Old Yorker

  • The Childhood of a Leader

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brady Corbet (2015)

    Brady Corbet’s first feature takes its title and basic theme from Jean-Paul Sartre’s (longish) short story.  Sartre gets right inside the head of his young protagonist, describing Lucien Fleurier’s attempts to make sense of existence and struggle to affect the world he inhabits.  As a pre-adolescent child, Lucien is more comfortable with plants and insects – he can destroy and squeeze out their inner fluids – than with relatively implacable entities such as trees, furniture and people.  As a teenager, he ventures into Freud and into homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships but he gradually adjusts to the conventions of bourgeois family life that he once found alienating.  He takes increasing pride in the mores of his class and, by the end of the story, is a confirmed patriot and a fully-fledged fascist thug:  having joined Action française, it’s Lucien who administers the final blows when he and his cronies beat a Jewish man to death in the street.  Sartre derives a few drops of sarcastic consolation from the fact that Lucien, even though he believes he’s now ready to be ‘a leader among Frenchmen’, still isn’t free of the underlying lack of self-confidence which, in earlier years, caused him to doubt even his own existence.  In the final paragraph, Lucien looks at himself in a shop mirror:

    ‘But the mirror only reflected a pretty, headstrong little face that was not yet terrible enough.  “I’ll grow a moustache,” he decided.’

    The story isn’t the only material on which Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, with whom he wrote the screenplay for The Childhood of a Leader, have drawn; John Fowles’ The Magus and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism are among other sources acknowledged.  Corbet is free, of course, to adapt Sartre et al as he sees fit; but there are unfortunately clear signs from the very beginning of the film of a strong-arming, high-energy but superficial approach.  The opening is headed ‘Overture’ and dominated by Scott Walker’s The Rite of Spring-inspired music.  To put it another way:  the Psycho score and the Jaws score seem to be colliding – and experiencing an immediate nervous breakdown as a result.   The dark, louring tone of Lol Crawley’s cinematography and the camera’s hurtling movement towards the entrance of a large, forbidding house emphatically promise a horror story within.  Even the fancy arrangement and illegibly rapid movement of the credits on the screen are a form of showing off.

    The house, on the outskirts of Paris, is the location for negotiations that will lead to the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.   An American diplomat (Liam Cunningham), his French wife (Bérénice Bejo) and their young son (Tom Sweet) are staying in the house while the negotiations take place. (The parents remain nameless throughout the film – so does the boy until near the end.)  In the game room, the diplomat trades billiards shots and aphorisms about warfare with a journalist called Charles Marker (Robert Pattinson).  The child is already indulging in violent strife of his own:  cast as an angel in a nativity play at the local church, he disgraces himself, after the show is over, by throwing stones at the congregation.  Sartre’s Lucien Fleurier has a strong appetite for being the centre of attention and, in his early years, feels continually thwarted by other people in his attempts to satisfy this appetite.  The protagonist of Corbet’s movie has no such difficulty.  He is such a conspicuous and disruptive influence that he can’t fail to be noticed, even in a house where political discussions of international importance and complexity are taking place:  indeed, the three main ‘chapter’ headings of the story are ‘The First/Second/Third Tantrum’.  Like Lucien, the long-haired child of the movie gets mistaken for a girl (this annoys him, though he refuses to have his hair cut) – but he’s also a precociously sinister and sociopathic presence.  He comes across less as deceptively angelic fascist larva than as kin to Damien, the Antichrist child in The Omen.  Here again, Brady Corbet is under no obligation to follow Sartre but, in departing from the original The Childhood of a Leader, he comes up with a dramatically flat illustration of what makes a totalitarian:  the child monster turns into an adult one.

    It’s no surprise that Corbet steers his film to a decidedly grandiose conclusion.  Lucien Fleurier’s fight to assert his identity and his achievement of ‘leadership’ qualities signal, according to Sartre, not only the developed sensibility of a political fascist but also Lucien’s readiness to succeed his father as boss of the family firm and the workers it exploits, and to take ownership of a wife.  The film’s final section – entitled ‘A New Era, or Prescott the bastard’ – shows the hitherto unnamed child grown into the awe-inspiring leader of a totalitarian country.  For a British audience, the connotations of Prescott in recent national politics make this a less than ideal name for an autocratic head of state – but the conclusion is confusing in other and larger respects.  First, the historical specificity of the post-Great War setting of the bulk of the story – reinforced by occasional insertions of newsreel footage – now gives way to a synthesised, imagined totalitarian society.  Second, the adult Prescott is played by Robert Pattinson, seen in another role earlier in the film.  It’s possible that Brady Corbet means to imply that the journalist played by Pattinson is the biological father of Prescott – there’s a moment when the diplomat-father is confronted by his wife and Charles Marker emerging from a room together – but this makes little realistic sense, since Prescott is by now already about ten years old.

    Tom Sweet is, as well as a dominant image, a highly skilled young performer, though there’s little sense of what’s going on in little Prescott’s mind.  In the adult cast, Yolande Moreau, as the indulgent housekeeper, and Michael Epp, as an interestingly troubled economist involved in the treaty negotiations, make the strongest impression.  In the role of the boy’s governess, Stacy Martin, as usual, is striking to look at and anti-climactic as soon as she speaks.   Brady Corbet, his editor Dávid Jancsó and the actors build up considerable tension within the strange household yet this doesn’t connect satisfyingly with the political thread of the material.  Corbet was barely twenty-seven when this film premiered (and won prizes) at the 2015 Venice Film Festival.  He has made a remarkably confident directing debut.  But The Childhood of a Leader, under its compelling technique, is intellectually weak and emotionally inert.

