Old Yorker

  • A Star Is Born (1976)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Frank Pierson (1976)

    I don’t usually return to films I walked out of.  Keen to compare the 1976 A Star Is Born with the 1954 one, I made an exception.  I feel I did George Cukor and Judy Garland an injustice in the note I wrote earlier this month.  Cukor’s film, half an hour longer than this remake, is turgid but it never occurred to me to leave it early (and I watched it straight after seeing another film on the same day).   The Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born – surely the only way to describe it, though Frank Pierson was nominally the director – has now attained unique status in my cinema-going history.  It’s the only film I’ve walked out of twice.

    I don’t remember why I exited forty years ago – at least this time I can record the reasons.  First, there was a bad smell close to where I was in NFT2.  I’m nearly certain it was the feet of the BFI usher who took a seat and his shoes off just behind me – not the fault of the film of course, though a better one might have distracted my nostrils.  The setting of A Star Is Born in this version has switched from Hollywood to the music business and the self-destructive leading man is now a hell-raising rock star, instead of a matinee idol on the skids.  Whereas the Cukor film didn’t show James Mason’s Norman Maine acting on screen, there’s no such luck with John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson).  The hour that I lasted included lots of his boring music.  Worse than the smell and the noise, however, and the main reason for walking, was Barbra Streisand.

    This isn’t an unusual objection to the film.  Streisand’s allegedly high-handed behaviour during the development and making of it guaranteed exceptionally bad advance press.  By the time it opened in the US in December 1976, Frank Pierson had virtually disowned A Star Is Born (as had Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, with whom Pierson wrote the screenplay).  Streisand had initially wanted her then-boyfriend, hairdresser-to-the-stars Jon Peters, to direct.  When that didn’t happen (Peters eventually shared the producing credit with her), Streisand, according to Pierson, constantly interfered and took over the direction when she felt like it.  Many of the negative reviews the film received when it finally appeared majored on how thoroughly incongruous Streisand was in the rock world of the story.  As a Broadway and screen musical star and pop performer, perhaps she was miscast but what makes her intolerable is the overbearing quality that also disfigured Funny Lady the previous year:  she was hardly miscast in that, having given a great performance as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968).

    Barbra Streisand combines exceptional performing skills and enormous self-confidence.  Everything she does in Funny Lady and A Star Is Born is filtered through her superstar persona – and her awareness of it.  Perhaps this affected Streisand only in musical roles of the period:  I didn’t dislike her in The Way We Were (1973) when I last saw it a few years ago (she sang the theme song over the titles but not on screen).  But in Funny Lady and A Star Is Born her mixture of self-assertion and self-approval doesn’t merely detract from her singing:  it charges her every expression of emotion and delivery of lines (including the casual, goofy ones).  It suffocates characterisation.   What kind of a singer Esther Hoffman, the heroine of A Star is Born, is meant to be is virtually irrelevant:  she is, to all intents and purposes, Barbra Streisand.  Streisand is the polar opposite of Judy Garland in the Cukor film.   Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester was authoritative on stage and screen and, in her personal life, an utterly dependable wife; yet, with Garland playing her, she always seemed on the verge of breakdown.  However tough the going gets for Esther Hoffman, Streisand makes her invulnerable.

    A Star Is Born opens in a huge stadium where John Norman Howard is performing – barking out numbers in a manner that betrays his contempt for his zillions of fans.  It’s immediately clear that this is a screwed-up superstar.  After various brawls and a set-to with his road manager (Gary Busey), he gets into a car leaving the stadium, the driver asks, ‘Where to?’, and John Norman replies, ‘Back ten years’.  I wasn’t sure from what follows whether the car’s destination is the bar where John Norman discovers Esther, singing in an all-girl trio; or whether the words ‘back ten years’ bring on an extended flashback that describes this first meeting and the development of their relationship.  In any case, the camera discovers Esther before John Norman does, and her amazing voice commands attention before he has had chance to hear it.  From pretty well the start of the scene in the bar, the focus is on Esther and the two black girls flanking her – the trio’s name is The Oreos – are effectively her backing singers.  The idea of Esther emerging from obscurity makes no sense:  she’s in the spotlight from the word go.  The film is less a case of a star being born than a demonstration that celebrity is preordained.

