Old Yorker

  • A Star Is Born (1954)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1954)

    There are three versions of A Star Is Born and a fourth, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is due for release this year.  The 1954 film is the most famous one (so far) and this is thanks to Judy Garland.  Her own life story was a Hollywood tragic melodrama.  Her performing style was remarkable for its all-out emotionality.  As a result, the distinction between Garland and the character she’s playing is often, in retrospect, blurred – from the teenage Dorothy singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ in The Wizard of Oz (1939) to the screwed-up superstar Jenny Bowman in I Could Go on Singing (1963), her last film, where the role has unmissable autobiographical flavours.  In A Star Is Born, Garland plays the antithesis of the popular image of who she was.  Vicki Lester, the title character, is professionally reliable, a devoted wife and an emotional tower of strength compared with her helplessly alcoholic ex-matinee-idol husband Norman Maine (James Mason).  Even so, the lead performance and the exposé of how cruelly studio-system Hollywood used and abused its stars, coalesce – so that the film’s subject seems to be Judy Garland.

    Moss Hart’s screenplay, adapted from that of the 1937 A Star is Born (by Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell), skewers not only the Hollywood machine but also the fickle public whose appetites it exploits.  The machine, represented chiefly by the nasty studio fixer Matt Libby (Jack Carson), is largely upstaged by hoi polloi, especially in the hysterical sequence in which a baying horde of Vicki’s fans (‘There she is!’) bursts into the foreground of Norman’s funeral and his grieving widow collapses in the press of bodies and an explosion of flash bulbs.  The lone bastard Libby doesn’t make a lot of sense since his boss, the studio head (Charles Bickford), is, much of the time, a model of dreary probity and a caring father figure to Vicki.   These clichéd character types are one example of how George Cukor’s film is a reflection rather than a critique of contemporary Hollywood.  The sumptuous, extravagant production, reinforced by the CinemaScope presentation, is another:  some of the sets and elaborate costumes for the chorus line get no more than a few seconds of screen time.

    In spite of which, the picture is insanely long – 178 minutes.  The only point at which George Cukor is at pains to save time and cut costs is shortly after the first encounter of Norman and Vicki – or Esther Blodgett as she still then is.  Cukor abbreviates what-happened-next to an extended sequence of black-and-white still photographs.  This temporary switch to monochrome has considerable impact because of the extraordinary richness of the film’s colour scheme, which often heightens its emotional effects.  (The DP was Sam Leavitt and the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene a special colour consultant to Cukor.)  The stills shorthand is puzzling nonetheless:  Cukor doesn’t use it again and it’s not as if these are photographs of Norman and Vicki that will appear in the press.

    A Star is Born begins and ends with a benefit at the Shrine Auditorium.  At the opening benefit, Esther Blodgett is a showbiz hopeful, performing a song and dance number with others.  Norman Maine is a big star, his arrival eagerly awaited by the crowds lining the street outside the Shrine.  The closing event takes place shortly after his suicide; Esther-Vicki emerges from the depths of despair to attend.  She introduces herself from the stage, to tumultuous applause, as ‘Mrs Norman Maine’.  Because Judy Garland became a star thanks to talent rather than conventional beauty, there’s a resonance to the sequences that show the studio giving Esther Blodgett a disfiguring facial makeover.  There’s a minor resonance too in the heroine’s change of name:  Garland was born Frances Gumm.  The persisting connection, however, is between her personality and the themes of disintegrating fame and mental health pulsing through the story.  Garland is in fine voice but the voice, and the misery it’s difficult not to hear in it, consistently overpower the songs.  Her acting, alert and accomplished as it is, is sometimes hard to bear:  she seems to be emotionally electrified by the camera – so little of what she does registers as painless or casual.  Her dancing – I’m always surprised that her legs are so long and shapely – is the most comfortably appealing aspect of her repertoire here.  Her performance is phenomenal but exhausting.

