Old Yorker

  • Jackie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pablo Larraín (2016)

    During the thirty-four months of John F Kennedy’s presidency, his wife Jackie was an unprecedented First Lady:  a consort of exceptional youth and beauty; a star on TV screens as well as on the pages of newspapers and society magazines.  She was both fashion icon and the perfect wife and mother, to the Kennedy’s young children, Caroline and John Jr.   Jackie’s demure charisma made her a kind of delightful counterweight to the reality and the paranoia of Cold War politics.  A necessary part of that role was being a featherweight counterweight (even though she suffered more than her fair share of maternal trauma:  after a miscarriage in 1955, she gave birth the following year to a stillborn daughter and, in August 1963, to a son who survived only two days).  In the hours and days that followed her husband’s assassination, however, the public perception of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy changed.  The medium that had made her a charming screen celebrity turned Jackie – through the courage and dignity that a worldwide television audience saw – into a substantial heroine.

    The timeframe of Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is the immediate aftermath to the assassination, with flashbacks to the events in Dallas and to the recording of and mock-up clips from the television special, A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F Kennedy, which CBS screened on Valentine’s Day 1962.  (The programme won Jackie Kennedy a special award at that year’s Emmys.)  The inclusion of the latter flashbacks is a clear indication that Larraín and the screenwriter Noah Oppenheim realise the need to remind their audience that the distraught, isolated woman who dominates the film was once this effortlessly chic, relatively carefree hostess.  In spite of this, Jackie is dramatically disappointing just because its central character is largely unvarying.  Behind closed doors, she doesn’t develop in a way that corresponds to the transformation of Jackie Kennedy’s public image.

    The device used to frame the narrative is an interview Jackie (Natalie Portman) gives to a journalist she’s invited to the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port one week after the assassination.  The actual interview, which appeared in Life magazine on 6 December 1963, was with Theodore H White whose non-fiction book The Making of the President had recently won a Pulitzer Prize and whom Jackie Kennedy respected.  Larraín and Oppenheim turn White into an unnamed Everyjournalist (Billy Crudup) and the purpose of his invitation seems to be to allow Jackie to vent her anger with what’s been written about her husband’s legacy in recent days.  She inveighs against the press before she even lets her visitor cross the threshold then insists on the right to decide what he can and can’t reproduce of their conversation.  (This turns out to mean editing not just the journalist’s draft article but also his handwritten notes!)  The effect of this is to present us immediately with a Jackie who is surprisingly but emphatically tough and authoritative.

    On the journey back from Dallas to Washington and the White House, Jackie is bewildered and occasionally incoherent but her distraction is understandable, to put it mildly:  it hardly suggests an inherently timid personality.  Back in the White House, the young widow (worth remembering she was only thirty-four) disconcerts, by her forthrightness and intransigence, people who are naturally inclined to dictate to her what should happen next in terms of funeral arrangements and protocol:  her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) and mother-in-law Rose (Georgie Glen), the new President (John Carroll Lynch) and Johnson’s right-hand man Jack Valenti (Max Casella).  Jackie’s being strong-willed from an early stage makes the continuing startled reaction of her elders artificial.  When Jackie says to Bobby Kennedy, ‘I know you think I’m just a silly little debutante’, the remark makes no sense.  Natalie Portman’s Jackie is anything but.

    If this seems to be confusing Portman’s characterisation with the strength of her presence and the power of her performance, I think that’s partly inevitable – and raises the question of whether she’s the wrong actress for the role.  She’s well cast to the extent that the Jackie Kennedy of Larraín’s film is a woman almost continuously in extremis.  Portman, as she showed in Black Swan, has an appetite and an aptitude for miserable intensity.  In Jackie, she expresses the heroine’s grief and fury impressively, especially in a sequence in which the weeping Jackie wipes bloodstains from her face in the washroom of the plane taking her husband’s body back from Dallas.  It’s no coincidence that she’s less persuasive in the White House tour bits, where you’re conscious of the strain of impersonation of Jackie in happier times.   Portman’s looks prompt another question:  is physical similarity between a biopic actor and the real-life person they’re incarnating especially important when the subject is an ‘icon’ – that is, someone memorable primarily as an image?   Not necessarily perhaps but it matters here, for all the expertise of Natalie Portman and her make-up people.  Her features are formally more flawless than Jackie Kennedy’s but her beauty is consequently not so elusive.  Portman is more imposing and less mysterious.

