Old Yorker

  • A Monster Calls

    Old YorkerFilm review

    J A Bayona (2016)

    It begins with the boy protagonist, Conor O’Malley, having a nightmare – we soon find out it’s a recurring one.  Although the foundation of J A Bayona’s fantasy drama is anything but fantastic, it might well be described as a continuing nightmare:  a child struggles to cope with his mother’s terminal illness.  A Monster Calls is based on true stories in an unusual sense.  The author and activist Siobhan Dowd wasn’t herself a mother but this story is her brainchild.  Dowd died from cancer, aged forty-seven, in 2007.  She was denied the time she needed to bring her ideas to fruition as a novel but she had discussed them with her publisher, Walker Books.  After her death, Walker invited another author in their stable, Patrick Ness, to develop Dowd’s material, and his book A Monster Calls, with illustrations by Jim Kay, was published in 2011.  (The following year, both men won the Carnegie Medal and the Greenaway Medal for children’s or young adult fiction.)  The part of Conor in Bayona’s screen version of the novel is played by Lewis MacDougall, whose mother died from multiple sclerosis when he was eleven.

    A Monster Calls is set in present-day England but Conor’s bedroom in the house where he lives with his dying mother overlooks a time-honoured landscape of mortality – a church graveyard, sheltered by a yew tree.  Although the time at which the monster – a giant human shape, formed from the branches of the yew – repeatedly calls on Conor is shown on a digital clock with an LED display, the appointed hour is also traditional:  a few minutes after midnight.  The monster isn’t simply scary, however – at least, Conor isn’t scared by it.  The main purpose of its visits is to tell the boy three stories.  While these contain characters and events that wouldn’t be out of place in traditional fairytales, the message of the stories is that human beings, their motives and behaviour are more complicated, less morally black-and-white than Conor may have been led to believe.  Figures in the monster’s tales seem to correspond to people in the boy’s own life:  a witch not as black as she’s painted may be his grandmother; a parson, who unwisely prefers the apparently easy option, suggests Conor’s father.  The monster insists that, once he has told his three tales, Conor must, on pain of death, tell a true story of his own.  I was puzzled by the premise of the film, for which Patrick Ness wrote the screenplay, that Conor is a complete innocent.   Wouldn’t this twenty-first-century twelve-year-old already be familiar with moral complexity and troubling uncertainty – in both his own life and his cultural experience?  This is a boy whose parents have split up and whose father has started a new family on the other side of the Atlantic.  I admit that my knowledge of contemporary children’s fiction is negligible but if Disney Pictures are now encouraging young audiences to apprehend shades of grey and themes of loss – in movies like Maleficent, Cinderella and Inside Out – it seems a safe bet that tougher-minded, less commercially oriented writers for children will have gone before in doing so.

    J A Bayona’s two previous features were The Orphanage and The Impossible.   The Orphanage is a supernatural ghost-horror story, in which, as the title suggests, children who’ve lost parents feature strongly.   In The Impossible, the survival of a family – a woman, a man and their three sons – in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 hangs by a thread; the relationship of the mother and her eldest son is at the heart of this story (based on real events).  Bayona’s CV sounds tailor-made for A Monster Calls but the film suffers from a surfeit of gloomy style.  Jim Kay’s illustrations for the book are the inspiration for the movie’s beautiful and ingenious artwork, which appears in the form of animated illustrations to accompany the monster’s telling of his tales and as examples of the artistic talent Conor has inherited from his mother (we learn that she wanted to go to art college until the unplanned Conor came along).  These images connect with each other effectively.  They’re the visual highlights of A Monster Calls, despite unrelenting competition from collapsing buildings, imploding landscapes and other CGI manifestations of the psychic uproar the hero is battling with.  Óscar Faura’s lighting, indoors and out, is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Conor’s fearful misery.  Even when he goes with his briefly visiting father to a funfair, the place is Stygian and deserted.  We accept the bleak outlook as the boy’s perspective, just as we accept his lack of school friends as an expression of his feelings of isolation, but the pervasive gloom limits the emotional range of the narrative:  there’s virtually no sense of a happier land from which Conor has been exiled.  Bayona should be grateful to the actors who suggest a more normal world and who thereby place Conor at a poignant, tantalising distance from it:  Toby Kebbell, as the affable, somehow useless father; and, especially, Ben Moor, who underplays skilfully and sensitively as a teacher at the boy’s school.

