Old Yorker

  • The Virtues (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Shane Meadows (2019)

    Accepting BAFTA’s Fellowship at their TV awards ceremony last month, Joan Bakewell hailed today’s ‘golden age’ of television.  It’s an era too in which the tradition of film-going, thanks in no small part to streaming services, is disintegrating and in which more than one director who made his name with theatrical releases has turned increasingly to television – or his back on cinema.  Whereas Steven Soderbergh seems to keep changing his mind about this, Shane Meadows hasn’t made a non-fiction feature since Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee in 2009.  The four-part drama The Virtues on Channel 4 is Meadows’s first work for television that isn’t a continuation of the This is England story that started life in cinemas in 2006.  Each of the three TV series that it spawned felt necessary.  Like Meadows, we could never get enough of the characters he and his actors had created and whose lives and personalities he continued to explore.

    Persisting regret that he’s no longer making cinema films has made this viewer alert to how Meadows exploits the additional screen time available to him in a mini-series.  Like This is England 90 (2015), The Virtues runs a total of 270 minutes minus commercial breaks (and with the last of the four episodes ninety rather than sixty minutes).   This new work makes such continuously compelling viewing that it doesn’t seem protracted as you watch.  On the other hand, there’s no doubt the story, in terms of plot, could be told in two hours or less.  Of course that’s not the essential criterion for how long a drama should be but in this case I think Meadows does over-extend things.  He’s so rightly confident that his lead actors can keep sustaining the tension and interest of their one-on-one exchanges that he lets a few of these go round in too many circles, run on beyond the point at which they’re still imparting something new.

    The protagonist is fortyish Joseph (Stephen Graham), who is battling alcoholism and depression.  He has a Liverpool accent but lives in Sheffield.  When his ex-partner Debbie (Juliet Ellis) emigrates to Australia with their nine-year-old son Shea (Shea-Michael Shaw), and her new partner David (Vauxhall Jermaine), Joseph buys a ferry ticket to Ireland.  He goes there less to start a new life than to try and make sense of his past.  He turns up at the home of Anna (Helen Behan), the sister from whom Joseph was separated as a young boy, when he was put into care.  He ran away from the care home, made his way to Liverpool and was never heard of in Ireland again.  Anna, now married to Michael (Frank Laverty), who runs a small building business, and with children of her own, has spent most of her life assuming her brother is dead.  (I wasn’t clear how he knew exactly where to find her.)  Anna and her husband welcome Joseph into their home:  it’s an even fuller house with the arrival of Michael’s unsettled younger sister Dinah (Niamh Algar), who also needs – not for the first time – a roof over her head.  Joseph starts work for Michael, another of whose building team is Craigy (Mark O’Halloran).  He too has a chequered history and he seems to recognise Joseph.

    From an early stage in the drama, Joseph experiences flashbacks to his time in the care home.  My impression was that these increased in number and duration once Joseph was back in the vicinity – rather as Lee Chandler, returning to his home town in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, finds the traumatic memories of what happened there several years previously increasingly hard to suppress.  The revelation of Joseph’s childhood trauma is longer coming, however, than the revelation of Lee’s more recent torment and the nature of the trauma relatively predictable.  In a care facility in Ireland in the 1980s, the only question is by whom the nine-year-old Joseph was sexually abused.  Midway through the last episode, he learns that the offenders were two older boys, young teenagers.  The person who confirms their identity is Craigy, also resident in the care home and Joseph’s predecessor as the brothers’ choice of victim.

    It was only after I’d watched The Virtues all the way through that I read Miranda Sawyer’s interview with Shane Meadows, which appeared in The Observer a week or so before the first episode was shown and in which ‘The director speaks for the first time about the horrific event from his childhood that inspired his new TV drama…’  As a nine-year-old, Meadows too was violated by two brothers, one about the same age as him, the other a few years older.  The background to the assault, which took place in woods behind a public park in Meadows’s home town of Uttoxeter, was much more specific than the setting that he and Jack Thorne, who shares the writing credit, have given The Virtues.  While it’s understandable, to put it mildly, that Meadows didn’t want to replicate the circumstances of his own trauma, his decision to root things in Ireland runs the risk of making Joseph’s ordeal more representative than specific – especially once, halfway through part three, Meadows and Thorne introduce another character’s tragedy.

