Old Yorker

  • The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noah Baumbach (2017)

    The territory of his films is so familiar and their quality so dependable that Noah Baumbach is at increasing risk of being taken for granted.  I chose to forego his latest at the London Film Festival:  seeing The Meyerowitz Stories just a few days later made me more sharply aware that, except for 120 BPM and perhaps Mudbound, Baumbach’s film beats anything that I did see at LFF.  As its name suggests, this comedy-drama is formally episodic but its picture of the titular New York family develops and richens continuously over the course of these episodes.  The pivotal figure in the story is the elderly paterfamilias Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman), who didn’t become the renowned sculptor he was all set to be.  Harold’s self-esteem is undiminished, even magnified, by the world’s failure to appreciate him.  Baumbach explores, instead of the familiar tyranny of the recognised creative genius, the more insidious tyranny of a fameless counterpart.  At the opening of a new exhibition by his more successful contemporary L J Shapiro (Judd Hirsch), Harold breezily dismisses L J as ‘popular but minor’:  Olympian judgments are meat and drink to Harold, and extend well beyond fine art.  Although each of his middle-aged children – Danny (Adam Sandler), Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) and their half-brother Matthew (Ben Stiller) – finds him reliably infuriating, all three have tended, if not always consciously, to take their father at his own high estimation.

    Harold is onto his fourth wife, Maureen (Emma Thompson), a ditsy unreformed alcoholic.  We also meet – more briefly but memorably – Maureen’s immediate predecessor Julia (Candice Bergen), who is Matthew’s mother.  Julia has only one significant speech, in which she regrets her faults as a parent.  Harold, with infinitely more to say in the course of the film, utters never a word of self-reproach.   He tends to use Matthew’s professional success as a stick to beat Danny with – that’s how it seems at any rate to Danny, a musician manqué who’s recently split from his wife and moved back to his father’s Manhattan home.  Yet the younger son – visiting from Los Angeles, where his financial consultant work seems to be going better than his marriage – is no less frazzled than the elder:  Matthew is ‘tired of apologising for doing well’.  As for the glumly hectic, solitary Jean, Harold seems hardly to notice her.   When he falls seriously ill and his three offspring go on a hospital visit, they see another elderly man in the car park; Jean reveals that, when she was a young girl, this old friend of their father’s exposed himself to her.   Danny and Matthew spring into exuberant avenging action, not on the geriatric himself but on his car.  Their sister’s exasperated, deflating response is ‘I could smash every car in the parking lot and burn down the hospital and it wouldn’t unfuck me up’.   For the audience, her childhood revelation comes as a shock but not a surprise.  It was already clear that Jean is the family member most likely to be overlooked.

    All this makes The Meyerowitz Stories (the mildly irritating parenthesis of the full title is best ignored) sound much more miserable than it actually is.   This is partly because the predominantly acerbic exchanges are written and played acutely and wittily, and partly because the overall situation is far from hopeless.  For a start, there’s Danny’s daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten), in her freshman year at Bard College, an institution where Harry once taught but which has more recently insulted him with its plans for a retrospective of his work as part of a (perish the thought) group show.  Eliza thrives at Bard, where she makes soft-porn arty shorts, typically starring herself and occasionally with a supporting (non-porn) role even for her aunt Jean.  Unlike any of her older relatives, Eliza is balanced and content – thanks to a generational distance from Harry’s influence and, more importantly, to the fact that, as Nathanael Hood suggests in his review of the film on the Audiences Everywhere website, ‘Danny has somehow managed to overcome Harold’s tyrannical parenting to become the loving, supportive father he always needed’.   More generally, Noah Baumbach and his high-powered cast do an admirable job of animating the co-existent bonds, rivalries, affections and resentments that fuel family relationships. The Meyerowitzes are, in accordance with the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, distinctive and expertly shaped for entertainment but they’re essentially recognisable too.  For the most part, Baumbach refrains from over-resolving things either sentimentally or bitterly.  When Harold’s children occasionally lose their inhibitions enough to express their feelings – Danny and Matthew vandalising the car, or coming to blows with each other – it provides an instantaneous release of tension but no kind of solution.

    Critical praise for the acting has centred on Adam Sandler’s Danny – on how amazingly good, in the light of many terrible performances, Sandler is.  I can’t share this view, not because he’s not good – he is, very – but because this is still only the second time I’ve seen Sandler and he was good the first time too, in Funny People (2009).  I’ve seen Dustin Hoffman much more often but I’ve rarely seen him better.  In his eightieth year, Hoffman has a masterly blend of brio and control:  the monstrous Harry is one of his most satisfying creations.   Noah Baumbach succeeds again in exploiting Ben Stiller’s unusual talents.  Stiller has an agonised superficiality that’s winning – and touching, when Matthew breaks down in a speech about his absent father at the opening of the Bard retrospective.  (This takes place shortly after the fisticuffs between Matthew and Danny; it’s a daft joke, and a pity, that Baumbach has the well-groomed Matthew still bearing the traces of a bloody nose when he delivers the speech.)   The women in the cast don’t have the same opportunities as the men:  the relative underwriting of Jean is an unfortunate echo of her lack of identity in the family and may explain the sense of strain in Elizabeth Marvel’s playing:  the actress rather than the character seems anxious to assert herself.  Marvel is much better, though, than Emma Thompson, whose contrived, unfelt kookiness as Maureen stands out in the wrong way.  On the plus side, Candice Bergen’s Julia is very fine and Grace Van Patten does well as Eliza; in a smaller role, Rebecca Miller registers as L J Shapiro’s daughter.  There are cameo appearances from Adam Driver (as one of Matthew’s LA clients) and Sigourney Weaver (as herself – a guest at L J’s private view).   The link between dogs and unhappy events in Wes Anderson/Noah Baumbach cinema is back in evidence in The Meyerowitz Stories.  At least in this case the canine is the cause of an accident – and to Harry – rather than on the receiving end of one.  It’s the consequences of a fall out dog-walking that land the old sod in intensive care.

