Old Yorker

  • Song to Song

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terrence Malick (2017)

    The shape of Terrence Malick’s filmography is exceptionally odd.  The more prolific he becomes in the current decade, the more oddly shaped the filmography gets.  Born in 1943, Malick made his first feature, Badlands, just before he was thirty.  Days of Heaven followed in 1978.  Twenty years elapsed before his third picture, The Thin Red Line.  In the decade or so that followed, the intervals were shorter but still considerable:  The New World was released in 2005 and The Tree of Life in 2011.   In the six years since, four Malick features have appeared – three dramatic (To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), now Song to Song) and one documentary (Voyage of Life (2016)).  His next film, Radegund, is due to be released during this year.  I’ve not been very keen on any of the Malicks I’ve seen – Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life.  Not having been to anything more recent than the last-named, however, I’ve been missing plenty.  I thought I should try Song to Song.

    In spite of appearances, this film is something of a throwback to the days when Malick took a long time to complete a project:  it was shot mostly in late 2012 and early 2013, then in post-production for over three years.   In terms of critical reception, however, it’s definitely later Malick and has cemented the polarising effect of his recent work.  Rotten Tomatoes includes for Song to Song, on the one hand, several call-me-philistine-but-this-is-self-indulgent-twaddle-type reviews; and, on the other, raves from the likes of Richard Brody, whose adverse criticism is often acute but who, as an enthusiast, tends to make a film sound like a pretentious wank even when it’s nothing of the kind.  The setting of Song to Song is the music scene of Austin, Texas, where Malick went to school and where he now lives.  There are cameos from, as well as Cate Blanchett, Holly Hunter et al, big names from rock and punk, as themselves – Patti Smith, John Lydon, Iggy Pop.  The principal characters are a successful music producer (Michael Fassbender), two struggling aspiring songwriters (Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling), and a waitress (Natalie Portman).  The story revolves round the relationships involving these four – and ‘revolves’ is the right word:  the narrative of this ‘experimental romantic drama’ (Wikipedia) goes round in circles.  As Song to Song went on, I kept wondering what to write about it, which is always a bad sign.  I found it increasingly and punitively boring but told myself to avoid the temptation of being merely sarcastic:  it must have involved an awful lot of hard work on Terrence Malick’s part.  Resorting to that kind of defence is a bad sign too.

    Malick and the DoP Emmanuel Lubezki shoot people, buildings and landscapes from often extraordinary angles and to sometimes distorting effect.  The various sexual interactions include lesbian but not male homosexual ones.  Rooney Mara has repeated changes of hairstyle and hair colouring.  Her character is particularly prone to existential reflections (‘I want to take back all the wounds … I played with the flame of life’), in meditative voiceover and in conversation alike.  She and Natalie Portman are remarkably different in how much they seem to need other actors.  You wouldn’t have predicted it from Mara’s early roles (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) but she more and more tends to register only as a complement to stronger performers (Carol and The Secret Scripture, as well as this film).  Portman, in contrast, is not only an acting powerhouse but a self-contained unit, somewhat disconnected even from the person she’s pretending to be.  Michael Fassbender seems the most grounded in the music world of the film, though this could be thanks to his passing resemblance to Sting.  Ryan Gosling has more natural humour than his three co-stars.  I’ve seen enough of him doing waggish, zany routines (Blue Valentine, La La Land) yet I still missed Gosling when he was absent for some time during Song to Song.   

    These observations are evidence that I was paying attention of a sort but they don’t add up to any kind of assessment – I hadn’t a clue what Terrence Malick was trying to achieve or express.  I noted characteristics of the main actors because I was so disengaged from them – not surprising because most of what Malick asks them to do seems to consist of drama-class mini-exercises, holding poses, other bits of business.  I might just as well be merely sarcastic after all.  Perhaps the key line of Song to Song comes when Patti Smith (?) is demonstrating something on a guitar (?) to Rooney Mara and says, as if on behalf of the film’s writer-director, ‘I can play a single chord for hours’.

