Old Yorker

  • Sorry, Wrong Number

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anatole Litvak (1948)

    At eighty-nine minutes, Sorry, Wrong Number isn’t a long feature film but it’s four times the length of its source material, a radio play of the same name, first broadcast in 1943 – a ‘famous radio play’; according to the opening credits, written by Lucille Fletcher, who also did the screenplay for Anatole Litvak’s picture.  Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck), a highly-strung, bedridden heiress, is trying to make telephone contact with her husband Henry, who, unexpectedly, hasn’t yet returned home.   The servants have the night off and Leona is alone in her house in Manhattan.  She gets a crossed line and listens to two male voices discussing the murder of a woman that will be carried out in a few hours’ time.  A series of subsequent phone conversations with other callers convince Leona that she is the intended victim of the murder plot.  Neurotic she may be but she’s eventually proved right.

    Except for the last few seconds, Lucille Fletcher’s original (available on YouTube) consists entirely of Mrs Stevenson’s phone conversations.  With the New York Police Department, to report what she’s heard on the crossed line and how it’s upset her; with Western Union, who transmit a telegram from her absent husband; with a hospital from whom she tries and fails to get an emergency nurse for the night.  And especially with telephone operators:  the tension of the piece depends largely on the contrast between the nagging, increasingly hysterical tones of the protagonist (played by Agnes Moorehead) and the operators’ unnerving robotic calm.  At the very end of the play, Mrs Stevenson’s killer is heard answering a call to her phone from the police.  He delivers the ‘Sorry, wrong number’ punchline and confirms that everything’s fine.   No other voices feature and there’s no background to speak of on the Stevensons’ marriage etc.  The filmmakers clearly are keen to preserve the compressed timeframe and claustrophobia of the radio play and they succeed to a limited extent.  For example, even though the ominous quality of the phone operators is diluted by their not being faceless in the movie, their relentless chirpy competence still imparts to their voices an increasingly mocking quality.  But by adding numerous other characters and a ton of backstory, Anatole Litvak and Lucille Fletcher sacrifice a lot – including, for a fair amount of the time, Barbara Stanwyck.

    Sorry, Wrong Number (with cinematography by Sol Polito and music by Franz Waxman) announces its noir credentials immediately.  The first sequences, focusing exclusively on Stanwyck’s overbearing, entitled Leona, are atmospheric.  The director and his star build a sense of Leona’s irritable agitation and of stifling New York heat, even with the bedroom windows open to the darkening Manhattan skyline.  The narrative shape and rhythm start to change when Leona makes contact with Henry’s secretary Miss Jennings (Dorothy Neumann), who says that Mr Stevenson took an attractive young woman out to lunch and didn’t return to work.  This news comes complete with flashback to the office earlier in the day, and Henry (Burt Lancaster)’s reaction to the appearance there of said young woman (Ann Richards), whose name is Sally and who is revealed to be Henry’s ex-girlfriend, from whom Leona stole him.

    It’s not long before Sally phones Leona with a lengthy description of how the lawyer to whom she’s now married has been carrying out an investigation that somehow involves Henry.  Sally describes how she followed her husband and his associates in the district attorney’s office to a deserted house on Staten Island belonging to a man called Waldo Evans, a chemist who works for Leona’s rich industrialist father James Cotterell.  In due course, Evans (Harold Vermilyea) is also calling Leona, with an even longer account of Henry’s (and, at Henry’s instigation, Evans’s own) wrongdoings.  The backstory is cumbersome and clumsy.

    As a phone interlocutor, Leona is reliably impatient and unwilling to let the voice on the other end have its say – so the sequences showing Sally and Waldo Evans speaking into the mouthpiece without a sound of interruption are unconvincing, as well as unexciting  to watch.  For both these reasons presumably, Litvak sticks to the pattern established by Miss Jennings’s recollection:  events and conversations recounted to Leona over the phone are largely shown on screen.  But this inevitably robs the film of the radio play’s formal distinctiveness – without there being anything to replace it.  Besides, whether the description of events leading up to the murder plot is purely verbal or in the form of dramatised flashback, it nearly always removes Barbara Stanwyck from the action.  Her impact has been so strong that, when Leona is invisible and silent for any length of time, it feels that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the telling of the story.

    The ‘nearly always’ above is because Stanwyck does feature in flashbacks illustrating the state of the Stevensons’ marriage, in which Leona is domineering and Henry virtually powerless.  James Cotterell (Ed Begley) didn’t want his daughter to marry drugstore-employee Henry.  Used to getting her own way, Leona ignored her father’s wishes but, once married, has continued to see those wishes as more important than anyone else’s except her own.  Henry, for his part, wed Leona without knowing about her chronic ill health (serious heart condition) or realising how humiliating he would find his sinecure in Cotterell’s company.  The combination of Burt Lancaster’s potent physical presence and the weakness of Henry’s position is one of the more effective elements of the film.  So is Ed Begley:  in spite of being Stanwyck’s senior by only six years (and Lancaster’s by twelve), he’s credibly a generation older.  The flashbacks to earlier in the couple’s relationship, although they present the marital dynamic crudely, register too – simply because they give Barbara Stanwyck the opportunity fully to interact with another actor.   This is an essential part of her artistry and seeing it in action underlines what you’re missing in the scenes where Leona is alone on the screen, wholeheartedly though Stanwyck plays these.

