Old Yorker

  • Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul McGuigan (2017)

    Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool recreates Gloria Grahame’s affair, in the last two years of her life, with a young Liverpudlian actor called Peter Turner.  The film ends with her death from cancer, at the age of fifty-seven, in October 1981. The screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh (Control, Nowhere Boy) is based on Turner’s memoir of the same name.  He was nearly thirty years Grahame’s junior and a jobbing actor.  She had behind her four marriages, only one of which lasted more than a few years (her ex-husbands included both Nicholas Ray and Anthony, his son from a previous relationship), and movie stardom that was also short-lived.  Perhaps their relationship has come to seem increasingly extraordinary to Turner with the passing years (during which he’s had work but hasn’t achieved fame).   It’s certainly not surprising that he decided to write an account of his love affair with Grahame and it’s a tale worth telling.   Paul McGuigan works his way competently through the unhappy events of the story but it’s hard to dramatise this material on screen without certain elements (such as the key stages and crises of a terminal illness) coming over as generic – an effect occasionally reinforced by McGuigan’s choice of image (bereft Peter standing alone in an empty street).  Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool features fine performances but it left me feeling glum – I think because, as well as being miserable, it felt somewhat routine.

    In an absorbing opening sequence, in her dressing room at a Lancashire theatre, Gloria (Annette Bening) prepares to go on stage as Amanda Wingfield, in a touring production of The Glass Menagerie.  At the end of the sequence, she collapses in pain.  Admitted to hospital, she makes contact with Peter (Jamie Bell) in Liverpool.  The narrative that follows is divided into the present tense of late summer 1981 and flashbacks to the earlier phase of her relationship with Peter.  They first meet in 1979, when each is renting a room in the same Primrose Hill house.  He has never heard of her; it’s only when they’re in a pub and the barman recognises Gloria that Peter realises she was once a Hollywood name.  (The barman is film-buff enough to tell Peter that she ‘won an Oscar too, as I recall’.)  After discharging herself from hospital, Gloria comes to stay with Peter and his family – his parents (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham) and brother (Stephen Graham).  They welcome her warmly as an old friend:  Gloria has stayed with the Turners before although the film doesn’t cover those relatively happy times.   Its past tense concentrates largely on the time the couple spends together in America, where Gloria’s concealment of her ill health is the cause of increasing friction between them.  An exasperated Peter eventually returns alone to Liverpool, after getting a part in an Alan Bleasdale stage play.

    Annette Bening has played real-life figures before but not ones with well-known voices.  Her vocal impersonation of Gloria Grahame takes a while to get used to but only a short while:  the voice is soon an integral part of the character she creates.  In the early stages, I wondered too whether the keen intelligence that Bening naturally projects was right for Grahame, before realising I was making unfair assumptions about the latter, based purely on her screen personae (Ado Annie in Oklahoma! as well as her trademark tarnished beauty in a succession of noir roles).  Playing a dying woman, Annette Bening’s vividity takes on a special poignancy.  Her Gloria is funny and charming but painfully brittle – physically as well as psychologically.  Jamie Bell’s emotionally fine-tuned Peter is impressive:  there’s a convincing rawness about him – callowness and sensitivity are two sides of the same coin.  It’s great to see Bell dancing again, albeit briefly (and not with Julie Walters this time), in Peter and Gloria’s dynamic groove to a disco track in her room in Primrose Hill.  The choice of music works well throughout, especially the repeated extracts from Elton John’s ‘Song for Guy’, which becomes in effect the theme song of the love affair.

    You take for granted Julie Walters’s excellence in a role like Mrs Turner; what’s remarkable is that she still makes it fresh.  Kenneth Cranham partners her admirably.  He has a very strong moment when Tim Ray (Tom Brittney), one of Gloria’s four children, appears on the scene, determined to take his mother back to America.  (She died in New York City the day after leaving Liverpool, hence the title.)  Mr Turner calmly tells the distraught Peter that he must accede to Tim’s wishes; Cranham’s eyes show the father’s distress at his son’s distress.  Stephen Graham is good, as always – in spite of a wig that makes him look less like Peter’s brother than kin to the Scousers in the Harry Enfield sketch.  Vanessa Redgrave is miscast in her cameo as Gloria’s mother Jeanne, who recites John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II grandly but falteringly.  Redgrave’s very presence fundamentally contradicts the theatrical fraud this woman seems meant to be.  As Gloria’s rancorous elder sister, Frances Barber is funny when she first opens her mouth, with a flat, scornful prompt to her mother:  ‘Eden’.   It’s a pity the script then requires Barber virtually to repeat herself with each of her subsequent one-liners.

    Gloria’s long-held, never fulfilled ambition to play Juliet is, against the odds, a more successful Shakespearean element of the film.  Shortly before their final parting, Peter arranges with a contact at a local theatre for him and Gloria to visit while there’s nothing going on there.  They sit together on stage reading, very well and affectingly, lovers’ lines from Romeo and Juliet.  Paul McGuigan makes the right decision, when Peter watches Gloria in her Hollywood heyday in Naked Alibi (1954), to show the actual film instead of attempting a reconstruction.   This links nicely with the closing clip of the real Gloria Grahame in 1953 receiving her Academy Award, as Best Supporting Actress for The Bad and the Beautiful, from Edmund Gwenn.  I’d seen this before and been amused by the brevity of her acceptance speech (four words:  ‘Thank you very much’) and hurried exit from the stage. ‘She just made it’, jokes Bob Hope, the MC, as she disappears.  Coming at the end of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, the clip, though still funny, is also a saddening confirmation of the transience of Grahame’s time in the limelight and of her far from long life.