    Dinah and Joseph, soon attracted to each other, have something else in common – a son of similar age.  (As will be clear from the above, nine-year-old boys resonate through The Virtues and what inspired it.)  Dinah gave birth at fifteen and was forced to give up the child.  Learning of Joseph’s recent separation from Shea, she’s impelled to try and make contact with her boy, through the case worker (Niamh Cusack) who arranged his adoption as a baby.  In the final episode, it emerges that Dinah’s son wrote letters and sent drawings to his birth mother several years ago.  She never replied, the child was very upset and his adoptive parents don’t want him upset again.  Dinah didn’t reply to the letters because she knew nothing about them.  They were intercepted and destroyed by her devout Catholic mother.

    In the climax to episode four, each of Joseph and Dinah pays a call on the person who has so damaged their life.   Joseph learns from Craigy that one of their abusers is dead and where the other is living.  Joseph doesn’t think the name is right until Craigy reminds him that, in the care home, the boy in question was known by his name’s reverse spelling:  Joseph remembers Nomad all right.  When he turns up at his house, Joseph finds Damon (Liam Carney) bedridden and quite unrepentant.  Being subject to repeated abuse himself, Damon says, made him immune to receiving and inflicting pain.  Both he and Dinah’s mother (Deirdre Donnelly) wear crucifixes, although Damon, when Joseph asks about this, pronounces God, if He exists, ‘a fucking evil bastard’.  The crucifix image which stands in place of the ‘T’ of ‘virtues’ in the series titles now acquires a more particular significance[1].  It also confirms the Catholic Church as – as usual – the villain of the Hibernian piece.  I’m not suggesting this is wide of the mark but it does feel that Meadows is using it as a convenience – a tried-and-tested framework for his story.

    Meadows’s cross-cutting between the two climactic encounters tightens their grip but also sharpens awareness of how schematic The Virtues has by this stage become.  The main problem with this is the imbalance of power between the Joseph and the Dinah aspects.  Although Niamh Algar gives a highly committed and convincing performance, Dinah doesn’t have anything like the textured backstory that Joseph has.  It’s hard not to be aware that Meadows is using her to complement his main character – and eventually contrast with him.  The threat of lethal violence hangs heavy in the confrontation between Joseph and Damon but materialises only in Dinah’s visit to her mother.  Joseph tells Damon that he forgives him and walks away.  Anna, after a frantic drive to try and intercept her brother’s taking revenge, arrives at Damon’s house as Joseph emerges.  He gets into his sister’s car.  The last shot of The Virtues shows him asleep in the passenger seat as Anna drives them home.  This is a fine image and, once you realise the depth of Shane Meadows’s personal involvement in Joseph’s story, an even more eloquent one than it first seems.  But it also confirms the core of the drama.  So too does Craigy’s suicide, whereas the aftermath of Dinah’s matricide is conspicuous by its absence.

    Stephen Graham is marvellous.  In the first episode, Joseph, after a farewell meal with Debbie, David and Shea, is so miserable that he goes on a bender.  Graham brings to the succeeding phases of Joseph’s getting drunk the most startling realism.  His presence throughout is irresistible, whatever the character’s mood.   The fury within Joseph often makes him formidable.  At other times, he’s so vulnerable you think he might break.  Graham uses his stockiness and his smallness to reinforce the sense of threat and fragility respectively but you never see his technique:  his acting is as interior as it’s expressive.   Although they’re facially very different, he and Lee Pepper, who plays Joseph as a child, have a spiritual continuity.  All the cast are good although there were times, especially in the last episode, when the expletives and repetitions developed the ring of strenuous improvisation.  (I felt particularly that Helen Behan, as much as Anna, was reduced to saying ‘fuck’ every second word as the crisis came to a head.)   It’s churlish to criticise the quality of the acting, though.  Its quality was emphasised by The Virtues being scheduled by Channel 4 in the same slot as Stephen Poliakoff’s expensive-looking, clumsy and stilted Summer of Rockets on BBC2.   Regardless of my reservations about what Shane Meadows has done here, it’s still far ahead of most TV drama.  Cinema’s considerable loss is television’s great gain.