    It fits with the Streisand effect that the line between the on-screen audiences’ response to the characters of John Howard and Esther, as distinct from the actors incarnating them, is blurry.  This is quite interesting in the opening section.  The stadium crowd switches instantly from why-are-we-waiting impatience, when John Howard still hasn’t appeared, to deafening adoration the second he comes on stage, though he’s obviously drunk.  Even if this crowd is just doing what Frank Pierson (or Streisand) told them to do, their abrupt change of mood does convey a plausible sense of fickleness; John Howard’s zonked disrespect for them is increased by his realising that the fans either can’t see or don’t care how he’s treating them.   There’s no such ambiguity in the interaction between audiences and Esther.  At a Native-American-rights fund-raiser, John Howard disappoints punters by pushing Esther on stage to perform in his place.  This turns into a rags-to-riches-story trope:  her irresistible singing melts the audience’s hostility and wins them over.  Yet Streisand hardly bothers to suggest that Esther is apprehensive before she works her magic – and the audience’s grinning acclaim seems to confirm we’re watching a Barbra Streisand concert.  This approach proved to be commercially shrewd:  in spite of its bad press, A Star Is Born became the second highest-grossing American movie of 1976.  (The film’s softest-of-soft-porn icing – epitomised by its ‘sexy’ theatrical release poster – probably didn’t harm either.)  But the heroine’s moment of triumph at the benefit is also the moment of Esther Hoffman’s complete submersion by Barbra Streisand.  And the moment at which the film and I parted company again.

    25 January 2018

  • The Post

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2017)

    The advertisements for The Post on hoardings at our local station bespeak an overweening confidence.  There’s a STREEP one and a HANKS one – a backview of each star above their upper case name, below an array of rave review headlines for the film.  I didn’t look closely enough to find out whether the posters felt the need even to mention SPIELBERG.  As the world knows, this is the first time these three have collaborated – to be precise, the first time the two actors have shared the screen and Meryl Streep has appeared in a Spielberg film.  (She supplied a voice for A I Artificial Intelligence (2001).)  There’s an implication in the publicity that movie people of the celebrity magnitude of Streep, Hanks and Spielberg were needed to tell a story as IMPORTANT as the one this film has to tell.

    Yet in spite of mostly good notices and excellent box office (worldwide takings to date of $83m against a $50m budget), The Post hasn’t proved to be the awards season smash many expected it to be.  The National Board of Review, first out of the annual prize-giving gate as usual, gave it Best Film, Best Actor and Best Actress honours in late November.  The Board is by no means a reliable predictor of honours but few would have expected the film not to get a single SAG or BAFTA nomination.   Although it has two Oscar nods – for Best Picture and Best Actress – it won’t win either award.  Is this a fair reflection of the film’s quality or has its hype worked against it?  Both, I think, and the two things interact.  The Post purports to be urgently of the moment.  It turns out to be, in many respects, an old-fashioned piece of cinema.

    In October 2016, Amy Pascal (who has produced the film with Spielberg and Kristie Macosko Krieger) made the winning bid for the rights to Liz Hannah’s screenplay, which dramatises the events that led to the Washington Post ‘s publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.  At the start of 2017, Steven Spielberg hadn’t even read Hannah’s script but a gap in his schedule unexpectedly appeared (when production was halted on The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara) and he decided this was a story that couldn’t wait to be made.  The Post means to be a rallying cry for the sanctity of the First Amendment, at a time when the Trump White House has made freedom of the American press a live political issue.