    This was probably the third time I’d seen Sorry, Wrong Number.  The first was on television, several decades ago; the second, like this latest viewing, was at BFI, around twelve years back.   All I remember of the first time is the scary shock of the ending but that’s a clue to how powerful an experience the film can be as an unknown quantity.  Leona Stevenson is a highly unsympathetic character – monotonously self-centred, humourless, a doubly faint-hearted bully.  She’s consistently the centre of the audience’s attention, though; at some level you expect her to be successfully extricated from a situation that is unarguably suspenseful.  As a contrite Henry calls Leona long-distance, shortly before the shadow of her killer makes its way up the staircase in Manhattan, police officers stand by the phone booth, apparently ready to make an arrest.  On this occasion, however, the bringing to justice of a guilty party doesn’t help a prospective victim.  If you’re a newcomer to the movie, the finale is likely to be startling:  you suddenly realise Leona isn’t going to be saved, really is going to die.  The fact that you don’t forget this weakens the film when you go back to it, though.  When you’re no longer anxiously preoccupied with how things will turn out, you see Sorry, Wrong Number for what it is, which is no great shakes.

    19 March 2019

  • Ben Is Back

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Hedges (2018)

    Both of Lucas Hedges’s latest films have arrived in cinemas on the heels of another movie with the same theme.  In Boy Erased, Hedges played a teenager subjected to gay conversion therapy, like Chloë Grace Moretz in The Miseducation of Cameron Post.   In Ben Is Back, written and directed by his father Peter, he is a young man struggling with drug addiction, like Timothée Chalamet in Beautiful Boy.  The latter two films are similar too in focusing on the effects of addiction on a son’s relationship with a loving parent.  Boy Erased, unlike Cameron Post, derives from a real-life memoir.  Ben Is Back, unlike Beautiful Boy, doesn’t and Peter Hedges’s far-fetched screenplay is the film’s fundamental problem.

    During Christmas Eve, Ben turns up at the family home, having discharged himself from the rehab centre where he’s currently receiving treatment.  While Ben’s mother Holly (Julia Roberts) is stunned but thrilled to see her elder son, his sister Ivy (Kathryn Newton) is alarmed – so is his stepfather Neal (Courtney B Vance), the father of Holly’s two much younger children, Lacey (Mia Fowler) and Liam (Jakari Fraser).  After an urgent confab, Holly and Neal agree that Ben can stay for twenty-four hours, on condition that he doesn’t leave his mother’s sight.  The action duly ends twenty-four hours later.  During that time, Holly fails more than once to keep tabs on Ben but they’re together in the film’s closing scene, in which she performs CPR on him.  He starts to breathe again just before the screen goes dark.  Rather than concluding, Ben Is Back eventually just stops – Hedges Sr’s way of making the point that, in this situation, closure isn’t an option, let alone a happy ending.  Although this seems reasonably honest, it doesn’t make what’s gone before any less contrived and implausible.  The compressed timeframe, designed to give extra intensity to proceedings, succeeds only in making the narrative overwrought, in both senses of the word.

    It’s about halfway through that the film plunges into melodrama and never again comes up for air.  The family returns home from an evening Christmas service – where Ivy sings a choir solo and Lacey and Liam appear in the nativity play – to discover their house has been broken into and the family dog Ponce has disappeared.  (Ponce presumably doesn’t mean in the US what it means in the UK.)   Ben instantly knows this must be the work of people on the local drug-dealing circuit who’ve a score to settle with him.  Holding his domestic pet hostage might seem an odd weapon of choice on the part of the drug lords:  Ponce is a scruffy mongrel rather than a pedigree animal, and how do the dealers know about him anyway?  Reasonably attentive viewers won’t find the kidnap surprising, though.  Earlier on, Ben has felt the sudden urge to attend a 12-steps meeting; Holly takes him to the nearest one available.  He recounts to the other addicts there how, when he overdosed, his life was saved by the nick-of-time intervention of his mother and his dog.  You get a strong suspicion, as soon as Ponce is abducted, that history may be set to repeat itself.

    Before it does, Peter Hedges uses the dog’s disappearance as a means of putting a little flesh in the bones of Ben’s backstory.  People from his recent past have already made their presence felt fleetingly.  In the mall where Holly has taken him to do some last-minute Christmas shopping, eye contact with someone he recognises unnerves Ben – that’s why he has to get to an addiction group meeting.   At the meeting, a girl (Alexandra Park) whom he doesn’t recognise tells Ben he used to be her dealer and asks if he wants to get high for old times’ sake.  (She gives him drugs that Holly discovers and confiscates when she and Ben resume their shopping trip.)  Just before the start of the church service, Holly expresses her condolences to a distraught-looking woman in the congregation.  This is Beth (Rachel Bay Jones), whose late daughter Maggie was Ben’s former girlfriend – a relationship that got Maggie into the drugs that killed her.