    15 May-5 June 2019

    [1] According to Wikipedia, ‘Traditionally, the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues combine the four classical cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage (or fortitude) with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity’.

  • Booksmart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Olivia Wilde (2019)

    A caveat … There’s a lot of dialogue in the comedy Booksmart, much of it spoken at speed.  My ears didn’t adjust as they usually do to what I was meant to be hearing; I missed plenty of words and may have misunderstood some important elements of Olivia Wilde’s debut feature.  The premise is clear enough, though.  Hard-working, academically successful students Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) have grown up together in San Fernando, California, and been best friends for years.  Amy is going to Botswana for the summer – teaching local women to make their own tampons, she says – before taking up a place at Columbia.  Molly has got into Yale.  On the eve of high school graduation, the pair realise that concentrating on good grades has deprived them of all the extracurricular fun their contemporaries have been having.  Amy and Molly embark on desperate last-minute attempts to compensate.

    Everyone in the girls’ class is sworn to secrecy as to their higher education or job destination – in order not to hurt each other’s feelings.  This is presumably class president Molly’s idea and ignored by everyone who despises her all-work-and-no-play philosophy – so that only she and Amy are still in the dark about what their classmates are doing next.  Even the high school principal (Jason Sudeikis) makes clear in an early conversation with Molly that he finds the don’t-tell policy tedious.  In the school toilets, she receives shocking news from three other students, the notoriously promiscuous Annabelle (Molly Gordon) and two boys, one of whom is off to Stanford, the other to a six-figure-salary job with Google.  Like Molly, Annabelle – aka ‘Triple A’ – is headed for Yale.  ‘I’m incredible at handjobs, but I got a 1560 on the SATs,’ she explains.  Molly is horrified and incredulous:  ‘But you guys don’t even care about school!’  Annabelle corrects her:  ‘No, we just don’t only care about school’.

    Although that’s the key (audible) line of Booksmart, its implications aren’t clear cut.  Are Amy and Molly isolated from the other students because they’re swots or because they’re more generally serious-minded?  They decide to crash a succession of graduation eve parties.  At one of these, someone expresses surprise the duo isn’t otherwise engaged in ‘some kind of boring demonstration’.  But there’s no evidence, beyond the stated purpose of Amy’s trip to Africa, that they translate into action the right-on surface of their lives – the pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Molly’s bedroom wall, the ‘Warren 2020’ sticker on Amy’s car.  This may, of course, be down to the story’s short timeframe but the screenplay (by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman) is slippery about just what kind of killjoys Molly and Amy are.  As a result, Olivia Wilde tars with the same brush nerdiness and humanitarian aspiration.

    Compared with another recent schoolgirl coming-of-age story, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, this film is opaque about the protagonists’ financial circumstances.  Even so, Booksmart gives the impression that Molly, at least, is also different from her peers because her background is less privileged.  Her parents are conspicuous by their absence but their daughter is unusual in not already having her own car.  Further up the economic scale, it’s somewhat refreshing that the girls’ super-rich classmate Jared (Skyler Gisondo) emerges not as a spoiled brat but as kind-hearted – and lonely because the other students assume he’s a spoiled brat:  except for his druggy friend Gigi (Billie Lourd), the heroines are the only arrivals at his graduation party, on a yacht.  Later, all the main characters, including Jared, end up at another party at an enormous house with a swimming pool – which somewhat blurs the standard-of-living distinctions between the better off kids.

    The host of the latter party is Nick (Mason Gooding, Cuba Gooding Jr’s son), the class vice-president.  Nick’s popular with all his classmates (how come he didn’t get elected president?) and Molly has a crush on him.  Amy came out as lesbian in tenth grade but hasn’t yet had a relationship, though she’d like one with Ryan (Victoria Ruesga).  The two (stereotyped) leading lights of the school drama society are differently camp:  waspish, bossy George (Noah Galvin) and glamorous, queenly Alan (Austin Crute), white and black respectively.  The sexual and ethnic diversity of the students, though hardly unstressed, is enough to give Booksmart a contemporary feel.  Yet what gives the two lead performances depth is the persisting suggestion – even though next to nothing is said to this effect – that personal insecurities drive Amy’s and Molly’s scholastic focus.  Molly is overweight and dresses like someone twice her age.  It may be personal shyness rather than disquiet about her orientation that’s held Amy back but she’s evidently found the step from announcing to realising her sexuality intimidating.  Both girls assume that sex life will start after high school – in other words, at a point in the future.