    12 October 2017

  • The Glass Castle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Destin Daniel Cretton (2017)

    The first part of the IMDB headline describes The Glass Castle accurately:  ‘A young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of non-conformist nomads with a mother who’s an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father …’   Destin Daniel Cretton’s film – with a screenplay by the director, Andrew Lanham and Marti Noxon – is based on a memoir of the same name by the American journalist Jeannette Walls.  Published in 2005, Walls’s book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.  The film version has had a shorter stay in London cinemas.  It opened the first weekend in October; the first weekend in November it’s nowhere to be seen.  There are several good reasons for that.

    In particular, something has gone badly wrong with Cretton’s storytelling.  Even when there’s an occasional strong scene, its context is liable to be baffling.  After one especially spectacular falling out with their dominating father Rex, the four Walls children, by this stage in or approaching their teens, determine to go to school.  (Jeannette, the second of three daughters, is the most strong-willed of the quartet and, in effect, their leader.)  It’s not clear whether Rex and his wife Rose Mary have thwarted previous attempts by the kids to get conventional education and, if so, what has changed now to mean that Jeannette and her siblings will eventually get what they want, as they seem to succeed in doing.  It’s not clear either what home schooling they’ve had hitherto.  (Last year’s Captain Fantastic dodged the question of how Viggo Mortensen’s protagonist envisaged his children’s long-term future but at least gave a picture of the idiosyncratic education they were getting from him.)  The last bit of the IMDB summary (after the ellipsis above) is ‘who would stir the children’s imagination with hope as a distraction to their poverty’.  It’s true that Rex can be more fun to be around than the drippy, distraite Rose Mary but IMDB ‘s words seriously overstate what Cretton realises on screen.

    The narrative switches between the present day, when Jeannette (Brie Larson) is a successful New York-based gossip columnist, preparing to wed her financier boyfriend David (Max Greenfield), and flashbacks to her turbulent girlhood and adolescence.  As she takes a cab home after dinner with David and two of his clients in a posh restaurant, Jeannette catches sight of her parents on the pavement, rooting around in litterbins.  Soon after that, we learn that Rex (Woody Harrelson) and Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) are living in a squat, as they have done for much of their adult lives.  The crude polarisation of street life and Wall Street life in these opening sequences immediately makes this true story seem a false one.   The description of Jeannette’s earlier years is rather better.  In spite of the sketchy background noted above (the details of Rex’s unstable employment history are also sparse), there’s more connection between Woody Harrelson and twelve-year-old Ella Anderson, who plays the adolescent Jeannette, than there is between him and Brie Larson.

    In his previous film, Short Term 12 (2013), Destin Daniel Cretton provided Larson with what turned out to be her breakthrough role.  In the meantime, she has won numerous prizes, including the Best Actress Oscar, for Lenny Abrahamson’s Room (2015).  Larson is an actress who registers a character’s thoughts and feelings more forcefully than fluidly.  (The type has often proved popular with Academy voters:  Sally Field and Hilary Swank, for example, are both dual Best Actress winners.)  It’s true that the adult Jeannette, for much of the present-tense story, is meant to be tensely suppressing her true feelings but Brie Larson is no more expressive when she eventually yields to these feelings than when she’s denying them.  It’s no surprise that Jeannette’s marriage to Max Greenfield’s David is short-lived; it’s utterly mysterious as to what drew them together in the first place and keeps them together until Jeannette discovers that blood’s thicker than water.  To be fair to Larson, the weak script would make it hard for anyone to carry off the role.  In an early flashback scene, Rose Mary is so preoccupied doing her (crap) painting that she tells the infant Jeannette (Chandler Head) to check on a pan on the cooker; the child stands on a stool to do so and her dress catches fire.  Later on, we get a brief sight of the accident’s legacy.  The older Jeannette has severe scarring on her upper body; Larson’s face tells us that she’s understandably very self-conscious about this.  There’s not a hint of how much, if at all, she overcomes these feelings to enjoy physical relationships as an adult.  Cretton seems just about as negligent a writer as Rose Mary is a mother.

    As the short-fuse, alcoholic, life-force paterfamilias, Woody Harrelson is really trying.  He gets across, sometimes impressively, Rex’s confusion of angry self-pity and egocentric humour.  It’s obvious, however, long before the obligatory still photographs of the real-life originals at the end of the film, that the robust, pugnacious Harrelson is physically miscast.  As with Shia LaBeouf in Borg vs McEnroe, the film-makers appear to think all that’s needed to make an actor resemble the actual person he’s impersonating is a hairdo – but at least Janus Metz had no choice:  he could hardly alter the basic appearance of someone as recently famous as John McEnroe.   Since virtually no one has a picture of Rex Walls in their mind’s eye, the decision to give Woody Harrelson a dark wig, without altering his fair skin colouring, is hard to understand.  The wig emphasises the breadth of Harrelson’s face, which doesn’t remotely suggest a man wasted by years of hard drinking.   He is the best reason to see the film, though.  As his wife, Naomi Watts commits an unusual offence for an actor of not acting crazy enough – her Rose Mary is, for the most part, merely scatterbrained.

    The Glass Castle is one of those titles that’s intriguing for a couple of seconds – until, that is, you realise it gives the story away.  Designing a glass castle as the family home turns out to be Rex’s longstanding, never fulfilled project.  When he, Rose Mary and the kids visit his hillbilly mother (well played by Robin Bartlett), Rex’s instant switch into meekness also has a momentary effect that quickly gives way to another:  puzzlement is followed by the realisation that his change of mood signals that Rex was sexually abused as a boy.   His unhappy background is not enough to account for Jeannette’s eventual reconciliation with her destructive and differently abusive father on his deathbed.  The bizarre sentimentality of the film’s ending is the only thing about The Glass Castle that’s breathtaking.

    11 October 2017

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