Old Yorker

  • Nope

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jordan Peele (2022)

    I emerged from Curzon Richmond needing a Wikipedia plot synopsis and – worse – an Armond White review.  I hoped his predictable vivid antipathy to a Jordan Peele picture would dissolve some of the nervous tension of watching Nope.  White duly obliged and so did Wikipedia, which defines Peele’s third feature as an ‘epic science fiction horror film’.  It did sometimes make me want to scream but out of boredom rather than fear.

    Wikipedia’s label omits an important genre component of Nope:  the Western.  The action, which takes place in the present day, is centred on a remote ranch in California, the site of a distinctive family business.  After the death of Otis Haywood Sr (Keith David) in the opening minutes of the film, his son OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) take over the reins of the business, wrangling and training horses for movie and television work.  Haywood’s Hollywood Horses is the only set-up of its kind owned and run by African Americans.  (Hayward [sic], by the way, was the forename of Jordan Peele’s late father.)  The Haywoods’ few neighbours include Jupe (Steven Yeun), who wears cowboy outfits and runs Jupiter’s Claim, a theme park where visitors can pretend to be in a Western.  The set-up strongly suggests that Peele’s interested in the Wild West as a money-making vehicle – with particular reference to the involvement of ethnic groups not usually associated with the commercial Western.

    On the wall of an office at the ranch is a poster for Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher (1972), a Western in which the title roles were played by Poitier and Harry Belafonte.  But the Haywoods’ family connection with horses and film-making is – as Emerald explains in a pitch for a TV commercial – uniquely long-standing.  As part of the pitch, she shows one of the earliest moving-picture images, created by Eadweard Muybridge in the late nineteenth century.  It shows a galloping horse ridden by a Black jockey:  he was, says Emerald, Alistair Haywood, her and OJ’s great-great grandfather.  It’s an intriguing connection and, though fictitious, acquires the semblance of truth because Muybridge’s ‘The Horse in Motion’ is real and the horse’s rider really was Black.  Jupe, in the Korean-American person of Steven Yeun, isn’t similarly connected to his low-budget Westworld domain but his fictional backstory is also fascinating.  Jupe was once Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park, a child actor in ‘Gordy’s Home’ – a hit TV sitcom of the 1990s until the title character, a chimpanzee, went berserk on set, attacking and maiming his human adult co-stars while the terrified Jupe hid under a table.  The show was recorded before a live studio audience:  even as Gordy wreaked havoc, the illuminated studio sign kept up its flashing cue ‘Applause’.

    Peele accumulates instances of human exploitative abuse of non-human creatures and the latter’s revenge.  The mayhem on the sitcom set happened because the performing chimp was frightened by the pop of balloons (it was Gordy’s birthday).  At the filming of the TV commercial, OJ’s warning to the crew not to spook their horse by shining a light in its eyes goes unheeded:  the animal reacts violently and the Haywoods are fired on the spot.  At the centre of Nope‘s plot is a UFO, which appears to be the cause of Otis Haywood Sr’s peculiar death at the start:  a coin falls from the sky and penetrates his eye and brain.  The UFO – shaped like a flying saucer but reminiscent too of a ten-gallon hat – subsequently sucks up horses on the ranch.  When Jupe uses a horse as bait to get the UFO to perform at Jupiter’s Claim in front of a paying audience, the thing in the sky obliges by devouring Jupe and his customers instead.  With the help of tech geek Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), OJ works out that the UFO is no spaceship but a territorial creature that eats anything that looks directly at it.  OJ starts referring to the thing as ‘Jean Jacket’, after a horse his father could never tame.

    This much (or nearly this much) I gleaned from watching Nope; it seems pointless to include further plot details that I only discovered afterwards.  I can’t know how many of these I missed through picking up no more than intermittently what people on the screen were saying.  In her first scene, when Emerald is making the Haywoods’ pitch, Keke Palmer’s delivery is refreshingly distinct.  Once that public speaking is over, she’s the chief offender in the indecipherability stakes.  It’s not a question of volume – Emerald’s usually excited voice is loud enough.  Making out the words, though, is a different matter.  Daniel Kaluuya is less of a problem if only because OJ, in keeping with his Western hero quality, is a man of relatively few words (one of them the film’s title).  Besides, Kaluuya is expressive in other ways, to a greater extent than anyone else in the cast.  Although I don’t like Nope, I was once again impressed by its lead actor.

    In his hostile review of Peele’s Get Out (2017), Armond White described Kaluuya’s ‘dark skin/bright-teeth image’ as ‘inadvertently recall[ing] the old Sambo archetype’.  Noting that ‘Surely Spike Lee would have recognized the resemblance to Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland, and Willie Best, the infamous comics who made their living performing Negro caricatures during Hollywood’s era of segregation’, White suggested that Peele seemed ‘too caught up in exploiting modern narcissism to notice old repulsion’.  Even at the time, I thought White was probably wrong to think this inadvertent and Peele’s subsequent work – Us (2019), now this film – settles the argument.  It seems that Peele casts Kaluuya both for his acting skill and precisely because his facial characteristics evoke the egregious treatment of Black performers during Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’.  In Nope, the weight of Kaluuya’s melancholy presence does more than reflect OJ’s particular circumstances.  It also situates him in racially exploitative cinema history, the exposure of which is evidently essential to Jordan Peele’s own film-making.

