Old Yorker

  • Dark River

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clio Barnard (2017)

    At the start of Dark River, the heroine Alice (Ruth Wilson), a contract agricultural worker, explains to her current boss that her father has died and that she’ll now be returning to live and work on the family farm in Yorkshire.  The boss (Jonah Russell) lightly touches Alice’s hand to express his sympathy for her loss.  She flinches from the contact.   That night, lying in bed, she sees an older man enter her room.  He does it again as soon as she goes to bed back in Yorkshire.   Soon afterwards, there’s a flashback to the younger Alice (Esme Creed-Miles) in bed; the door opens and the same man appears.  The writer-director Clio Barnard has soon made it clear that this man (Sean Bean) is Alice’s late father and that he sexually abused his daughter during her adolescence.  Alice expects another, better inheritance in the form of the farm’s tenancy, which her father promised her.  On her return, however, she finds herself competing for the tenancy with her brother Joe (Mark Stanley), who’s been managing the place during the father’s long terminal illness.  Joe opposes Alice’s various attempts to innovate and revive the farm’s fortunes.  A representative of a water company (William Travis) informs Joe that, if his tenancy application succeeds, he’ll be able to evict Alice and sell the property to a developer.  What happens next is too grimly and melodramatically predictable to be worth recording.

    Although Barnard’s film is ‘inspired’ by a Rose Tremain novel called Trespass (set in rural France), cinemagoers will see in Dark River a clear kinship with Hope Dickson-Leach’s The Levelling (2016).  There are several similarities.  The three key characters, members of a farming family, are a sister and brother and their father.  The narrative starting point is the death of one of this trio.  There’s then an unhappy family backstory to exhume.  Livestock is at continuing risk of death or injury that symbolises the plight of the human characters.  The financial outlook for the farm is bleak.  So are the prevailing tone of the film and the weather in it.  At least in The Levelling the waterlogged ground and louring skies were essential to the scheme of the story – they referred to real-life rainfall in a specific time and place.  In Dark River, the weather conditions are merely and obviously metaphoric.  Barnard rigorously eschews contrast between the principals’ misery and a bright external landscape, though this might have been more interestingly atmospheric.  The one conspicuously sunlit sequence is the very last in the film:  it’s anyone’s guess what this is supposed to mean but I took it to be a fantasy, an illustration of what might have been (how, though?) for Alice and Joe.

    Both leads give committed performances.  Mark Stanley’s is the more nuanced.  Stanley has impressed in recent television serials, one heavyweight and unconvincing (Jimmy McGovern’s Broken), the other entertainingly ridiculous (Kay Mellor’s Love, Lies and Records).  He was a surprising choice for Professor Bhaer in the TV adaptation of Little Women last Christmas but did well in the role.  It’s crucial to Dark River that Alice and her brother don’t say a lot to each other, that Joe expresses himself chiefly through anger and physical action.  Stanley nevertheless makes the most of what he gets to say – especially in a scene in which Joe lists the various types of wildlife in his hay meadow, that he’s keen to protect.  The brother’s imprisonment in hopeless, hard-drinking routine and fear of the future are more convincing than the sister’s return to a past she escaped from as soon as she could – essential though that return is to the plot.   Ruth Wilson’s strong, distinctive face is the dominant image of Dark River but Alice is a sketchily written character.  It’s not clear quite what effect her father’s abuse has had on her adult relationships with other men.  The early scene mentioned above implies she can’t bear even to be touched.  The brief resurgence of a relationship with Tower (Shane Attwoll), a boyfriend from Alice’s teenage years, suggests otherwise.  (Tower now works as a euthaniser, putting animals out of their misery …)

    In Sight & Sound (February 2018). Nick Pinkerton’s review of a collection of Dave Kehr’s film criticism begins with:

    ‘There are two kinds of writing about film.  One treats movies as star vehicles, or bellwethers of social and political phenomena, or triggers to personal recollection.  The other assesses them as a series of decisions made from post-to-pre-production intended to tell a particular story, crystallise a particular feeling, or express a particular ethos, and makes the effort of reverse-engineering to get back to the root of authorial intention, and to then measure that intention against accomplishment.’