    The best thing about the film is James Mason’s Norman Maine.  In the opening section at the Shrine Auditorium, Mason’s athleticism and smiling, sneering instability make the drunken Norman truly unpredictable and threatening.  (He eventually barges his way onto the stage where Esther and her colleagues are performing.  She resourcefully pretends he’s part of the act and saves the day for all concerned.)  Mason plays this quite brilliantly but he’s very good throughout, especially at conveying Norman’s sense of humiliation and a self-loathing that’s increased by Vicki’s love for and loyalty to him.  This on-the-skids character is a very familiar one, of course, and it may have helped Mason that his role was smaller than the leading lady’s.  Whatever the reasons, you increasingly want more of Norman and less of Vicki.

    Except for ‘The Man That Got Away’, the new songs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin are undistinguished.  The film also reuses standards (‘Swanee’, ‘I’ll Get By’, ‘You Took Advantage of Me’, ‘The Peanut Vendor’ and more) but A Star Is Born seems to have as many melodramatic set pieces as it does song and dance numbers.   Standouts include a sequence at a racecourse, where Libby goads Norman – they both just happen to be there – into (1) a fist fight and (2) falling off the wagon; and the courtroom sequence in which a judge hands down sentences to a drunk and disorderly group that includes Norman.  When Vicki intervenes to appeal against her husband’s going to jail and insists that she’ll ensure Norman doesn’t reoffend, the judge relents and gives him a suspended sentence instead. (If only Cukor had had the non-celebrity drunks react and one of them say, ‘I wish my wife would do that for me’.)  Comfortably eclipsing these highlights, however, is the notorious Academy Awards ceremony scene.  This is not just a runaway winner in the competitive so-bad-it’s-good category in A Star Is Born but a masochistic classic of its kind.

    The clothes, the references to television, the mention of a dream sequence as an obligatory part of a new musical:  all these indicate that the film is set in the 1950s.  One immediately striking thing about the Oscar episode is that the guests at Cukor’s ceremony sit at little tables rather than in auditorium rows of seats:  the actual venue from 1950 to 1960 inclusive was the Pantages Theatre.  What’s more, Vicki Lester is one of only four nominees for Best Actress:  since 1936, there have always been five.  I’m not sure if these differences from the real thing were stipulated by the Academy – albeit pointlessly, since their name and statuettes are being used – but that’s by the by.  As she waits for the result to be announced, Vicki is as worried by Norman’s absence from the ceremony as she is about the outcome.  When her name is called, she comes onstage and begins her acceptance speech, only to be interrupted by a loud, solo handclap from the back of the room.  Norman has arrived:  he makes his inebriated way to the stage, hijacks his wife’s speech and, in an over-expansive arm movement, with his back to Vicki, inadvertently whacks her in the face.

    For Oscar nerds, however, even this on-screen episode is challenged by Judy Garland reality.  This is how Robert Osborne describes the Best Actress contest for 1954, in his book Academy Awards Illustrated:

    ‘It was a neck-and-neck race to the finish between two red-hot favorites:  Judy Garland, in the midst of a major career comeback, and Grace Kelly, the new golden girl of the movies.  On the night of the awards – March 30, 1955 – Garland was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, new mother of a day-old son.  NBC-TV, anticipating a possible Garland victory, had television equipment set up outside her hospital room, ready for on-the-spot coverage.  But when William Holden announced the winner …, it was newcomer Kelly who stepped up to receive the award. …’

    The NBC camera crew allegedly left Garland’s bedside with a grumpy lack of ceremony.  Groucho Marx cabled her to describe the Academy’s decision as ‘the biggest robbery since Brink’s’.  Judy Garland certainly deserved the award more than Grace Kelly in The Country Girl or any of that year’s other nominees (Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina and Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession).  But Groucho’s judgment, for all that it’s a good line, is OTT.  As such, it’s a fitting capper to A Star Is Born.