    19 July 2017

  • Wag the Dog

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Barry Levinson (1997)

    The President of the United States – seeking re-election and well ahead in the polls with less than two weeks to Election Day – is caught making advances to an underage girl in a room behind the Oval Office.  While the President is on a trade visit to China, his team brings in spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) to divert attention from the scandal.  Brean’s solution is a pretend war with Albania.  He recruits a Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), to construct the illusion – fake news footage, a theme song, the works.   The outrageous ruse is succeeding splendidly until the CIA gets wind of it.  After an announcement that the war has ended, the abuse scandal edges back towards centre stage so Motss invents a subplot in the form of an American soldier left behind enemy lines.  A military hero’s homecoming is arranged but Schumann (Woody Harrelson), the soldier supplied by the Pentagon for the role, is actually a criminally insane army convict serving time for rape.  He’s shot dead while attempting another sexual assault.  No matter: Motss, who repeatedly assures Brean and the others that he’s had to solve much bigger problems in the course of his Hollywood career, turns the homecoming into a military funeral.  As Election Day draws nigh, however, Motss loses patience.  This is a man who’s produced the Academy Awards show but has never himself won an Oscar; it’s intolerable to him that his latest production is hush-hush while plaudits head the way of the team behind the unimaginative ‘don’t change horses in midstream’ ads for the President’s campaign.  He threatens to blow the gaff on the Albanian war in order to get recognition for his much more creative work.  Brean promptly has Motss killed although the official cause of death is a heart attack.  The President is re-elected.

    The impact of Barry Levinson’s satirical black comedy Wag the Dog was increased by the timing of its original release.  The film, written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet  and loosely based on Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel American Hero, opened in America in late 1997, just a few weeks before the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted (and a few months before the Clinton administration’s bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, which some saw as diversionary action).  Fake news may never have been bigger news than it is twenty years on from 1997 and the audience reaction to Wag the Dog in NFT2 (where it was showing as part of BFI’s Dustin Hoffman retrospective) was, from the very start, audibly strong and audibly knowing.  That soundtrack hardened my resistance to the film.  Its main themes – the distorting effects of television on the political process, war as a form of popular entertainment and of satisfying public appetites – are compelling but Wag the Dog has made its points in less than ten minutes:  the success of the remaining ninety depends on inventive plotting, smart lines and effective acting.   Although it has plenty of all three (even if Stanley Motss’s eleventh-hour decision to spill the beans is weakly contrived), the movie also has a blanketing smugness.  It seems fuelled not by anger or even concern at the political chicanery and show-business egocentrism it’s lampooning but by a desire to be admired for its cynical cleverness.  I found the filmmakers’ calculation at its most hateful when it was explained that Schumann was doing time for ‘raping a nun’.  This got a good laugh in NFT2 though it clearly wouldn’t have if nun had been girl or woman.

    There are compensations.  Robert De Niro wears a silly ‘characterful’ hat throughout but it’s good to hear him handling so expertly dialogue that’s thoroughly witty and whose profusion isn’t the result of improvisational padding.  Dustin Hoffman’s line readings are, of course, expert too – though the only time he made me smile was when he made a sound rather than speaking words:  the President’s aide asks if Schumann has much of his prison sentence left to serve and Motss replies, in a tone of suppressed hysteria, ‘Hmmm’.  Anne Heche works hard as the aide (the third biggest role):  you’re always conscious of the effort.  Woody Harrelson is alarmingly unhinged as Schumann.  It’s interesting to see a fifteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst:  she plays a young actress posing as a fetching Albanian peasant in Motss’s faux footage and frustrated to learn that the job is top secret and can’t go on her CV.  William H Macy is good as a CIA agent though his character is too easily squished by Brean’s verbal onslaught.  The President’s face remains unseen throughout.  Willie Nelson is agreeable as the increasingly puzzled songwriter brought onto the team.  The resulting songs are enjoyable too but I was more grateful for Mark Knopfler’s instrumental score.  Its wistful quality supplies a rare and welcome suggestion that the abuses ridiculed in Wag the Dog might give rise to regret rather than self-satisfied contempt.

    18 July 2017

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