    Lewis MacDougall is an inspired choice for Conor and not just because he gives a convincingly felt performance (I wasn’t aware of his own bereavement until after I’d seen the film).  MacDougall’s troubled, questioning face is right for someone forced to grow up before his time while his slight build reinforces Conor’s vulnerability.  Although he’s already at comprehensive school, Conor is bullied there by a trio whose leader (James Melville) stands head and shoulders above him. As Conor’s mother, Felicity Jones is particularly good at conveying Lizzie O’Malley’s selflessness in letting Conor express his fears without letting him see her own.  These reminders that a loving mother gives protection and comfort to her child, even when she’s in desperate need of both, are perhaps the most uncompromising element of the film.  In the role of Lizzie’s uptight mother, Sigourney Weaver is probably miscast and certainly uncertain – especially with an English accent.  In the scheme of the story, the grandmother verges on wicked stepmother – she’s set to replace Conor’s mother as the woman running the house he lives in.  Weaver’s imposing presence works in realising this idea (and chiming with the putative villainess of the monster’s first story).  But Conor’s complaint that his grandmother’s house is ‘full of old person’s stuff’ (she forbids him to touch any of it:  he trashes the place) draws attention to how wrong Weaver is in other ways.  I got the sense from the dialogue and the plotting that grandmother was meant to be an out-of-touch oldie – someone who’s forgotten what it was like to be a child and how to handle one.  Sigourney Weaver doesn’t suggest this at all.  (Even without make-up, she’s a very glamorous granny.)  Geraldine Chaplin’s cameo as Conor’s head teacher lasts only a minute or two but she’s a confusing presence, too.

    The monster is incarnated, through motion capture technology, and voiced by Liam Neeson.  I found him an underwhelming storyteller though this may be the fault less of Neeson than of the technical trickery that upstages him – and which, for me, detracted from the emotional power of A Monster Calls more generally.  There was sustained sniffling in the row behind me at the Richmond Odeon but tears came to my eyes only once, during Felicity Jones’s deathbed scene; and I knew they were caused by things that have happened in my own life which the scene reminded me of.   When Conor asks why his parents’ marriage failed, his father tries to explain and the boy says, smiling but ruefully aware, ‘So you didn’t live happily ever after?’  This may be a blatant feed line but it gets an interesting response:  ‘No, but that’s all right – most people just get messily ever after.  That’s life …’   It may be life but it isn’t death – it isn’t what Conor’s mother gets.  The  monster forces Conor to tell the truth of his feelings about his mother’s illness; when he does so, the effect is meant to be cathartic (as it conventionally is in screen dramas when the psychoanalyst gets to the bottom of the patient’s problems).  What the monster doesn’t do is prepare Conor to cope with his impending loss.  Although he assures Conor (BFG-style) that he’ll-always-be-there-for-him, the platitude doesn’t convince.  This unusual movie is in my head more today than it was when I came out from seeing it yesterday but that’s largely because I think the technique in A Monster Calls is ‘distract[ing] from distraction by distraction’.  I don’t feel it gets to grips with its awful subject – that, when a child’s much-loved parent receives a death sentence, it’s a case of a monster calling and refusing to go away.

    5 January 2017

  • Silence

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Scorsese  (2016)

    In his last movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese took an insubstantial subject and gave it a dazzling treatment.  His new one is the exact reverse, an uninspired exploration of weighty matters.  Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman is unfortunately right:  ‘If ever there was a film that was both thought-provoking and deathly dull, it is this one’.  Silence is adapted (by Jay Cocks and Scorsese) from a 1966 novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō, based on historical events from the mid-seventeenth century.  It tells the story of two young Portuguese Jesuits, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), who travel to Japan in search of a third priest, Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson).  Formerly Rodrigues’s and Garrpe’s mentor, Ferreira went to Japan as a missionary but is reported to have apostatised and gone native.  There are echoes of Heart of Darkness here but Scorsese makes immediately clear, in a prologue, the extreme pressure under which the priest renounced his faith.  Ferreira witnesses the torture and crucifixion of fellow Christians by the Japanese authorities.  He knows there’s only one way of avoiding the same fate.

    Scorsese wastes no time either in sending Rodrigues and Garrpe, after a brief exchange with a senior member (Ciarán Hinds) of their Jesuit college in the Portuguese colony of Macau, on their voyage.  This may have been a mistake:  showing a bit more of the two priests on their home patch might have strengthened the presentation of Japan as traumatising terra incognita.  But if Scorsese rushes the embarkation – Rodrigues and Garrpe are smuggled into Japan on a Chinese boat – it’s the last thing in Silence that does happen too quickly, at least until the last quarter-hour of this 161-minute marathon.  The Japanese odyssey is hard going for the viewer, not just because of the priests’ gruelling experiences but also because it’s boring.  It’s difficult enough for a film-maker nowadays to engage an audience’s sympathies with devout Christians, let alone representatives of religious imperialism.  Scorsese makes matters worse for himself by putting his protagonists – who are underdeveloped as characters – in what is to them a foreign country but to experienced moviegoers a not in familiar locale.

    Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography often gives the landscape (actually Taiwan) a desert pallor that expresses well the place’s inhospitableness to the alien culture of Christianity – this point is made repeatedly in dialogue – but the people the priests encounter are less extraordinary than the terrain.  The hunter-persecutors of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan aren’t so different, when it comes to cackling malignancy, from the denizens of bandit or Injun country in plenty of Westerns.  The serial apostate-survivor Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), who keeps turning up and routinely begs Rodrigues to hear his confession, may be meant to have a peculiarly Christian significance but comes over as a stereotypical fawning sniveller.  The Inquisitor Inoue (Issey Ogata is theatrically charismatic in the role) has the controlled, sneering articulacy of many a Nazi officer or Bond villain.  There are moments in Silence that verge on up-against-it-heroism genre parody – as when Rodrigues, confronted by a row of hostile interrogators, demands to meet the Inquisitor (in other words, ‘Take me to your leader’).  The Japanese laugh derisively; when Rodrigues asks why they’re laughing, Inoue, in the middle of the row, introduces himself as the Inquisitor.  (Who did Rodrigues think he was talking to?)