    Armond White is right, though, when he censures Peele for the naming of his latest protagonist (‘Every time OJ is addressed, Peele achieves an unearned cultural frisson’) and compares his approach with Quentin Tarantino’s in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019).  Like Tarantino’s worlds, the world of Nope is defined by ‘movieland history’ (White again), which limits its impact – even its immediate impact.  Unlike Tarantino, Peele isn’t, since Get Out anyway, a naturally talented storyteller.  As with Us, the themes of Nope sound promising on paper – an alien entity’s force field is a location peopled by Hollywood ‘aliens’, and so on – but they don’t play out interestingly.  As a piece of horror cinema, the few minutes of the ‘Gordy’s Home’ subplot are much more gripping than the UFO-or-is-it stuff that makes up most of the film’s 130 minutes.  (Inside the chimpanzee costume is Terry Notary, whose extraordinary simian antics also briefly enlivened Ruben Östlund’s overrated The Square (2017).)

    Get Out was a deserved critical and commercial success, and a dual surprise.  Peele, who had worked predominantly in television comedy, gave evidence of precocious film-making skill in a genre you wouldn’t have expected from him as a first-time director.  His second film was another racially charged horror movie and the result much less effective, although Us (2019), like its predecessor, was a big box-office hit.  Peele was thus established, even before writing and producing the remake of Candyman (2021), as a purveyor of smart-aleck horror and Nope proves it’s time he tried something else.  For a while, the film is more tonally varied than Us but it’s also longer and, by the halfway point, has turned into a bombastic spectacular slog.  As with Us, I saw Nope through with difficulty.  To this cinemagoer, the title of his auspicious debut is starting to sound like warning advice on sitting down to watch a Jordan Peele film.

    18 August 2022

  • The Story of Looking

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Cousins (2021)

    I was apprehensive about this documentary – I’d not previously got on well with Mark Cousins’s voice in any medium.  Thanks to his incantatory narration, I parted company with Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) long before the last of its fifteen one-hour episodes.  In more recent years, I regularly read his Sight & Sound column but found his passionate, supposedly spontaneous prose practised and wearying.  The Story of Looking, which largely consists of Cousins on the screen as well as the soundtrack, is a pleasant surprise.  Although its maker says plenty to query or disagree with, it’s hard not to be impressed by his wide frame of cultural reference and he’s genially stimulating company.

    Most of the film happens, or purports to happen, on one October day in 2020 – the day before Cousins goes under the surgeon’s knife.  In his mid-fifties, he’s suffering from a cataract (‘a bad one’) in his left eye.  The Story of Looking is pre-conceived in more ways than one.  Cousins hasn’t come up with the idea for it simply in light of his recently diagnosed eye condition:  he wrote a book of the same title in 2017.  He narrates lying in bed in his Edinburgh home.  By telling us at the start he never stays in bed once he wakes on a morning, he immediately admits that his position throughout most of the film is a pose.  It’s a far from empty one, though.  Cousins puts on the screen, and comments on, things and people he’s already seen, that he’s kept inside his head and on his camera.  He interleaves several cinema clips into this beguiling succession and diversity of images (which Donna McKevitt’s music supports very effectively).  Illustrating how what we see shapes our understanding of the world, Cousins describes in turn the visual experience of babies, young children and so on.  His bed serves as a contrastive still point from which to chart a ‘journey through our visual lives’.

    It’s important to the film that it was made in 2020.  Cousins refers more than once to life under Covid and his situation as narrator – in his home, apparently alone – resonates with the experience of lockdown.  His eye condition connects with it, too.  When The Story of Looking premiered (as the closing film of Sheffield DocFest) in June 2021, cinemas had only just reopened after their latest pandemic closure.  Watching it a year later is a rather different matter.  It’s evocative of a multiply dark time – for the world, for filmgoers generally and for Cousins, optically speaking, in particular – but the film has lost, at least for the time being, the immediacy and urgency it may originally have had.  Cousins decides at an early stage to send a tweet, inviting thoughts on looking, and reads out some of his followers’ responses.  If, like me, you find most of these, and Cousins’s reactions to them, unremarkable, it’s worth reminding yourself this kind of communication had more vital meaning in a time of enforced isolation.