    7 January 2018

  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin McDonagh (2017)

    Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) rents three billboards near her home in Ebbing, Missouri.  The notices she has posted on them – ‘Raped while dying’, ‘And still no arrests’, ‘How come, Chief Willoughby?’ – refer to the assault and murder of Mildred’s teenage daughter Angela, seven months previously.  Even before these words appear on them, the hoardings have something to say:  the dim palimpsest of old adverts indicates their long disuse.  And it’s not long before the billboards in Martin McDonagh’s film have become a truly formidable image, from two aspects.  Mildred’s angry messages – black letters on a red ground – are decidedly confrontational.  The structures holding them, viewed from the back, take on the look of stark memorials.  (Reduced in size in a long shot, they bring to mind the three dark-framed photographs among Lee Chandler’s few possessions in Manchester by the Sea.)   The billboards’ quality of sadness derives mainly from the tragedy that has consumed Mildred’s life but their desuetude (it turns out they last advertised in 1986) adds to it, implies that Ebbing is a place somehow left behind.  It’s pointed out to Mildred – though she’s already well aware – that few vehicles nowadays use the road the billboards stand beside.  Posting the notices, although it may therefore be a futile gesture from the point of view of getting justice for Angela Hayes, has an impact nevertheless.  Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the Ebbing police chief, is well respected and popular with the local community, who take it as read that he’s been doing his best to find Angela’s killer.  It’s common knowledge too that Willoughby is terminally ill.  Mildred – later described as the woman ‘who never smiles’ – has a proven talent for falling out with people, including her now ex-husband (also an ex-cop) Charlie (John Hawkes).  The billboards widen the scope of her unpopularity.

    Although the time is the present, McDonagh augments a sense of the place being part of the past by referring to genres with strong traditions in film history.   Ebbing has a one-horse-town look about it and Frances McDormand, from the moment Mildred walks into the local advertising agency to inquire about renting the billboards, the uncompromising expression and wary but ready-for-a-fight gait of a Western protagonist.  It’s clear the agency doesn’t get a lot of business.  Until Mildred enters, the young manager Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones) has been sitting at his desk reading a book by Flannery O’Connor:  this hints at Southern Gothic elements to follow (even if this is technically the Midwest).  The O’Connor book is A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories and the name of the title story reflects a major part of the moral scheme of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.  Halfway through, Sheriff Willoughby takes his own life, though not before writing a series of notes that confirm he was a good man, personally and professionally.  Willoughby’s legacy encourages junior police officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell) to turn from crass racist hothead, ridiculous mother’s boy and Mildred’s chief antagonist into something more uncertain.  Jason starts to find – though it’s hard to find – the good man in himself.

    I’ve not seen either of Martin McDonagh’s two previous features, In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), or any of his stage plays, but his reputation for gruesome, jet-black comedy precedes him:  the morally upward trajectory of Three Billboards outlined above therefore comes as a surprise.  One of this film’s fascinations is the unresolved tension between the writer-director’s misanthropic impulses and humanist efforts.  As those words imply, the former come more naturally to McDonagh.  He shows – even shows off – a flair for foul-mouthed dialogue that crackles with often nasty wit.  He’s also keen for his angry characters to express themselves through physical as well as verbal violence.  When her dentist (Jerry Winsett) complains to the police about the billboards, Mildred makes an appointment to see him and, while she’s in the chair, grabs a dental drill and drives it into his thumbnail.  As she drops her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges) off at school, someone throws a can at their car.  She gets out and accosts the two kids she thinks responsible; she knees both of them, a boy and a girl, in the groin.   When Jason Dixon learns of Willoughby’s suicide, he wrongly assumes it’s the result of the billboard notices, goes to the advertising agency and hurls Red out of an upstairs window before going downstairs to kick his unconscious body.

    McDonagh nevertheless wants to find more in his characters than first meets the eye (and ear) and to show them capable of the unexpected.  This works easily with Mildred:  her views on law enforcement are illiberal, to put it mildly, but she is, from the start, predominantly a grieving mother – we expect to see beyond and beneath her anger.  It’s just about plausible that Chief Willoughby, in the note that he leaves for Mildred, not only assures her that his suicide is unrelated to the billboard notices but also reveals himself to be her mystery benefactor.  (When Red demands an extra month’s rental, in the hope Mildred won’t be able to pay for the notices to stay up, the money required arrives on cue, with an anonymous letter.)  McDonagh’s approach is less effective in the case of Jason, who requires radical treatment in order to become a reformed character.  Even though he doesn’t undergo a Damascene conversion, his evolution is imposed on the story rather than humanly convincing.