    Until Nick’s graduation party, that is.  Things soon go wrong there for Amy when she sees Ryan making out with Nick but that’s not enough to discourage Molly.  Insisting something ‘could really happen’ between her and Nick, she refuses to leave when Amy says they’ve done enough partying.  This sparks a home-truths row between the two best friends, in which Amy says she’s fed up of being organised by Molly and announces she’s spending not just the summer but a whole gap year in Botswana.  She then has a panic attack in a bathroom, where she’s found by classmate Hope (Diana Silvers), reputedly a bitch but not so now.  The girls’ preparations for sex together are stopped in their tracks when Amy vomits over Hope.  Molly gets no further with Nick than dancing with him for a few seconds.  She leaves alone and is heading home on foot when Triple A stops and gives her a lift.  Back at the party, police arrive to make a drugs raid.  Amy surprises everyone (me included) by distracting police attention to allow everyone else to get away.  She spends a night in the cells; by next morning, she’s the class heroine.  I didn’t understand why Molly too was so rapturously received at the graduation ceremony.  At this stage, tensions and animosities between the students have simply vanished without trace.

    The film’s most successful combination of instant-impact joke and socio-economic comment concerns not one of the students but the principal, when it’s revealed he supplements his income driving for an Uber-type outfit.  When Molly and Amy get a cab and find him at the wheel, Jason Sudeikis plays the principal’s embarrassment sensitively.  In most other respects, though, Booksmart cuts down to size authority figures – adults generally – as in a traditional teen movie, though sometimes with a fashionable flavour.   It’s not enough for the principal to need a second job; he also accidentally plays pornography through the speakers while Amy and Molly are in the back seat of his car.  After escaping from the lavishly costumed murder mystery party that George is holding, the girls find out the address for Nick’s party from a pizza delivery man (Mike O’Brien), who then refuses to give them a lift there.  The next morning, Molly sees an artist’s impression of a serial killer outside the police station where Amy is being held.  The drawing looks just like the pizza man and Molly trades the information to get Amy out of jail.

    Amy’s doting, embarrassing mother and father (Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) make an appearance only for an easy laugh or two.  Their daughter’s decision to go partying thwarts their plans for a graduation-themed celebration supper for her at home.  Her parents are so lovingly ready to accept Amy’s sexual orientation that they wrongly assume she and Molly are even more special friends than they actually are.  The most striking treatment of a grown-up, however, is that of Miss Fine (Jessica Williams), a teacher who’s ‘always there’ for, and very popular with, her students – especially Theo (Eduardo Franco), the apparent dimwit who’s landed the Google job.  He has a crush on Miss Fine and the two of them end up having a fling, which Olivia Wilde presents as cute and funny.  It’s obviously unthinkable that she would have done so if the characters’ sexes had been reversed.  By the same token, the Botswana tampons joke – an uncomfortable one in the moneyed context of the film, especially when none of the other students appears to have anything altruistic in mind – would rightly be deplored if the screenwriters were male.

    But is Booksmart funny?   I didn’t think so – perhaps because I missed some good lines, certainly because of unease about its ‘feminist’ double standards, also because of the prevailing acting style that Olivia Wilde has surely encouraged.  All the young cast are more than competent.  All, except for the two leads and Skyler Gisondo, seem to be doing a turn.   This works well enough with characters like George and Alan, whose performance and personality seem virtually indivisible.  In the case of, say, Hope or Theo, it comes across as shallow characterisation.  This is the third time I’ve seen Kaitlyn Dever this year; I’m afraid I didn’t recognise her from the two other films (Beautiful Boy and The Front Runner) but she naturally makes a stronger impression as Amy.  Beanie Feldstein, wonderful in Lady Bird, confirms here that she shares her brother Jonah Hill’s ability to move easily across a wide tonal range.  Even so, I liked her best at the very start of Booksmart, in one of her simplest moments.  Amy arrives to give Molly a lift to school.  Molly dances her way out of the house to meet her friend.  Beanie Feldstein’s movement has wonderful eccentric verve.

    5 June 2019

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