Old Yorker

  • My Left Foot

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jim Sheridan (1989)

    The tendency of reviewers to recommend films featuring terminally ill and/or disabled characters as ‘remarkably unsentimental’ was strongly in evidence in the 1980s.   The praise was usually undeserved, even when, as in the case of Rain Man (1988), the promotion of the movie made shrewd play of the supposedly unsentimental treatment.  Two films, appearing at the start and the end of the decade, were exceptions:  David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot.  Lynch’s picture, not unexpectedly, is the more inventive piece of film-making and features a fine lead performance from John Hurt.   As a personality, though (as distinct from a moral symbol and an acting opportunity), John Merrick is a limited conception:  a sweet nature inside a hideous exterior.   In terms of characterisation of the protagonist, My Left Foot, subtitled ‘The Story of Christy Brown’, is the film that really bucked the trend.  It did so thanks to a fine screenplay by Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton, based on the writer and artist Christy Brown’s autobiography of the same name; and, in Daniel Day Lewis, to a lead actor ready – eager – to go unusually far and deep into character.

    Christy Brown was born into a working-class Dublin family in 1932.  He was one of twenty-three siblings, nine of whom died in infancy.  He was diagnosed shortly after birth with severe cerebral palsy.  His parents Bridget and Patrick were determined to raise him at home, along with their many other children, even though Christy was unable to walk or talk.  He was spastic in all his limbs except for the lower left leg.   With the encouragement of his parents, especially his mother, and, in his adolescence, a regularly visiting social worker, Christy learned to write and draw with his left foot.  He quickly matured into a serious artist.  His autobiography, published in 1954, was followed by other prose and poetry, and he continued to paint.  He died suddenly in 1981.

    The film’s narrative moves between present and past.  The former seems at first no more than a framing device.  Christy attends a charity event to celebrate the publication of his autobiography, at a grand house outside Dublin on a beautiful summer evening.  On arrival, he and his mother (Brenda Fricker) meet Mary Carr (Ruth McCabe), the nurse who will be Christy’s ‘handler’ for the next few hours.  Mary will push his wheelchair onto the stage once the preceding entertainment, from a group of classical musicians, is over.  In the meantime, in a reception room behind the concert area, the pair chat and – a nearly inevitable consequence of Christy’s cussed nature – argue.  Mary also starts reading a copy of My Left Foot.  Into this framework, Jim Sheridan incorporates extended flashbacks to Christy’s earlier life.  These are the guts of the story but the meeting with Mary turns out to be important too.  The evening ends, as does the film, with the two of them driving further out into the countryside and drinking champagne together.  A closing legend on the screen explains that they married in 1972.

    Sheridan’s realisation of the Brown household during Christy’s childhood, with the teeming family crammed into their small home, is very convincing.  Hugh O’Conor, as the child Christy, has an intense eccentricity that paves the way for Daniel Day Lewis.  Mrs Brown, eloquently played by Brenda Fricker in her role of a lifetime, is the heart of the family:  it’s her quiet, utter steadfastness as well as her perennially pregnant state that makes Christy’s mother such a large, enduring presence.  Ray McAnally, in one of his last performances, is differently formidable as Christy’s heavy-drinking, more volatile father.  The social worker who helped assist Christy’s progress becomes the presumably fictional Eileen Cole (Fiona Shaw), a doctor working with cerebral palsy patients to improve their speech and movement.  Eileen moves in cultural circles and it’s through her contacts that she arranges both the first public exhibition of Christy’s art work and the later charity event hosted by Lord Castlewelland (Cyril Cusack).

    Eileen is also the woman with whom Christy first falls in love.  They go out for dinner with her friend Peter (Adrian Dunbar) and others after Christy’s exhibition opens at Peter’s gallery.  Christy is, in both senses of the word, intoxicated until Eileen takes the opportunity to announce her engagement to Peter.  Christy, in his distorted, effortful speech, articulates the word ‘Congratulations’ – as he makes his way from the first to the last of the five syllables, his voice is increasingly anguished and vengeful.  He then says, ‘I’m glad you taught me to speak so I could say that, Eileen’, before beating his head repeatedly on the restaurant table.  This scene is the culmination of My Left Foot‘s near subversiveness in its treatment of a disabled central figure.  Christy’s behaviour comes as a shock not only to the cultured Dubliners who’ve virtually adopted him as an expression of their avant-garde broad-mindedness but also to audiences with a built-in predisposition to feel essentially sorry for disabled characters.  You do still feel sorry for Christy here:  but you’re aware too that he’s behaving badly on purpose, aware that he’ll create a bigger impact – and make it harder for his companions to object to his anti-social performance – because of how he physically is.