    The two elements that make Silence substantially distinctive are its unresolved ambivalence towards the priests – Rodrigues in particular – and a succession of torture and execution scenes, which are often impressive.   A sequence in which three Japanese Christians are crucified at sea is a troubling combination of grim, mad and beautiful, centred as it is on Mokichi (Shinya Tsukamoto), who takes several days to die for his faith and always remains ready to do so.  In an unequivocally shocking bit, a man’s decapitation is made horrifying less by a shot of his severed head than by the long bloodstain that runs across the screen when his body is dragged away for burial.   Startling too is the contrast between these brutal acts and the smallness of what the authorities require as a sign of apostasy (and which they frequently insist to their prisoners is ‘only a formality’):  although this is at first described as ‘trampling’ on an image of Christ, it’s enough for the Christians to step on the metal portrait of Jesus.  Yet visually powerful moments are, until the closing stages, relatively rare.  The exposition of the core themes of Silence is achieved mostly through the spoken word – in Rodrigues’s showdowns first with Inoue and then, at greater length, with Ferreira, when the two priests are eventually reunited (Garrpe has been murdered by this point).  An over-reliance on words is confirmed near the end of the movie with the sudden, clumsy introduction of a new narrative voice – a Dutch trader called Dieter Albrecht (Béla Baptiste) whizzes through what happened to Ferreira and Rodrigues in the decades that follow the bulk of the action.

    This voiceover also serves another and more interesting purpose, though.  As Albrecht recounts the developments he observes on his occasional visits to Japan over the years, Scorsese supplies mainly visual indicators that what’s apparent may not be the whole story.   This idea has been anticipated in the debate between Rodrigues and Ferreira.  The latter gets the better of the argument as a verbal exchange, insisting that even when Christianity flourished in Japan it did so only through being distorted into something the Japanese, who ‘can’t conceive of anything beyond the world of nature’, could believe in.  (Ferreira points to the sky and tells Rodrigues that, to the Japanese, the son of God was never more than the sun of God.)  Ferreira’s thesis doesn’t square, however, with the emotional effect the viewer experiences during Mokichi’s crucifixion.   Eventually, Rodrigues seems to follow the example of Ferreira – in apostatising, in observing Buddhist ritual, in inheriting a Japanese widow (Asuka Kurosawa) and her children as his wife and family.   The silence of the film is, for the most part, the silence of God, which Rodrigues experiences, at different times, as merely an absence and as an expression of divine sympathy with men who suffer in God’s name.  In the final scenes, however, we get an increasing sense that the silence is Rodrigues’s too – that his conforming words and behaviour doesn’t reflect his private thoughts.

    Although Rodrigues is presented in the eleventh-hour narration as virtually the last Catholic priest left in the country, the faith was never entirely extirpated.  The legends at the end of Silence comprise the Society of Jesus motto ‘Ad maiorem Dei gloriam’ and a dedication of the film to ‘the Japanese Catholics and their pastors’.  (According to Wikipedia, there are today around half a million Catholics in Japan, representing just under 0.5% of the total population.)   Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) was baptised a Catholic at the age of eleven or twelve, after his parents divorced and his mother converted to Catholicism.  He remained a Christian for the rest of his life and Christian belief was a consistent theme of his novels.  Martin Scorsese was raised in a strongly Catholic family.  Although he’s not been a practising Catholic for many years, his cinema reveals a recurring fascination with faith:  Silence is (like The Last Temptation of Christ) a project which he’s proved tenaciously determined to bring to fruition, even though the gestation period has been extremely long.  The end product is given substance more by one’s awareness of Scorsese’s abiding, unquiet interest in religious belief and imagery than by what he has put on the screen.  It’s a regrettable fact that, when Scorsese aims for an explicitly ‘religious’ effect, the result tends to be anti-climactic at best – when, for example, Rodrigues sees his reflection in a pool of water turn into the face of Christ, or the voice(over) of God speaks to the young priest.

    There are times when the earnestness in evidence seems to reflect the main actors’ reverence for the major film artist they’re working with as much as it does the piety of the people they’re playing.  Andrew Garfield gives a conscientious performance in a tough role but his Rodrigues never quite sparks to individual (as distinct from representative) life.   Adam Driver, in spite of the brevity of the sequences in Macau, immediately suggests a young man more cut out for the classroom or the cloisters than for adventures further afield.  Garfield and Driver speak in accented English, presumably as a Portuguese might.  I’m not sure why Scorsese encouraged this (assuming that he did) – possibly as a means of acknowledging historical distance between the actors and their characters, their cultural ‘foreignness’ to each other?  Whatever the reason, neither Garfield nor Driver sounds entirely comfortable with the accent.  But they both become convincingly emaciated in the course of their arduous travels.

     

    3 January 2017

Posts navigation