    (Pinkerton goes on to praise Kehr as a leading exponent of the latter school.)  Trevor Johnston’s interview with Clio Barnard in the next Sight & Sound seems to spare the reverse-engineer a large part of the effort that Pinkerton applauds.  Johnston’s piece details the ‘stealth documentary input’ to Dark River.  Barnard summarises what she set out to achieve:

    ‘The PJ Harvey song we have in there [‘My Father Left Me an Acre of Land’], is about getting the audience to think about the history of the land, and the way its commodification has accelerated in recent years.  But also I wanted to show how damaging it is living with rage when it’s internalised and suppressed, and to make connections between the way the father objectifies his daughter’s body, and the way we objectify the land, objectify nature. … [T]he upshot for me is that we need to rethink our relationship with the land.  I never want to preach, but this is a story which needs telling.’

    Dark River, according to the Pinkerton measurement test, isn’t a failure:  Barnard does provoke the thoughts and get across the ideas she was after.  But she does so in ways so limited and unimaginative, in both dramatic and visual terms, that it’s hard for this viewer to see the end result as successful.  You get the sense from Barnard’s comments in S&S that because ‘this is a story which needs telling’ she thinks that how she tells it is of strictly secondary importance.   As in God’s Own Country, the writer-director had the two main actors learn farm work techniques first hand – Ruth Wilson does all her own sheep-shearing etc.  This doesn’t make Dark River as all-round authentic as Clio Barnard seems to suppose.

    27 February 2018

  • I, Tonya

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Craig Gillespie (2017)

    The high point of Tonya Harding’s figure-skating career came in 1991, when she became the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition, winning the US Championships in the process, then a silver medal at the World Championships.  Harding’s sporting achievements were completely and forever eclipsed by an off-rink incident in January 1994, when her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly orchestrated a physical attack on her big rival Nancy Kerrigan at the US Championships, just a few weeks before the Lillehammer Winter Olympics.  Kerrigan wasn’t badly hurt and was able to compete in Lillehammer, where she won silver and Harding finished eighth.  After the Games, Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the criminal investigation into the incident and was banned for life from the US Figure Skating Association.  She’s had subsequent short-lived careers in music, movies, wrestling, boxing and television.  In 2010, she ‘set a new land speed record for a vintage gas coupe … driving a 1931 Ford Model A, named Lickity-Split, on the Bonneville Salt Flats’ (Wikipedia).   She married her third husband the same year and gave birth to a son in 2011.  In recent years, she’s had jobs as a welder and hardware sales clerk.  She now lives in Washington State, north of her hometown of Portland Oregon.  Tonya Harding is, to put it simply, a notorious figure in American popular culture.  The title of Craig Gillespie’s new film about her life, as well as evoking respectable literary forerunners (I, Claudius, I, Robot), has the ring of in-her-own-words-putting-the-record-straight.  This is misleading.  I, Tonya is hard to define but it’s certainly not that.

    Gillespie and the scenarist Steven Rogers use a mockumentary framework, interspersing the biographical action with talking-heads interviews featuring Tonya (Margot Robbie), Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), Tonya’s mother LaVona (Allison Janney), Jeff’s pal and henchman Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), Tonya’s coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) and a television producer (Bobby Cannavale).  A legend at the start announces that what follows is ‘based on irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly’; the tone of those words is some hint of what’s to come.   The film implicates its audience.  As well as speaking to camera in the interview sequences, the main characters occasionally break the fourth wall in other scenes.  Tonya, in interview, can be confrontational:  at one point, she glares at the camera and tells us she knows we’ve bought a ticket for the movie only because of ‘the incident’.  (Even if I didn’t buy as many cinema tickets as I do, this wouldn’t hit home:  I don’t think the Harding-Kerrigan scandal is part of sporting folk memory this side of the Atlantic.  Brits old enough to remember the Lillehammer Olympics will know they were preoccupied with Torvill and Dean’s comeback there.)  Tonya comes from the wrong side of the tracks and I, Tonya makes much of the skating establishment’s snobbish prejudice against her, from the very start of her competitive career.  But foregrounding this prejudice and warning us voyeurs that we’re watching only out of schadenfreude is a subterfuge on the filmmakers’ part.  Their treatment of the error-prone redneck characters exudes what-are-they-like derision.

