the Jordans’ home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and sits down to talk with Michael’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis) who, with her husband James (Julius Tennon), is leading the negotiations on their son’s behalf.  Back at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, designer Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) comes up with a prototype ‘Air Jordan’ shoe.  Phil Knight, though exasperated by Sonny’s impulsive tactics, agrees to spend the whole quarter-million-dollar budget on trying to net Jordan.  Sonny and Rob work round the clock on a pitch for their do-or-die meeting with the Jordans …

    The screenplay by Alex Convery is his first, according to IMDb, and it’s also first-rate – efficiently constructed, replete with good dialogue.  Although most of the characters inhabit the same hectic, fast-talking environment, Convery gives them plausibly individual voices.  In the main role, Matt Damon is middle-aged, overweight and excellent.  Convery gives Sonny Vaccaro hardly any backstory and we see he has next to no personal life yet he’s never a clichéd, married-to-his-work obsessive, even when immersed in trying to win the Jordans over.  Sonny’s very perceptive about the sport that gives him a living:  Damon conveys this credibly as he watches then rewinds then watches again videos of basketball games and Michael Jordan’s contribution to them.  Sonny’s pivotal speech to Jordan and his parents is a masterly piece of acting.  Damon blurs the line between a salesman trying to sell and passionate sincerity – until Sonny’s evident need for the pitch to succeed becomes a proof of his sincerity.

    Although Ben Affleck orchestrates his cast admirably, his own performance is the film’s least satisfying.  He tries hard but you can feel the effort, especially when Phil Knight is imparting Buddhist wisdom (Sonny describes it in less respectful terms).  This anxiously self-assertive CEO philosopher is meant to be a true eccentric but Affleck doesn’t have an eccentric bone in his body.  It’s also immediately obvious that his frizzy gingery hairdo is an attempt to replicate the actual Phil Knight (this is confirmed in a closing photograph of the latter).  As Rob Strasser, Jason Bateman delivers his cynical lines with impeccable deadpan timing; over the weekend before the crucial meeting, when he and Sonny have no choice but to spend a lot of hours together and Rob opens up about his failed marriage and how little he gets to see his daughter, Bateman gives a sense of the sad self-reproach that underlies and is expressed in his illusion-free patter.  When the deal is finally done and Rob enters a room of wildly celebrating colleagues, Bateman makes his giddy disbelief touching.

    Chris Messina is Jordan’s driven, expletive-prone agent, David Falk – who is, determinedly, consumed by his lucrative work to the exclusion of friendships outside it.  Messina was a familiar face in high-profile films of the late 2000s and early 2010s (Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Julie and Julia (2009), Greenberg (2010), Affleck’s Argo (2012)) but I’d not seen him in anything since Manglehorn (2014).   His return is welcome – and so is his role, which has more verbal guts than those earlier ones.  Matthew Maher is thoroughly, effortlessly geeky as Peter Moore, and Chris Tucker enjoyable as another Nike executive, Howard Wright, who’s the fastest talker of them all.  George Raveling is in only one scene but Marlon Wayans makes it count.  (In the course of this, Raveling also tells Sonny of a remarkable past connection.  He was on the podium with Martin Luther King, as a security volunteer, at the ‘March on Washington’ in August 1963.  After the speech was over, Raveling asked if he might have part of the transcript as a memento:  King gave him the original typewritten pages of the ‘I Have a Dream’ section.)