    For me, the one poignant, memorable Twitter response came from a man called Dave Hollingsworth.  He begins with a self-effacing ‘I’m not sure if this counts but …’, goes on to report a lifelong ordeal of looking in the mirror, and leaves Mark Cousins uncharacteristically lost for words (or nearly so).  Cousins does well to include a tweet about loathing one’s reflection because his film otherwise leaves itself open to charges of narcissism.  Cousins is always shirtless in bed.  He runs the camera over his bare legs which he says are, along with his eyes, the best part of him (to be fair, he partly means his legs have carried him on many long walks).  In a sequence visualising his desire to ‘be’ a jellyfish, he lies in a human-sized rock pool, full-frontal naked.  As well as seeming very comfortable in his own skin, Cousins puts himself at a remove from physical unsightliness.  When he discusses the vulnerability of teenagers whose bodies are changing and describes his own adolescent insecurities about his appearance, we’re shown, more than once, the face of a teenage boy with severe acne but the boy isn’t Cousins.  What Dave Hollingsworth actually looks like remains, of course, a mystery but his powerful words suggest something harder to deal with than Cousins’s recollection that he felt his youthful chest compared badly with Robert De Niro’s in Taxi Driver (1976).

    I think Cousins mentions narcissism just once, when he takes issue with complaints about selfies.  He asks why they’re dismissed as narcissistic and silly when artists’ self-portraits never are.  It’s the comparison here that’s silly.  Painting a self-portrait tends not to be a facile undertaking, given the technical and creative skill liable to be involved.  And Cousins doesn’t follow through what he says anyway.  One of the art history works mentioned and shown is a Dürer self-portrait but Cousins doesn’t go so far as to suggest that the Christ-like look the artist gives himself is especially presumptuous or self-admiring.  It’s fortunate that this detour is also the only time Cousins comes on as provocative populist even though it’s not the only time he poses a question he shows no interest in answering.

    Later in the day, it appears that he does actually get up and go out – although this, too, may be an imagining since he doesn’t wear a face mask on public transport (surprising, given Scotland’s more disciplined approach to Covid restrictions).  The flow of images continues but Cousins’s face now suggests anxiety at seeing things for the last time, at least before his surgery next day.  This connects with the inspiration for the film – Paul Cézanne’s description of his own developing ‘optical experience’, a description written by Cézanne, says Cousins, near the end of his life.  Cousins films himself at the outset of his eye operation then shows close-ups of his cataract being removed and the cloudy eye lens replaced with an artificial one.  These close-ups are wondrous but hard to watch (even for a viewer who, like this one, has had cataracts removed from both eyes).  The eyeball and knife combination even upstages the notorious clip from the Luis Buñuel-Salvador Dali collaboration Un chien andalou (1929), which Cousins unsurprisingly inserts into proceedings.

    It’s an affecting moment when Cousins removes his eye-shield and registers with grateful relief that he can see out of his reconstructed left eye.  He doesn’t, however, attempt to replicate this new world on screen, even though he has mentioned being told things may well appear bluer as well as brighter immediately after surgery (as, in my experience, they did).  This touches on a larger challenge for Cousins.  His narrative has been propelled by apprehension about his impaired vision and imminent treatment.  Where does he go now those are behind him?  Well aware that he risks post-op anti-climax, he opts for a fantasy finale in which he imagines his own distant future.  He tells us that he emigrated to live in Sweden in 2030; it’s now around 2050, so Cousins is in his mid-eighties.  He makes a journey back to Scotland to see once more sights he cherishes.  Although this is at one level the most artificial part of the film, it’s a nice way of smuggling in thoughts that Cousins wonders if he’ll have in the years ahead.

    The cinema clips in this concluding part of The Story of Looking include two featuring Ingrid Bergman, in films made thirty-five years apart – Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1943) and Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978).  Both clips show Ingrid Bergman’s face at the same angle to the camera.  Linked in this way, the images prompt Cousins to muse on Bergman’s journey through her visual life.  This made me more sharply aware than anything else in Cousins’s film of how differently he and I seem to look at people on the cinema screen.  When I see these images of the same woman in her late twenties and her early sixties, I initially register that they’re both Ingrid Bergman – but I then see the face of an actress inhabiting two very different characters, each with her own individual history.  Cousins evidently sees Bergman’s face as an enduring movie image that transcends the difference between Ilsa in Casablanca and Charlotte in Autumn Sonata.

    The Story of Looking begins with a clip of Ray Charles, talking with Dick Cavett on the latter’s show in the early 1970s.  Blind from the age of seven, Charles was then in his early forties.  He tells Cavett that, given the chance to have his sight permanently restored, he would say no.  There are, says Charles, ‘a couple of things’ he would like to see, including the faces of his children, but he’d be content to see them only once.  Cousins is reasonably astonished by this, not only because looking is so fundamental to his own life but also by the implication that Charles, having seen something once, can retain it in his mind’s eye indefinitely.  Charles’s reason for not wanting his sight back is that there are things going on in the world he feels lucky he can’t see.  Cousins shows examples of such things in the course of his film, which he ends by conclusively refuting Ray Charles.  The octogenarian Cousins professes gratitude for everything seen in the course of his long life.  As he speaks these words – rather than replaying, for example, footage he’s shown of the beheading of a Saudi woman – he gives us ingeniously beautiful shots of a Scottish landscape reflected in water.   This is a jarring close to the film but it still left me not just liking Mark Cousins as I hadn’t before but wanting to hear more from him.   He achieves a real sense of intimacy with his audience, not by showing himself in bed but in the quieter, more reflective parts of what he has to say.  And he makes The Story of Looking a very fine picture show.

    14 August 2022

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