    The star’s assertive quality is reinforced through Peter Sarsgaard’s weak interpretation of Robert Kennedy.  Sarsgaard, in an unusually off-key performance, makes Bobby less shocked and bereft than petulant and neurasthenic.  Caspar Phillipson has been cast as JFK for facial similarity but he’s much shorter than the six-foot original.  This is made almost comically obvious in an eleventh-hour flashback to Jack and Jackie dancing gaily at a White House ball.  (Peter Sarsgaard, far from a giant, towers over Phillipson.)  Not for the first time (The Right Stuff, The Butler), LBJ is presented, puzzlingly, as a clod.  In this kind of piece, the actors playing less well-known historical personages tend to be at less of a disadvantage.  As Nancy Tuckerman, the White House social secretary during the Kennedy administration, Greta Gerwig seems at first to be hiding beneath her wig but she comes through:  an exchange between her and Natalie Portman provides one of the few moments in the film where the emotions expressed seem natural and are affecting.   About halfway through, Pablo Larraín introduces the character of the Catholic priest (John Hurt) who will officiate at JFK’s interment at Arlington Cemetery.  (It wasn’t clear to me when this was meant to be taking place relative to the funeral service and procession.)   From this point onwards, Jackie’s conversation with the priest virtually competes with her conversation with the journalist as a framing device.  This is odd but the mixture of weakly consoling and more thoughtful, troubling things the priest says is believable.  John Hurt plays him well.

    In this picture, emotional relentlessness and monotony are two sides of the same coin.  While Natalie Portman’s playing compels your attention, the script’s conception of Jackie Kennedy doesn’t supply much in the way of new insight into her personality, once you’ve registered the initial surprise of seeing a harsh, uncompromising aspect.  Because Jackie herself isn’t complex, you’re more aware than you might otherwise be of the tabloid, what-really-went-on-behind-the-scenes strand of the movie.  And Jackie, exceeding the call of morbid duty, verges on the tasteless in conveying – in images and words – the horror of the physical details of John Kennedy’s assassination.  Pablo Larraín may feel it’s important not to shy away from the blood and brains but he achieves a more edifying impact when John Jr suddenly and briefly sobs.  (The moment is strong because the tears aren’t caused specifically by the child’s missing his father but make you think how many more inconsolable tears must have followed in the months and years ahead.)    While the black-and-white tour-of-the-White-House material is visually convincing, the melding of Larraín’s reconstruction of the funeral scenes with occasional news film inserts isn’t as texturally seamless as you might expect from the director of No.

    The Life interview was the source of the Camelot myth of the Kennedy White House.  Jackie Kennedy explained to Theodore White that her husband’s favourite late-evening choice for the turntable was the original Broadway cast recording of Camelot and that JFK particularly liked the lyrics in the title song ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’.  Larraín works this a bit too hard:  we get the song on a bedside record player; then, in the closing stages, Jackie tragically intoning the key lyrics (adding ‘There won’t be another Camelot, not another Camelot’); then Richard Burton’s voice reprising them.   This overkill is less of a problem, though, than Mica Levi’s resoundingly sombre music for Jackie.  Levi wrote a fine score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin a couple of years ago and her music here is undeniably powerful – too powerful:  it’s often competitive with what’s on the screen.  I wonder what Adam Mars-Jones will make of it … [1]

    20 January 2017

    [1]  Afternote:  The answer is in his review in the TLS (27 January 2017) – http://www.the-tls.co.uk/.