    19 October 2017

     

  • You Were Never Really Here

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lynne Ramsay (2017)

    Sometime in the early 1970s, a friend’s mother walked out of a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend at the University of York.  As she was leaving, a student in the foyer affably asked her, ‘Can’t you take it?’  ‘I can’, she replied, ‘but I don’t see why I should’.  Sally says this sums up what she felt departing the Leicester Square Odeon halfway through You Were Never Really Here.  (She also asked me to remind her ‘never to go to a film again just because I like the main actor’.)  There were several reasons why I saw Lynne Ramsay’s film through, none of them very good.  The screening was on the last morning of the London Film Festival, an event that I’d greatly enjoyed in spite of its disappointments:  it would have been a dismal anti-climax to end on a walkout.  You Were Never Really Here, unlike most of the LFF fare that I saw this year, is short – only eighty-five minutes.   There was always the remote possibility that the later stages would change my view of what had gone before.  If I sat the film out, I’d be fully justified in inveighing against it.

    The protagonist of You Were Never Really Here, adapted by Ramsay from a 2013 novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a psychologically disturbed ‘enforcer’.  At the start of the story, based in New York, Joe is living with his elderly, ailing mother (Judith Roberts); the main plot concerns the relationship that unexpectedly develops between him and Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), a teenage girl who first enters his life as a job of work.  Nina’s father (Alex Manette), an ambitious politician, employs Joe to find and retrieve his daughter, who has somehow been drawn into a paedophile sex-trafficking ring.  The film’s fragmented, disorienting structure and audiovisual scheme serve to express Joe’s disturbed, paranoid mind.  Visually and verbally assaultive, the narrative is dominated by killings, grievous bodily harm and self-harm.  Lynne Ramsay’s visual virtuosity is unarguable:  You Were Never Really Here is a succession of how-did-she-do-that compositions.  Letting the camera dwell on an image as if fascinated by it, Ramsay has the gift of making this fascination infectious – regardless of the cause or context of the image.  There are rapt contemplations of, inter alia, a sopping wet towel, jelly beans and pooling blood.  In other respects, Ramsay doesn’t transcend cliché – the brief flashbacks to childhood abuse and traumatising military service to ‘explain’ Joe, the repeated juxtaposition of scenes of mayhem and a soundtrack of tinny, easy listening music playing on a radio or similar.

    As Joe, Joaquin Phoenix is rarely off the screen.  The weight he’s put on for recent parts gives him an intimidating bulk.   He’s shaggily, uncomfortably convincing as a man out of control (he won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for this performance).  But the title of the Woody Allen film that Phoenix made between The Master and this one is in danger of becoming his trademark screen persona:  I hope he can take a break from irrational man roles in the near future.  Lynne Ramsay’s screenplay (which also, and more surprisingly, won at Cannes) requires Phoenix to be almost continuously in extremis.   The strongest sequence in You Were Never Really Here – because it’s so distinctive in the context of the film as a whole – shows a group of laughing, carefree young women on a New York street asking Joe to take their photo.  His behaviour and demeanour up to this point make you fearful of his response but he takes the phone offered to him and politely obliges; in doing so, he still inadvertently unnerves one of the women.  Joe’s situation is more compelling when it intersects with some kind of normality.  The lack of such intersection makes the film monotonously grim – a main reason why it doesn’t begin to deserve the comparisons with Taxi Driver that some critics are making.

    The climax epitomises the incoherence and aesthetic self-indulgence of You Were Never Really Here.  With virtually everyone else in the cast dead, Joe and Nina go to a diner together.  The girl asks a question along the lines of where do we go from here.  There’s no immediate reply so Nina goes to the bathroom.  Alone, Joe shoots himself through the head.  A waitress breezes by, oblivious to the fact that the bill she’s left on the table is tipped in the blood that’s spreading across its surface.  Nina returns and touches Joe’s head.  He wakes up.  They get up and leave the diner.  The vacated table is spotless.  Has Lynne Ramsay provided two alternative endings or did Joe imagine his suicide?   I guess the latter, even though the film hasn’t begun to suggest how the mentally fragile Joe and the by now deeply traumatised Nina could possibly ‘move on’ together.

    This back-from-the-dead finale echoes an earlier sequence in which Joe attempts to drown himself.  For a few moments, he appears to have succeeded but then ‘sees’ Nina struggling underwater to swim upwards to the surface.  Joe is impelled to save his own life in order to save the girl’s.   The clearest message of the diner sequence(s) is that Lynne Ramsay wants it both ways.   She can have the waitress inanely say ‘Have a nice day’ to a man she doesn’t notice is a corpse – that got a knowing laugh around the Leicester Square Odeon – and end with a vaguely hopeful indication that loving feelings between people are salvific.   Lynne Ramsay was likeably honest on stage before the screening.  Declining even a mini-Q&A with the LFF person introducing her, she asked to be judged by what she put on the screen.  I’ve done as Ramsay asked.  She also warned us that, after the film was over, ‘You’ll feel you need a walk’.   I gather from Sally she wasn’t the only person to bring the walk forward.  There were no breezy questions in the foyer this time, just another woman rolling her eyes and heading for the exit.

    15 October 2017

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