    Although the film is far from biographically accurate, Christy Brown really did marry a woman called Mary Carr in 1972 but she was neither a nurse nor Irish nor, it seems, good for Christy.  According to Wikipedia, Carr was English, Brown met her at a party in London and they started an affair.  This led to his ending a relationship of several years with an American woman called Beth Moore (who doesn’t feature in the film).   Also according to Wikipedia:

    ‘Brown’s health deteriorated after marrying Carr. He became mainly a recluse in his last years, which is thought to be a direct result of Carr’s influence and perhaps abusive nature. … Brown died at the age of 49 after choking during a lamb chop dinner.  His body was found to have significant bruising, which led many to believe that Carr had physically abused him. …’

    Playing fast and loose with the facts of Christy Brown’s biography isn’t a problem to the extent that Jim Sheridan’s clear primary purpose is to celebrate an extraordinary, heroic life.  It’s surprising, nevertheless, that Sheridan doesn’t acknowledge how freely he and Shane Connaughton have adapted the true story and, more particularly, that he retains the name Mary Carr.

    This is one reason why, revisiting My Left Foot, I found it less impressive than I did when seeing it (twice) at the time of and shortly after its original release.   The film is well structured and paced.  The main strength of Jack Conroy’s cinematography is in how imaginatively it conveys the cramped spaces of the Browns’ home; there’s also a vivid Halloween sequence during Christy’s childhood – scary masks and fireworks in the night sky, seen from the little boy’s dazzled point of view.   Some of the other illustrations of robust community are more obvious than I’d remembered, particularly a punch-up that breaks out at the wake for Christy’s father.  I never liked Fiona Shaw as Eileen:  it’s the actress, as much as the character she’s playing, who seems to be bidding for attention.  Ruth McCabe is likeable as Mary and there’s a spark between her and Daniel Day Lewis.  It makes emotional sense too that she has the look of a younger version of Christy’s mother but the scenes featuring Mary become a little too drawn out and repetitive.  (Probably just me but she also looked to be reading Christy’s book backwards.)  Elmer Bernstein’s score is busy and too conventionally Hollywood for the material.

    Daniel Day Lewis’s performance is admirable as a technical achievement; what makes it exceptional is its daring wit.   The tones he gets into Christy’s torturous voice give depth, bite and wonderful humour to his persistent sarcasm.  Day Lewis’s dark-bearded physicality has an almost satyr-like quality – it’s an expression of the strength of Christy Brown’s appetite for, and determination to have his fill of, a life he seemed fated to be cut off from.  Day Lewis’s much vaunted commitment to his art has sometimes raised suspicions that he makes too much of immersive research and preparation for a role.  With his best work, however, you can only feel grateful for this – and to him.  His portrait of Christy Brown remains my favourite of all his performances.

    13 September 2018

  • 12 Angry Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet (1957)

    Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men began life as a teleplay, broadcast in 1954.  Three years later, it became a cinema film – Sidney Lumet’s first – with a screenplay by Rose, who also produced, in partnership with the movie’s star, Henry Fonda.  Photographed in black and white by Boris Kaufman, 12 Angry Men fared poorly at the box office but was critically acclaimed from the word go, and its reputation has grown over the years.   It ranks second in the American Film Institute’s all-time top ten of courtroom dramas.  Nearly the whole film takes place in a single room in a New York courthouse, where an all-male jury considers their verdict at the end of a murder trial.  (If you didn’t know better, you’d think the source material was a stage play, which the piece did become in the 1960s.)  A guilty verdict will mean an automatic death sentence for the trial defendant, a teenager accused of fatally stabbing his father.  The men on whom his life depends are referred to by juror number only, until the very end, when two of the jury, as they leave the courthouse, exchange surnames.