     

     

  • Fences

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Denzel Washington (2016)

    Fences is one of the ten plays that comprise August Wilson’s ‘Century Cycle’ (also known as the ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’), each of which explores black American experience in a different decade of the twentieth century.  Most of the action of Fences takes place in 1957, the final scene seven years later.  This places the piece chronologically sixth in the Century Cycle in terms of historical setting.  In terms of date of first public performance the sequence is very different:  for example, Gem of the Ocean, the 1900s piece, wasn’t staged until 2003, making it the last but one of the plays to premiere.   After a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in 1983, Fences was produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and premiered on Broadway in 1987 – only the second of the Century Cycle plays to do so, after the 1920s-set Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.  The first Broadway production of Fences won, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tonys for Best New Play, Best Actor (James Earl Jones) and Best Featured Actress (Mary Alice).

    Fences repeated the Tony hat-trick when it returned to Broadway in 2010, winning Best Revival of a Play and acting awards for Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, in the roles that Jones and Alice had played in the 1987-88 run.  August Wilson died five years before the Broadway revival but he had written a screenplay for a potential film of Fences.  This has now materialised, directed by as well as starring Denzel Washington, and with Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Mykelti Williamson and Russell Hornsby also reprising the roles they played on stage in 2010.  At the start of the Q&A that followed the BFI’s preview showing of Fences, Viola Davis was congratulated on the acclaim and awards her performance in the film is receiving.  Davis modestly replied that it was reward enough for her that Fences had made it to the screen.  I’m sure she meant what she said but Fences is an overlong (139-minute), mostly unsatisfactory movie that achieves distinction only in Davis’s great acting.

    The protagonist Troy Maxson (Washington) is a Pittsburgh refuse collector in his mid-fifties.   Rose (Davis), his wife of eighteen years, is the mother of Troy’s younger, teenage son Cory (Jovan Adepo).  The three of them live in the Pittsburgh suburbs.  Troy’s older work colleague and long-time friend Jim Bono (Henderson) and brother Gabe (Williamson) are frequent visitors to the Maxson home; Lyons (Hornsby), Troy’s son from a pre-Rose relationship, puts in more occasional appearances there.  Gabe sustained a head injury in World War II, which left him mentally impaired and with $3000 compensation, money used by Troy to purchase the family home.  A figure of fun to the local kids, Gabe still lives nearby until, around halfway through Fences, he’s taken into institutional care.  Lyons, now in his mid thirties, still hankers after a career as a musician and doesn’t have a regular job.  He turns up to borrow money from his disapproving father or to cadge a meal from his ever-hospitable stepmother.

    Troy is a reliable wage-earner – early in the story he’s promoted, becoming the only employee of colour on the local authority workforce to drive a waste collection truck – but he comes from a troubled background and he’s a bitter man.  Mistreated and rejected by his father, Troy took to crime as a teenager and served time for a self-defence killing.  On his release from prison, he became a successful baseball player in the professional Negro Leagues but his ethnicity prevented his graduation to Major League Baseball.  (His sporting prime was in the 1930s:  Jackie Robinson, whose name is mentioned at one point, became the first African American to break the Major League colour bar in 1947.)   Cory’s enthusiasm for football is a major source of tension between him and his father:  although he scornfully tells his son that continuing racial discrimination will stymie any prospects of an NFL future, Troy is more fearful that Cory may be able to succeed where he could not.

    Rose has asked Troy to build a fence round the house.  This turns out, not unexpectedly, to be a lengthy and heavily symbolic enterprise.  As Jim Bono tells Troy:

    ‘Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in.  Rose wants to hold on to you all.  She loves you.’

    The fence, from Troy’s perspective, represents the obstacles he came up against as a sportsman, the barriers he’s created between himself and his sons, and a means of keeping the Grim Reaper at a distance.  As a youngster, Troy was seriously ill with pneumonia and won a close fight with death; the (virtually personified) Reaper promised a return bout.  The pivotal moment in Fences comes when Troy tells Rose he’s going to be a father again.  Alberta, the (unseen) younger woman with whom he’s having an affair, then dies in childbirth.  Rose agrees to look after the new baby girl but tells her husband that he’s ‘without a woman’ from now on.   They continue to live together, but sexually estranged, within the family home, where the fence has now been erected.  In a showdown with Cory, Troy provokes his younger son into insulting him as an ‘old man’ and threatening him with the father’s prized possession, his baseball bat.  Troy grabs the bat, overpowers and humiliates Cory, and sends him packing.   Revitalised by this show of strength, Troy swings the bat, challenging the Grim Reaper too to take him on … Seven years later, Troy has died suddenly of a heart attack and the family gathers at the house for his funeral.