    His change of heart is prompted by the letter that Willoughby leaves for Jason, telling him that he’ll realise his potential as a detective only if he lets go of hate and learns to love.  Up to this point, however, Jason has shown nil potential for effective police work and not only because he can’t control his temper:  he’s presented as comically thick too.  Willoughby’s successor Abercrombie (Clarke Peters) fires him for the assault on Red but Jason, who conveniently still has his keys to the place, enters the otherwise deserted police station after dark to find and read Willoughby’s letter.  He does so just as Mildred, on the opposite side of the street, starts throwing Molotov cocktails at the station, in revenge for her billboards being set on fire – an act for which she assumes the police were responsible.  Jason emerges from the blazing station with severe burns but with the Angela Hayes case files that he’s clutching, intact.  In hospital, he shares a room with Red, who’s forgiving enough to pour him a glass of orange juice (and is never seen again).  McDonagh’s plotting is cavalier by now:  Jason, in view of the severity of his injuries, is discharged improbably quickly.  We next see him in a bar, eavesdropping on a conversation between two men one of whom – unbeknown to Jason – previously threatened Mildred in the local gift shop where she works part-time.  Jason now hears him talking about an assault on a girl some months back.  After taking his car details (the vehicle has an Idaho license plate), Jason, convinced that he’s Angela’s killer, provokes a fight with the man.  Jason comes off worse but comes away with a DNA sample, which he takes to Abercrombie.

    Martin McDonagh is well aware of the expectations his taste for mayhem are setting up in the audience.  After the sequence at the dentist’s and the grievous bodily harm Jason inflicts on Red, you fear the worst when the creepy man (Brendan Sexton III) confronts Mildred in the gift shop; when Mildred, having discovered it was her ex-husband who set fire to her billboards, brandishes a wine bottle as she approaches the restaurant table where Charlie and his new girlfriend (Samara Weaving) are sitting; when Jason phones Mildred with the bad news that the sample he obtained doesn’t match the DNA found on Angela’s body.  As his mother (Sandy Martin) dozes in her chair, Jason sits with a rifle close enough at hand to follow Willoughby’s lead and blow his own brains (or his mother’s) out.  In all three instances, McDonagh refrains from bloodshed – to real effect.  He’s also both too smart and too divided to deliver a facile upbeat ending, although what he goes for instead is in some ways unconvincing.  Taking the view that the man they suspected has raped someone, even if not Angela, Mildred and Jason decide to drive together to Idaho to kill him.  This is hard to credit, even allowing that both have hitherto used violence to get things off their chest.  It seems particularly improbable that Mildred would leave her teenage son in order to undertake such a mission.  As they start their drive, Mildred confesses to Jason that she started the fire at the police station; he replies that he already knows.  They both then voice second thoughts about the planned Idaho homicide but agree that they can decide en route.  As I watched this ending, I felt it was a copout.  In retrospect, I like it better – if only as an admission on McDonagh’s part that, like his protagonists, he wasn’t sure what to do next.

    Frances McDormand may not have the greatest character range but she’s just about peerless playing tough, ornery women.  She was remarkable in the title role in Olive Kitteridge (2014), the HBO mini-series adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s novel.  When the sour misanthrope Olive ruled the domestic roost, she could be a pain; when she was in a position of social vulnerability, as at her son’s posh wedding, McDormand made her extraordinarily moving.  Mildred Hayes’s plight in Three Billboards is so grim that it’s hard not to root for her throughout, however unreasonable and destructive her behaviour may be.  McDormand creates a vivid portrait of a woman fuelled by angry grief but McDonagh does well to suggest that Mildred was never easy to get on with.  He does so in an upsetting flashback to an argument with Angela (Kathryn Newton), who storms out of the house yelling ‘I hope I get raped on the way home’.  (It’s not explicit that this argument occurred the night that Angela was raped and died but you assume so.)  Frances McDormand’s acting appears to be technically simple but its emotional impact is powerful.  The characters she plays often have a built-in bullshit detector; the actress has an early warning system when sentimentality threatens.  The outstanding example of this in Three Billboards comes when Mildred, tending the potted shrubs she gets for the ground around the billboards, starts talking to a lone female deer that wanders into the area.  ‘You’re not trying to make me believe in reincarnation, are you?’ she says to the deer, ‘Because you’re pretty but you ain’t her’.  McDormand’s face has registered the thought even before she speaks this line.