    12 Angry Men has a good title and a nifty dramatic structure, both of which are phony.  Far from all the men are angry.   Juror number 1 (Martin Balsam), who’s also the jury foreman, shows remarkable patience throughout – his one outbreak of huffiness lasts about five seconds.  Juror 2 (John Fielder), a meek bank clerk, eventually raises his voice to speak his mind but is never cross.  Juror 12 (Robert Webber), an advertising executive, is too shallow and fickle to be up to anger.  At the start of the jury’s deliberations, only juror 8 (Fonda), an architect, votes not guilty.  He does so, to the exasperation of others, on the grounds of ‘reasonable doubt’.  At first, the outlier’s objections are remarkably woolly.  Can we be 100% sure, he asks; isn’t it possible that witnesses could be wrong?  Rather than telling him he’s confusing reasonable doubt with complete certainty, his fiercest antagonists mostly bluster – so as to contrast their benighted views with his educated liberality.  The structure is phony because the opening vague arguments are just a delaying tactic on Reginald Rose’s part.  In due course, juror 8 refines them into bit-by-bit, forensic dismantling of the prosecution’s evidence.  His increasingly persuasive case doesn’t consist of issues that occur to him during the discussion; rather, he keeps them up his sleeve until the dramatic time is right.  (There’s no disputing his claim that the defence lawyer was negligent in his cross-examination of prosecution witnesses:  it’s incredible that some of the points raised in the jury room weren’t raised in court.)  He wins over one bigot after another until the jury votes unanimously to acquit the defendant.

    When he first moves into the main arena, Sidney Lumet shows his talent for building realistic context and claustrophobic atmosphere.  The weather is hot, the window in the airless jury room is jammed, sweat patches soon appear on the shirts of some of the jurors.  It’s not long either, though, before the direction is emphasising significant details in an obvious way.  Juror 3 (Lee J Cobb), who runs some kind of business (and who really is angry), mentions that he has one son, whom he’s not seen for two years, adds with feeling, ‘Kids – you work your heart out …’, and looks furtively at the photograph he takes from his pocket:  Lumet is announcing this is going to matter in a big way.   We wait nearly the whole film for the payoff.  Juror 3 is the last to give in, breaking down as he rages:

    ‘You lousy bunch of bleeding hearts. You’re not gonna intimidate me. I’m entitled to my opinion. Rotten kids …  You work your life out!  … Not guilty.’

    Juror 10 (Ed Begley), a garage owner, is the most aggressively bigoted of the twelve.  Thanks to his racial and social prejudice, he knows what ‘sort of person’ the boy on trial is:  Hispanic and a slum-dweller.  ‘I don’t think the kind of boy he is has anything to do with it,’ counters juror 9 (Joseph Sweeney), an elderly man who’s the first to join juror 8 on the not guilty side.   Yet the kind of boy the defendant is counts for a lot with Lumet.  There’s only a single shot of the teenager in the dock, at the very start, but he (John Savoca) looks pathetically young and innocuous.  His brief appearance is accompanied by a burst of elegiac music that isn’t typical of Kenyon Hopkins’s score.

    There are five other jurors not so far mentioned.  Juror 4 (E G Marshall) is a stockbroker, who is super-analytical and has a pair of spectacles to prove it, though they prove his undoing at the business end of the arguments.  Juror 6 (Edward Binns) is a reasonably fair-minded house painter.  Juror 7 (Jack Warden) cares only that a verdict is reached in time for him to get to an evening baseball game.  Numbers 5 and 11 are, in effect, a pair, in that they have common ground with the defendant.  Mild-mannered Juror 5 (Jack Klugman) grew up in a slum.  Juror 11 (George Voskovec who, along with Joseph Sweeney, was the only member of the teleplay cast to reprise his role in the film) is a watchmaker and a European immigrant to America.  Perhaps the sweatiest and certainly the best performance comes from Martin Balsam as the jury foreman, a high-school football coach in the outside world.  Balsam manages to hint at a personality that’s more than the sum of the few characteristics supplied by the script.

    Juror 8, needless to say, is not one of the big sweaters – he only glows, although he might as well be wearing shining armour.  Henry Fonda’s outfit is the next best thing:  a suit whiter even than the one Gregory Peck wore five years later in To Kill a Mockingbird (number one in the AFI’s courtroom dramas top ten).  I’d watched 12 Angry Men twice before, decades ago; this viewing, on television, came the day after seeing The Miseducation of Cameron Post.    It made me feel I’d been unfair in implying that Chloë Grace Moretz, in playing a role to promote a worthy cause, was doing something distinctively de nos jours.  Henry Fonda, while demonstrating far superior acting skills, was essentially doing the same thing here, sixty years earlier.  The film has been widely admired as a ringing endorsement of the American justice system and it seems beyond reasonable doubt that it has affected many people deeply.  I find it cannily entertaining but schematic and manipulative to a vexing degree.   To say it made me angry would be an overstatement but I did feel increasingly embarrassed by the mechanics.  When Lee J Cobb eventually succumbs and buries his face in shame, I too wanted to cover my eyes.  The main consolation of revisiting 12 Angry Men comes in its reminder that Sidney Lumet went on to make Dog Day Afternoon – a much superior film in which a group of New Yorkers are stuck and swelter indoors as the result of a crime.

    12 September 2018

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