    Fences is the third feature that Denzel Washington has directed after Antwone Fisher (2002) and The Great Debaters (2007), in both of which he also played the lead.  I’ve not seen either but Washington’s direction of Fences, his first experience of bringing a stage play to the screen, is uncertain and ineffective.  He doesn’t decide if he’s making a motion picture or a filmed record of a feted theatre production.  The opening sequence, which features a conversation between Troy and Bono at work and sees them sitting either side of the back of a garbage truck, moves visually as well as verbally.  The two men then return to Troy’s home.  They walk up the street, into the back yard – and the no man’s land in which most of the rest of the film takes place.  Washington realises he has to keep the camera somewhat active but its movement often seems arbitrary, closing up on an actor’s face when what they’re saying doesn’t warrant such attention.  There are occasions when the spatial distances involved are at odds with the way lines are delivered:  Rose speaks without raising her voice to Troy, who’s approaching the house from some way away; Troy calls with cupped hands to Bono when the latter, although walking away from him, is still well within earshot.   The unrealism of moments like these is much easier to overlook in the essential unreality of a stage set.   It’s perhaps intentional, even if not coherent, that the actors are sometimes positioned so as to create a tableau effect.  When they materialise in the middle of a real street looking as if they’ve arrived there from the wings, it seems merely a mistake.  The street’s reality also draws attention to the complete invisibility and silence of the Maxsons’ neighbours.

    August Wilson’s dialogue may be naturally problematic for a film audience because it’s stage rather than movie writing – it’s doubly problematic when it comes over as forced or overwrought stage writing.  The central symbolism of the fence is obvious enough but it’s easier to take than Troy’s monologue on life-as-a-baseball-game.  The clumsiness of this – the improbability of a man like Troy using a metaphor of this kind – isn’t redeemed by Rose’s eventual interrupting him with ‘We ain’t talking about baseball’.  Wilson’s stagecraft is creaky in the last and particularly protracted scene.  Cory, who left home to join the marines, returns unexpectedly, in uniform, for his father’s funeral.  He then tells Rose he won’t be going to the church service.  It’s possible that Cory arrives intending to attend the funeral but, back in the house full of memories of his unhappy relationship with Troy, can’t face the prospect.  If so, Jovan Adepo doesn’t manage to suggest this; and if Cory didn’t intend to go along, why come back at all, when Rose evidently wasn’t expecting to see him?  The crisis is as easily resolved as it’s engineered.  Once Rose has told Cory she brought him up better than for him to miss his own father’s funeral, she’s so confident that her words will have the desired effect that she doesn’t even bother to ask if he’s changed his mind.  He does, of course – in the process of gradually joining his little half-sister Raynell (Saniyya Simpson), Alberta’s daughter, in her singing of a song that Troy used to sing.