    Now, as Holly and Ben drive round the neighbourhood in search of Ponce, the quest becomes an awkward sightseeing tour – here is the spot where Ben first used, there the site of a robbery he took part in.  They briefly visit one of his high school teachers (Henry Stram); Holly is appalled to learn this man used to supply Ben with drugs in return for sex.  They look through the window of the home of Maggie’s estranged father (Jeff Auer), who rushes out and smashes a window in Holly’s car, yelling furiously at Ben.  In a diner, mother and son are confronted by the hopped-up Spencer (David Zaldivar), a childhood friend of Ben’s revealed as the person who spooked him in the mall.  The two soon comes to blows but Spencer at least confirms the identity of the dog-snatcher, a dealer called Clayton.  In the course of their journey, Ben keeps telling his mother he’s not worth bothering with and that it’s for him alone to sort things out.  Holly assures him she isn’t going anywhere but, while they’re in a petrol station shop, Ben catches her off guard and drives away.

    In the closing stages, Ben Is Back turns into a nearly ludicrous suspense thriller.  Ben confronts Clayton (Michael Esper), who forces him to do a drug run if he wants his dog back.  Holly, meanwhile, calls on Beth, who not only agrees to lend Holly her car to try and track Ben down but also has the foresight to give her a medical kit for reviving a person who has OD’d.   Ben doesn’t leave empty-handed either, from his meeting with Clayton:  as well as retrieving Ponce, he’s rewarded with narcotics for carrying out the drug run.   Both principals make use of their gifts to deliver the film’s climax.  Ben leaves Ponce in his mother’s car and puts a note on the windscreen, telling whoever sees it to phone Holly’s mobile number.  He then overdoses on what Clayton gave him and wanders into a nearby barn to die.   A passer-by phones Holly as requested.  She drives to the scene, finds her own car and opens the door.  Out jumps Ponce – at which point, I shouted (inwardly), ‘No, don’t let him run away!’   By this stage, I’d tired of the non-stop action but was emotionally invested in the lost dog story.  I needn’t have worried, of course.  Ponce makes straight for the barn, followed by Holly, who has the resuscitation kit handy.

    Julia Roberts’s performance has received plenty of praise – another instance of mistaking conspicuous acting for great acting.  Roberts overdoes it from the word go, as Holly watches Ben’s siblings in rehearsals at the church.  Even though her famously huge, radiant smile is always going to be hard to ignore, Roberts works her face to emphasise overflowing mother-love.  As soon as Ben appears, she goes into overdrive.  Roberts’s histrionic energy level is remarkably sustained but its effect is a bit unfortunate.  It’s Holly rather than Ben who looks to be on something.

    Although he’s only just turned twenty-two, Lucas Hedges already needs to guard against being typecast as sensitive and vulnerable.  He showed those qualities in abundance in his breakthrough role in Manchester by the Sea (2016) but the teenager he played in Kenneth Lonergan’s film was a rich character – strong-willed, cussed and wittily sarcastic too.  With much thinner material, Hedges’s portrait of Ben is admirable, nevertheless.  (It’s good, for a start, to see him clearly again after the murk of Boy Erased.)  He’s marvellous in the early scenes, when Ben first comes home and plays around with Lacey, Liam and Ponce.  Strumming a guitar and singing a humorous made-up song to the younger children, Hedges expresses, as well as Ben’s natural charm, an undercurrent of grim determination to stay positive.  His easy interactions hint at the essentially happy family life that preceded his addiction.  As he showed memorably in the icebox scene in Manchester by the Sea, Lucas Hedges has a genius for uncontrollable crying and for making his tears infectious.  He reconfirms it as Ben listens to Ivy’s solo in the church service.

    It’s no surprise that plenty of American reviewers have praised Ben Is Back for confronting the national ‘opioid epidemic’ and Peter Hedges does make some effort to root the story in a community.  He seems interested too in exploring character rather than simply describing an addict’s behaviour.  For these reasons (and for Lucas Hedges), I prefer the film to Beautiful Boy.  But Hedges Sr increasingly sacrifices these promising elements for melodramatic mechanics and when he occasionally tries for brutal honesty the result is harshly unconvincing – as in two sequences meant to illustrate the depth of Holly’s distress and anger.

    In the first of these, she and Ben, when they first arrive in the shopping mall, bump into an elderly couple – their family doctor (Jack Davidson), now retired, and his wife (Kristin Griffith).  The doctor is suffering from dementia and doesn’t recognise Holly or Ben.  Holly offers to sit with him while the wife goes on a brief errand.  While she’s gone and Ben is standing out of earshot, Holly tells the doctor that she holds him responsible for her son’s condition.  As a young teenager, Ben needed medication for a minor snowboarding injury.  The doctor wrongly assured Holly the drugs he prescribed were not addictive.  She now tells the doctor she hopes he dies a terrible death.   The second sequence is in a cemetery (whose graves also feature in introductory scene-setting shots) – exasperated by her son, Holly demands to know from him exactly where he wants to be buried.  The effect, again, is too emotionally strident.  One more, and a more trivial, niggle:  what this Christmas story gains from calling the mother and daughter Holly and Ivy is beyond me.

    16 March 2019

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