    Perhaps Spielberg felt the best way to honour investigative journalism was to invoke past Hollywood celebrations of press crusaders.  Perhaps the speed with which he made The Post simply didn’t allow the time to work out a more imaginative approach.  Whatever the reasons, the visual narrative is clichéd – without putting a fresh spin on the clichés.  There’s even a bit where someone tries reading headlines in inclement weather – until a gust of wind catches hold of the paper and blows it away.  All the Money in the World features exactly the same number (which does give a new meaning to ‘hold the front page’).  Spielberg gets some mileage out of antediluvian 1970s technology – photocopiers, pay phones, newspaper typesetting – but his traditional approach is sometimes counterproductive.  As Ben Bagdikian, a key member of the Washington Post team, Bob Odenkirk has a haggard leanness that seems just right for a man who works too hard and sleeps too little.  (It was a pleasant surprise, given the actor’s drawn pallor, to discover from Wikipedia that the real Bagdikian lived to be ninety-six.)  Odenkirk also has a good journeyman gait but there are times when Spielberg’s camera seems determined to show Bagdikian-in-motion as more obviously heroic – a standard-issue pursuer of truth.

    The first part of the film’s prologue takes place in the South Vietnam jungle in 1966, where Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), then a member of staff of the State Department, is approaching the end of a two-year government assignment with the US military.   On his return home, Ellsberg worked on. ‘United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967’, commissioned by Robert McNamara, the Secretary of State for Defense.  The contents of this top-secret report (which McNamara – as The Post eventually makes clear – intended for posterity) became the Pentagon Papers.  The second part of The Post’s prologue describes how Ellsberg smuggled classified documents out of the office and, with a couple of friends, made photocopies.  (This actually happened in 1969.)  The film is so sure of itself that Spielberg foregoes the usual based-on-true-events reminder at the outset but there’s nothing exceptional about his opening sequences – they’re competent but conventional scene-setting for a political thriller.

    After this average start, The Post moves into 1971 and, for most of the next hour or so, it’s very entertaining.  Michael Kahn’s typically crisp editing enhances Spielberg’s typically clear storytelling.  The rhythms between Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in their first scene together – a meeting over coffee between the Washington Post’s owner, Katharine (Kay) Graham, and the paper’s editor-in-chief, Ben Bradlee – are close to elating, and make you eager for more.  The narrative gets across well the personal difficulties for Graham and Bradlee, both of whom were friends of John F Kennedy and of members of his White House team, in coming to terms with the Pentagon Papers’ exposure of the Vietnam War secrets of earlier American administrations, Kennedy’s included.

    The Washington Post’s going public on the stock market and its initial publication of the Pentagon Papers really did coincide as the film describes[1].  This gives Kay Graham, whose family had owned the paper since 1933, a dual dilemma and it’s in Kay that The Post‘s freedom-of-the-press theme fuses with its other politically right-on aspect:  the struggle of a woman in a man’s world.   Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Kay makes for amusing points of comparison with another of her recent forays into the world of journalism (albeit as a fictional character).  As in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Streep rarely raises her voice but the significance of this in The Post is very different:  whereas Miranda Priestly was so much in charge she had no need to shout, Kate Graham hardly dares to be heard.  Streep (who is perfectly audible, however quietly she speaks) plays Kay’s lack of confidence in public meetings brilliantly.  As Rozalind Dineen in the Times Literary Supplement says, she ‘has mastered the uncomfortable facial expression of someone who would like to speak, but is holding the words back in their mouth, as if they were small unknown objects’.  When Miranda Priestly entered the office, she almost chucked her bag and coat onto a desk and a chair.  Kay Graham puts them down carefully.

    The highlight of Meryl Streep’s performance – and of the film – is Kay’s phone conversation with Ben Bradlee and the Post chairman Fritz Beebe (Tracy Letts), in which she’s forced to decide whether to publish the first excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, in spite of the legal risks of doing so.  Bradlee urges her to say yes; Beebe advises against; the agonised Kay takes them both and herself by surprise by the suddenness of her ‘Let’s publish’.  Streep shows Kay as being propelled towards her decision yet generates suspense enough to surprise too the viewer who knows what’s coming.   She’s patchy, however, in the second half of The Post.   A scene in which she pays Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood, good as usual) a call at home – he’s another old friend – is awkward in the wrong way, as Kay tearfully reproves him for putting American mothers through the pain of seeing their sons go off to Vietnam, long after McNamara knew the war there could not be won.  In another one-on-one with Bradlee, which takes place chez Kay, Streep clutches a cushion from the sofa on which they’re both sitting.  The business with the cushion is meant to express Kay’s insecurity but it comes across as Streep, rather than the woman she’s playing, needing something to hold onto – the sort of thing an actor does to work their way into a character, then jettisons.  (The prop reliance may of course reflect the unusually swift production schedule; and it would be interesting to know the shooting sequence of scenes.)   Spielberg – not renowned as a director of actors or, especially, actresses – joins the roll call of film-makers who might have helped Meryl Streep and themselves by being tougher, instead of watching her in admiration.