    Sam Rockwell’s performance as Jason is the most strongly felt I’ve seen him give although the awards he’s winning have, I think, as much to do with the character’s ‘redemption’ as with the quality of Rockwell’s acting – the role gives him plenty of opportunities for grandstanding, which he always takes.  Woody Harrelson has played plenty of men with anger management problems before so it’s refreshing to see him succeed in the role of an emotionally solid counterweight to the principals.   One of the strongest moments in the film comes when Chief Willoughby, while questioning Mildred about the incident with the dentist, suddenly coughs up blood that spatters her forehead.  Though they both knew he was dying, they’re shocked into an instantly different mood:  horrified and embarrassed, he mutters a quiet apology; she involuntarily expresses compassionate sympathy.   For the most part, though, Willoughby is resolutely calm, even as he prepares to kill himself, after spending an idyllic day with his wife Anne (an awkward Abbie Cornish) and daughters.  (He ends his life in preference to letting it run its full course in miserable pain and indignity.)  As in Manchester by the Sea, Lucas Hedges gets the most out of sarcastic one-liners thanks to perfect deadpan delivery.  It’s a pity, though understandable, that the role isn’t larger but Hedges skilfully suggests Robbie’s confusion of feelings.  He is exasperated and embarrassed by Mildred’s a-mother’s-gotta-do-what-a-mother’s-gotta-do behaviour yet he’s loyal to her.  He becomes more subdued as he gradually recognises that his own grieving has to take second place to hers.  McDonagh skimps even more on Charlie and there’s not a lot John Hawkes can do with him.  The most crudely conceived character is Charlie’s nineteen-year-old airhead girlfriend Penelope, though Samara Weaving plays her with creditable empathy.   In the smaller parts, Željko Ivanek, as a desk sergeant at the police station, does particularly well.

    The limited conception of certain other roles is more problematic because it’s politically correct.  There are three African-Americans and they are all intelligent and decent – nothing less, nothing more – although McDonagh writes himself into a corner with Abercrombie.  In spite of the new chief’s brains and integrity, Ebbing policing is just as hopeless after he arrives.  Jason doesn’t face charges for his assault on Red, even though it’s witnessed by Abercrombie.  The latter is fobbed off too with Mildred’s comically flimsy alibi for the attack on the police station.  The two other blacks are Denise (Amanda Warren), who runs the gift shop, and Jerome (Darrell Britt-Gibson), who works with Red and who, when Charlie’s arson destroys the billboard notices, saves the day when he informs Mildred that it’s standard practice to get a reserve set printed.  It would be easier to accept the African-American characters’ lack of negative qualities if McDonagh wasn’t so keen on drawing attention to the shortcomings of white ones.  His approach to James (Peter Dinklage) is similarly condescending.  James, who quietly carries a torch for Mildred, supplies her with a false alibi for the Molotov cocktail attack; as a reward, she goes out for dinner with him.  Charlie and Penelope are in the same restaurant; Charlie comes over to Mildred and James’s table to make fun of their date and spit out vicious dwarfist insults.  After a row with Mildred, James leaves the restaurant with the parting shot, ‘I know I’m a midget who sells used cars and has a drinking problem – I know that’.    His self-awareness is an empty sophistication on McDonagh’s part.  Well as Peter Dinklage plays James, the viewer is meant to feel purely sorry for him because he’s a midget.

    Apart from the great billboards, there’s not a lot of texture to the locale though McDonagh animates the bars and diners through his excellent choice of music playing in them (The Four Tops’ ‘Walk Away Renee’, Joan Baez’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’).  This and Carter Burwell’s score, though it’s not one of his strongest, are more effective than the traditional Irish melody ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ used for the introduction and subsequently:  perhaps this means something personally to Martin McDonagh but it doesn’t connect to the culture of the people on the screen.  The black comedy and the straight drama sides of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri don’t mesh either but much of the acting, the story and the title trio make the film compelling.

    7 January 2018

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