    During the BFI Q&A, Viola Davis said the play script and screenplay of Fences were close to identical.  The combination of August Wilson’s eminence and the posthumous filming of his screenplay may have deterred the film-makers, out of respect, from editing what Wilson wrote.  Whether or not that’s the case, there are too many words, especially from Troy.   In the theatre, the actors’ momentum may have built intensity, and concentration on the part of the audience, enough to overcome this difficulty.  On screen, the camera’s attention, along with your own, keeps wandering when Troy is sounding off.    (This experience is one of the more realistic aspects of Fences:  it’s like being actually on the receiving end of a determined monologuist, tuning in and out of what they say, nodding or murmuring assent every so often to reassure them you’re listening.)  I found Denzel Washington’s Troy a problem in other ways too.  During that interminable last scene, Rose tells Cory that Troy was ‘so big he seemed to fill the house’ (and took up her space).  Washington is tall and a star presence.  He’s put on weight for the part (although the excessive width of his backside suggests padding); yet he isn’t ‘big’ in the way Rose describes Troy.  In order to be sympathetic, Troy needs to seem at the mercy of teeming impulses and resentments. Washington’s natural aura of intelligent control and his well-groomed look (unkemptness doesn’t come easily to him) get in the way of this happening.   Troy is a self-justifying tyrant but he comes across as a bore too, a man excessive only in his loquaciousness.  Denzel Washington shows formidable histrionic skill and, given how much he has to say, commendable vocal variety but it’s a relief when Troy has died – and not just because you feel his family might be happier without him.  (It’s right enough that none of them, even the seven-year-old Raynell, seems grief-stricken on the day of Troy’s funeral.)

    Denzel Washington may have wanted his cast to repeat as much as recreate their Broadway performances but this is easier said than done for Russell Hornsby and Mykelti Williamson, though for different reasons.  Hornsby, who’s forty-two, looks too old as Lyons:  the repeated references to Troy’s elder son’s age – thirty-four – serve only to underline this.  Hornsby also looks too natty:  I wish I believed there was a like-father-like-son calculation at work here.  (It should be said that Washington, although he’s now turned sixty, doesn’t look too old as fifty-three-year-old Troy.)   Mykelti Williamson is saddled with an impossible character:  the benign crackpot Gabe, chasing off hellhounds and presenting Rose with a rose each time he calls, is an incorrigibly stagy conception.

    Stephen McKinley Henderson is expert as Bono but Fences would be a poor show without Viola Davis.   She has a couple of advantages.  Rose keeps her verbal powder dry for longer than Troy.  Unlike the men generally, who stand or sit and talk, Davis can tell us a lot about the woman she’s playing – including the fact that she’s got used to keeping quiet – as Rose goes about her homemaking business, especially in the kitchen.  It’s beautifully expressive naturalistic acting.  Not even familiarity with her work in The Help prepares you, however, for Davis’s emotional power when Troy tells Rose about Alberta and the baby she’s expecting.  This is a remarkable rupturing of the register of the uninspired film you’ve been watching for the preceding hour or so:  there were times I’d been bored to tears then I was suddenly moved to tears.  Yet the outburst feels like a natural development of the character of Rose.  Davis is acting with all she’s got but she’s not overacting:  everything in her voice, face and body is generated from inside and it’s utterly true.  She stays true, in spite of the awkwardness and improbability of the plotting and of some of what Rose is given to say.

    Plenty of people thought Viola Davis should have won the Best Actress Oscar for The Help; others that Aibileen Clark wasn’t, in terms of screen time, a lead role and that, if Davis had been campaigned for Best Supporting Actress instead, she, rather than her co-star Octavia Spencer, would have won that award.  The part of Rose Maxson raises similar complications:  whereas Mary Alice had won a Tony for Best Featured Actress, Davis was Best Actress for Fences on Broadway.  It seemed to be assumed that she would be contending for Best Actress for the film version too until the announcement in autumn last year that she would be for-your-consideration in the supporting category.  Taking no chances is hardly the right phrase but Viola Davis looks a pretty safe bet to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Fences.  (Her main opposition seems to be Michelle Williams, who, marvellous though she is in Manchester by the Sea, is playing a relatively very small part.)

    There was plenty of whooping and PC fandom in evidence at the post-screening Q&A at BFI but Davis managed to be graciously discriminating, as well as entertaining.  When an elderly man thanked her, telling her she reminded him of his mother, Davis thanked him back and added, wryly but kindly, ‘I’ll take that as a compliment’.  Asked if Troy Maxson’s behaviour as a husband and father disparages black love and family life (or words to that effect), Viola Davis recognised that neither Troy’s unhappy upbringing nor his domestic tyranny was an exclusively African-American phenomenon.   She made a judicious suggestion:  ‘I think I might take the ‘black’ out of that statement …’

    14 January 2017

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