    With one important exception, the performances are effective.  Although Margot Robbie’s much more beautiful than the real thing, she and some clever make-up combine to give the heroine a rough, raw look that’s a good enough substitute for the real Tonya’s unpretty face.   Robbie gives a sympathetic, even empathetic, performance though she never seems inside Tonya’s head.  That may be intentional:  a more richly believable portrait would likely have made the physical violence inflicted on Tonya by both her husband and her mother even harder to stomach.  Robbie’s forceful, rather shallow portrait sits more easily with the brutal slapstick.  As Jeff, Sebastian Stan is a different problem (and the important exception).  His low-key playing is at odds with the style of I, Tonya.  The footage of the actual Jeff over the closing credits suggests that Stan’s inadequacy isn’t even the result of literal faithfulness:  the real-life Jeff has a slimy plausibility that Stan lacks – and which would have set up a sharper contrast between Jeff and his morbidly obese, cack-handed, delusional sidekick Shawn, well played by Paul Walter Hauser.   Bobby Cannavale’s caricature of the cynical TV man is amusing, though the role is minor.  Julianne Nicholson is fine as the somewhat precious coach, though I didn’t understand why Diane Rawlinson, having parted company once with Tonya, came back for more.

    Which leaves Allison Janney as mother-from-hell LaVona.  She starts her daughter skating at four years old (Maizie Smith and Mckenna Grace play the younger Tonya at different ages); when the child wants the toilet, LaVona tells her it’s not time for that yet, a yellow puddle forms on the rink and LaVona says, ‘So skate wet’.  In the course of the film, LaVona, inter alia, kicks her daughter off a chair, lands a kitchen knife in her upper arm, and sits impatiently at Tonya and Jeff’s wedding reception without taking her coat off.  LaVona needs her coat in another key scene: after the ‘incident’, she visits Tonya, professing unusual respect and admiration but concealing a recording device supplied by the press in the hope that LaVona can extract a confession from her daughter.  Allison Janney has been one of my favourite character actresses for approaching two decades.  I should be more pleased than I am that she’s sweeping the Best Supporting Actress board for this performance.  It’s precise, witty and grimly amusing – especially in LaVona’s brisk self-justifications and remarks to the pet parrot perched on her shoulder in the present-day faux interview.   Craig Gillespie also exploits Janney’s unusual height to convey LaVona’s towering monstrosity.  (I don’t know if the real-life LaVona was similarly tall:  there’s only a brief shot of her seated at the end of the film.)  Yet in spite of all this, Janney’s brilliant turn hits few notes (compared anyway with Lesley Manville in Phantom Thread  and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird).  This and her physical appearance help to reinforce the cartoon quality of I, Tonya but Janney’s credibility makes the film’s contempt for its characters more offensive.

    Like Margot Robbie and Allison Janney, the editor Tatiana S Riegel is Oscar-nominated and deserves to be:  the cutting between Robbie on the ice and the double executing the jumps and spins is seamless.  If you end up wanting to think well of I, Tonya you can probably admire it as a formally inventive biopic.  If you don’t you’ll realise the distinctive title is nothing more than attention-getting and that breaking of the fourth wall is designed just to give a few scenes a bit of extra pep.  I found I, Tonya very uncomfortable to watch – and not as a result of what Tonya says to make the audience uncomfortable.  When Craig Gillespie and Steven Rogers put those words about ‘the incident’ in her mouth, they may be tongue in cheek but you get a stronger impression of their smirks.  The on-screen legends at the end tell us that Tonya now not only is happily married but also wants it to be known that she’s a good mother.   What a gift for Gillespie if Tonya Harding really did ask for this to be made clear.   What a pleasing irony – and final joke at her expense.

    26 February 2018

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