Old Yorker

  • Miss Sloane

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Madden (2016)

    After an hour of getting bored and annoyed with Miss Sloane, I decided to cut my losses and left.  The film wasn’t halfway through (a main reason for crying enough) – so the few comments below may be invalidated by what I missed in the second half.  I doubt it, though.

    Elizabeth Sloane is a ruthless political lobbyist in Washington DC.  Jessica Chastain, who plays her, establishes Miss Sloane’s ruthlessness very quickly.  She speaks rapidly, aggressively and monotonously.   Every so often, Chastain stops talking for a moment and looks ‘vulnerable’ before moving on to her next scathing, self-assertive tirade.   In a BBC interview this week, Chastain criticised critics who’ve complained that Miss Sloane is a ‘masculine’ character:

    ‘I want to go back to those people and say Elizabeth Sloane is a woman, so that makes her feminine.  … Femininity for each person is whatever they define it to be, and to say that femininity is to be soft, kind, loving, compassionate and weak, and masculinity is aggression, power, ambition and strength – [we’re in] 2017 and we need to move away from that.’

    I’d say Elizabeth Sloane is a masculine character in a different sense:  the writer and director of Miss Sloane are men, the heroine reflects an antiquated male idea of what a ‘strong’ woman is like, and Chastain’s playing of the role panders to this.  The screenplay is Jonathan Perera’s first and he’s young, which makes it all the more dismaying.  Although John Madden knew better when he made Mrs Brown, he seems to have approached this film as a test of his directing manhood – anxious to prove he’s up to a ‘tough’ political thriller after doing time in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel.  Madden lathers the soundtrack with Max Richter’s excitative music.  The combination of the score and Jessica Chastain’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery is sort-of apt – the story concerns lobbying around a piece of gun-control legislation – but it’s wearisome.

    The supporting instruments in this one-note symphony are, for the most part, Elizabeth’s lobbyist colleagues-minions.   The quick-witted, competitive dialogue Jonathan Perera has supplied them with is Aaron Sorkin-inspired.  Sorkin and David Fincher showed in The Social Network how well this kind of writing can work if the verbal combat is rooted in character but that’s not the case here:  the effect is of actors, rather than the people they’re playing, fighting to be noticed.  It’s positively restful in Miss Sloane whenever someone strikes a different, more nuanced note – as Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Christine Baranski and Mark Strong all do.  As the head of a lobbying firm, Strong occasionally looks at the protagonist with a puzzled expression – as if he can’t understand why someone as talented as Jessica Chastain is performing so crudely.

    I gather from Wikipedia that the bill to expand background checks on the purchase of firearms, the legislation at the centre of the film, eventually passes.  Sad to say, but this now seems rather a far-fetched idea.  It isn’t, of course, the fault of Miss Sloane but its pumped-up fiction has been comprehensively Trumped by the reality of contemporary American politics.

    12 May 2017

  • Mildred Pierce

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Curtiz (1945)

    It starts with a bang – several bangs.  Gunshots ring out and a man falls to the ground, murmuring ‘Mildred …’ before he dies.  This introduction and the shadowy lighting immediately establish Mildred Pierce’s credentials as a film noir – reinforced by the information in the opening credits that the source material is a James M Cain novel.  The cinematographer Ernest Haller sustains the edgy chiaroscuro throughout; the investigation of the first-scene murder supplies the movie’s basic narrative structure.  Yet the core of Mildred Pierce film isn’t crime drama:  Michael Curtiz’s film is, rather, a peculiarly stylish and sour variation on the 1930s weepers about self-made women who are also self-sacrificing mothers (Imitation of Life, Stella Dallas).  Any such mother needs a spoilt ingrate of a daughter, and Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) has one in Veda (Ann Blyth), her elder child.  (It has to be a daughter rather than a son – the better to emphasise the offspring’s trivial materialism, and in order that she can become her mother’s sexual rival too.)  This set-up ensures that Mildred Pierce is only technically a whodunit.  Once Veda has appeared on the scene, it’s obvious that she’s not only a selfishly nasty piece of work but also the murderer of her stepfather Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott).

    Joan Crawford earns full marks for suffering.  Mildred starts to tell her story to a police detective (Moroni Olsen); Crawford is agonised even in the first flashback sequence, when Mildred is still a homebody, though baking and selling cakes and pies to keep the family going because her first husband Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) is out of work.  Bert nevertheless resents what he sees as Mildred’s preoccupation with the couple’s two daughters, the teenage Veda and ten-year-old Kay (Jo Anne Marlow).  He worries that his wife is encouraging Veda’s precocious social-climbing tendencies.  The Pierces separate.  To Veda’s ashamed horror, the best job her mother can find is waitressing but Mildred’s hard work and strength of ambition for her daughter to live the good life ensure rapid progress.  Mildred is soon running her own restaurant then the owner of a chain, ably assisted by her friend Ida (Eve Arden).  Buzzing around the restaurant, Joan Crawford is dynamic, to put it mildly.  (She’d put many a diner off a return visit.)  For the most part, though, she’s primed to react to Veda’s serial treacheries, which come thick and fast.   Crawford’s tortured mask is magnetic but not much emerges from behind it – or in her inflexible, often toneless voice.

    The doom-laden set of Crawford’s face calls to mind the heroine’s expression in numerous Hollywood tales of unrequited love. Mildred Pierce belongs to this genre but with the object of adoration the protagonist’s child rather than a man.   As Veda, toothy, moon-faced Ann Blyth is remarkably unappealing (and monotonous) but, after Crawford, she’s the film’s least ignorable presence.  Mildred Pierce is at its best when at its most floridly melodramatic.   In a home-truths-telling showdown between mother and daughter, Ann Blyth says such hateful things that you’re waiting for – to be honest, willing – Joan Crawford to slap her face.  It doesn’t happen and Blyth walks off in the direction of the staircase.  ‘Veda!’ yells Crawford and here at least her voice is extraordinary – resounding yet strangled. The set-to continues on the stairs until, in a shock climax, the face slap arrives and it’s Mildred on the receiving end.  There is a good daughter to compensate for Veda but not for long.  The signs aren’t promising when Bert takes the two girls away for a weekend and Kay coughs twice shortly before departure.  Sure enough, she’s dead from pneumonia a day or so later.

    The face of Zachary Scott, as the impecunious aristocrat-playboy Monte Beragon, suggests an only somewhat animated version of one of those old cigarette cards of Hollywood stars.  In a marriage of convenience (social for her, financial for him), Monte becomes Mildred’s second husband, and Veda’s secret lover.  Scott and Ann Blyth are both, in their different ways, so weird that the idea of this liaison really is queasy.  The screenplay by Ranald MacDougall contains an odd mixture of standard corny dialogue and arch, cynical quips, the latter tossed off by the likes of Monte and the straight-talking, unillusioned Ida.  Although she’s given too many of these wisecracks, Eve Arden delivers them expertly and entertainingly.  Jack Carson is good as Wally Fay, an unscrupulous business partner (first of boring Bert, then of Mildred).  One of the most likeable contributions is an uncredited cameo from Garry Owen, as a wry policeman who dissuades Mildred from jumping off a bridge.   Butterfly McQueen is the maid Lottie.  What McQueen is asked to do is infuriating – and more starkly racist because she’s the only African-American character in the film. Yet a fair number of people in NFT3 found this routine chuckle-worthy.

    8 May 2017

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