    Jason Robards’s portrait of Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men (1976) casts a long shadow.  Tom Hanks is a sufficiently strong – and different – screen presence to step out of that shadow but his persona immediately certifies Bradlee as not just editor-in-chief but good-guy-in-chief too.  This is no doubt what Spielberg wants but it reinforces the moral flatness of the piece and Hanks, for all his skill, doesn’t bring out Bradlee’s more belligerent side with much feeling.  It doesn’t help Hanks, Streep or Spielberg that the writing of The Post deteriorates sharply in the later stages.  Josh Singer, who co-wrote another high-profile newsroom drama in Spotlight (2015), was brought in for rewrites on Liz Hannah’s script but the end product pushes crudely towards the convergence of the press freedom and feminist themes.  This is realised in silly details like a crowd of women gazing awestruck at Kay Graham as she leaves the Supreme Court hearing.  It’s sealed when – after the Court has ruled 6-3 to allow newspapers to resume publication of Pentagon Papers material – the wording of the judgment, which confirms that the duty of a free press is ‘to serve the governed, not the governors’, is read out by one of the Washington Post’s female journalists (Carrie Coon).  Talk about a token gesture:  it does no more to substantiate the film’s professed feminism than does the the weakly written role of Bradlee’s wife (Sarah Paulson).

    In some ways, Kay Graham seems an odd choice of heroine for a parable of female empowerment.  A few years after her marriage to Philip Graham, Kay’s father, the financier Eugene Meyer, handed the Washington Post over to his son-in-law; Kay assumed the paper’s ownership following her husband’s suicide in 1963, when she was in her mid-forties.  She hardly fought her way to the top – it’s arguable she had greatness thrust upon her.  But The Post is interesting in its suggestion that Graham’s exceptionally privileged background increased her lack of self-confidence beyond the domestic and social worlds to which she was accustomed.  The wardrobe Ann Roth has designed for Meryl Streep stresses the dichotomy between the socialite and the businesswoman and it’s only in the very late stages of the story that Kay is anywhere near comfortable in the latter role.  It’s a pity the script effects her transformation coarsely.  The clumsy exposition in a conversation between Kay and her daughter Lally (Alison Brie) – in which Kay recalls her marriage, her husband’s death and how Lally helped her through it – verges on desperate.

    The Post really dives in the closing stages, during which you become increasingly aware of John Williams’s tiresome uplifting score.   The standouts in smaller roles are Michael Stuhlbarg (as the New York Times editor, A M Rosenthal), Jesse Plemons (as a member of the Washington Post‘s legal team) and the tape-recorded voices of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.  Spielberg makes effective use of them at an earlier point of the narrative but Nixon’s last-minute involvement is cheap and corny.   This time, as we hear the President’s voice, Janusz Kamiński’s camera looms towards a silhouetted figure within one of the windows of the White House.  The director then cuts to the initial discovery of the Watergate break-in, as if to say:  this led to the Washington Post’s next big coup (and to a contribution to the Hollywood freedom-of-the-press tradition that I, Steven Spielberg, am now maintaining).  The New York Times, which first published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, has unsurprisingly complained about its relatively minor role in the film.   During 2017, its entry on IMDB appeared first as The Post, then as The Papers, finally as The Post again.  I doubt it would have been enough to appease the Times but The Papers – with its dual meaning and applicability to newspapers generally – would have been a much better title.

    24 January 2018

    [1] On 15 June 1971, the Washington Post Company went public with the sale of ‘Class B common stock to the general public for $26 per share’.  On 18 June 1971, the paper began publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers.  On 30 June 1971, the US Supreme Court upheld the right of the Post and other newspapers to publish the Pentagon Papers.

     

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