    It seems Michael Jordan made few stipulations about the film being made about him but one was that Viola Davis should play his mother, a demand that amounts to a casting coup.  Davis’s Deloris Jordan exudes an almost unnatural calm, born of awareness of her family’s powerful bargaining position and of how privileged a position that is.  Deloris is a striking blend of authority and humility.  She and her husband (nicely played by Julius Tennon, Davis’s real-life husband) never raise their voices because they don’t need to.  Perhaps Ben Affleck showcases Davis a bit too much in Deloris’s climactic phone conversation with Sonny, when she accepts Nike’s offer on condition that Michael receives a percentage of every Air Jordan shoe sold.  But Davis’s strong presence and precise delivery serve to convey how game-changing this deal proved to be in the world of sports commerce.  The brief appearance in Air of another internationally admired actress is less felicitous.  As Käthe Dassler, widow of Adidas’s founder and mother of its current boss, Barbara Sukowa wears improbably large spectacles and speaks in a weird voice.  Confronting her in the Adidas boardroom, even the imperturbable Jordan parents exchange a discreetly suspicious look that seems to say:  isn’t that the Dustin Hoffman drag character in Tootsie?  It’s no wonder they chose Nike instead.

    Michael Jordan, played by Damien Delano Young, is always photographed at angles that keep his face hidden – we see the face only in news film and video clips, and on magazine covers, of the man himself.  Michael speaks one word in the course of Air, when his voice is on the other end of a phone line: we hear his ‘Hello’ as his mother puts him on to Sonny, negotiations successfully concluded.  The more Young’s back and torso are shown, the more contrived the obscuring of his face tends to become – but at least this film is concealing the identity of an authentic American hero rather than that of a Trump or Weinstein (as happened in last year’s She Said, for example).  At one point in his inspired pitch to the Jordans, Sonny prophesies that Michael will be defined in the public mind through missteps and traumas, as well as by sporting success, Affleck cuts away to future evidence of the prediction’s accuracy – newspaper headlines about Jordan’s stormy private life, the murder of his father and so on.  It’s a somewhat cheesy device but helpfully informative for a Michael Jordan ignoramus like me.  The line ‘A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it’ crops up repeatedly in Alex Convey’s script but not ad nauseam.

    I went to a lunchtime screening a couple of days before the end of Air‘s three-week run at Curzon Wimbledon and enjoyed a private screening – literally no one else in the theatre.  (On the rare occasions this happens, I get nervous they’ll call the show off.  Once I’m reassured on that, thoughts start up about the world going on without me in it:  would the film still have been played to an audience of none?)  Still, Air seems to be faring well enough at the international box office:  according to Wikipedia, it has recouped its production budget (the lower end at least: this is shown as $70-$90m) less than a month after its North American opening.  Most reviews have been favourable, too.  The dissenters tend to be primarily uneasy that the film comes over as a paean to capitalism – an understandable reaction which some of the director’s choices encourage.  Ben Affleck punctuates the narrative with selections from Nike’s list of governing principles – ‘Your job isn’t done until the job is done’, ‘It won’t be pretty’, ‘If we do the right things we’ll make money damn near automatic’, and so on – and appears to do so without irony.  In a surfeit of text on screen at the end – this also explains what each of the main characters did next, that in 2003 Nike bought up Converse, etc – the various megabucks figures that flash up are accompanied by the same generic uplifting music.  The whopping first-year sales of Air Jordan shoes thus seem to be accorded the same humanitarian value as the Jordan family’s philanthropic initiatives in the decades since.

    This obeisance to dollar power didn’t bother me as much as I’d have expected (or as much as part of me thinks it should have).  Recent months of cinema-going had left me even hungrier than I’d realised for a Hollywood movie with strong, well-written characters and a compact (112 minutes), compelling story – so I found Air refreshing.  If much of the closing text is questionable, the closing sequences certainly aren’t.  Early on, Sonny buys stuff at a 7-Eleven store and gets chatting about basketball with a cash desk clerk (Asanté Deshon), who suggests that Michael Jordan may be overrated.  Back in the 7-Eleven at the other end of the narrative, Sonny hears from the same clerk that he always knew how great Jordan was going to be (‘Everybody knew …’, Sonny says wryly to himself as he leaves the store).  We then see the notoriously unfit Sonny on a running track, about to change his ways.  He runs just a few steps before thinking better of it.  Mainstream American films in 2022 were so generally poor that it’s unavoidably damning with faint praise to say that the first one of 2023 that I’ve seen is better than any from last year.  But Air is good cinema.

    25 April 2023

     

     

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