    25 August 2016

  • Wiener-Dog

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Solondz (2016)

    Wiener-Dog is a portmanteau film, its episodes linked by a dachshund bitch and by themes of futility and mortality.  The movie starts with the title character being deposited at a dogs’ home.  From there, she begins her odyssey through a series of four, increasingly old owners – a child, a thirty-something, an elderly man, an octogenarian woman.  The first owner – a nine-year-old boy called Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) – is recovering from cancer.   The last owner (Ellen Burstyn) calls the dog Cancer; when her puzzled granddaughter Zoe (Zosia Mamet) asks why, Nana replies, ‘It seemed right’.  Visiting her grandmother for the first time in a long time, Zoe also questions Nana spending her twilight years in a house set at the side of a noisy major road.  The dog’s life ends there, when she wanders out into the road and gets run over by a truck.   Zoe’s rare visit to Nana is prompted by a need for funds – for herself and for her artist boyfriend Fantasy (Michael Shaw).  Three months later, a stuffed animatronic dachshund is a main exhibit at Fantasy’s latest show.

    There are funny lines, comic-sketch pleasures and arresting images in Wiener-Dog but Todd Solondz’s pessimism feels automatic and the story’s construction is negligent.  It’s messy that Solondz explains how the first change of ownership happens but not the subsequent ones.  When Remi’s bullying, bullhorn-voiced father Danny (a one-note Tracy Letts) has had enough of the dog throwing up and crapping, he takes her to the vet to be euthanised.  The vet’s assistant Dawn (Greta Gerwig, who’s affecting as usual) smuggles the animal out and takes possession of her.  It’s right enough that the dog’s reprieve is described; the rationale for not explaining her later transfers may be that the animal’s life is meant to be a proxy for haplessly fortuitous human existence.  But the dachshund’s cheerful inscrutability makes her too different from Todd Solondz people to function as an illustration of the human condition – and the writer-director’s approach comes across as more generally casual.

    The film’s third episode climaxes with her depressed owner strapping explosives to the dog.  Although he shows a sinister bomb disposal man inching towards the (unperturbed) animal, Solondz is otherwise indifferent to this cliffhanger.  It would make sense for the dachshund’s name to change each time her ownership changed – and there’s no doubt that Solondz attaches importance to names.  While she’s Remi’s pet, wiener dog is called Wiener Dog.  Dawn renames her Doody, which nicely combines her new owner’s sweet sentimentality and the excretory problems that, in effect, brought the dachshund into Dawn’s life.  Dawn’s own surname is Wiener:  this young woman is the adolescent protagonist of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz’s first success, twenty years on.  The sad, superannuated film studies professor who turns the animal into an explosive device has the fine name of Dave Schmerz (and Danny DeVito is impressively unhappy in the role) but Solondz doesn’t bother to rename the dog during her time with Schmerz.  He then does so very emphatically when she moves to the moribund Nana.

    The death theme in Wiener-Dog would have more bite if there were more people in the world of Todd Solondz who deserved better.  These are in short supply since he’s deeply pessimistic partly because he’s strongly misanthropic.  The relatively likeable human beings – Remi, Dawn, Zoe – tend to be appealing in a similar register – they’re wan yet emotionally knotted up.  Solondz gives Dawn – perhaps for old times’ sake – a low-key happy ending.  Buying dog food for Doody, she bumps into Brandon (Kieran Culkin), whom Dawn knew at school, and agrees to go with him to Ohio.  When she asks him what’s in Ohio, he replies ‘crystal meth’; in fact, his younger brother Tommy (Connor Long) and Tommy’s wife April (Bridget Brown) are there too.  They adore Doody and Dawn leaves her with them.  (There’s no further narrative involving Tommy and Dawn – they don’t really count among the dog’s owners in the main scheme of the movie.)   As they drive away, Dawn and Brandon tentatively touch each other’s hand.  In contrast, Solondz makes things as miserable as possible for Remi.  After Danny has taken Wiener Dog to the vet, Remi’s mother Dina (Julie Delpy) doesn’t euphemise the dog’s disappearance by telling her son that she’s gone to a better place.  Returning her to the dogs’ home, with good new owners as a possibility, seems a more likely scenario then asking a vet to euthanise a basically healthy dog but Solondz ignores this.  In spite of the fact that Remi has already survived serious illness, Solondz prefers to show the child, through the loss of Wiener Dog, being confronted with mortality.

    Nana’s apprehension of death, at close quarters, feels less predetermined.   At first, her cynical, foul-mouthed wisecracking suggests a geriatric movie type.  Once she removes the dark glasses she wears indoors, however, Ellen Burstyn achieves shades of a different kind – her face starts to achieve a real weight of fear and regret.  Sitting in her garden after Zoe and Fantasy have taken their leave, Nana has a dream in which she’s visited by a succession of identical young girls (incarnated by Melo Ludwig), each of whom represents what Nana might have been.  This sequence – as well as being visually striking – is funny in things like the anti-climax of the selection of if-onlys incanted by the clone girls (‘if only you’d liked other people more, if only you’d liked yourself more, if only you’d left bigger tips …’)   The most simply enjoyable comedy comes in the Dave Schmerz episode, when he sits on a panel interviewing a prospective student for admission to film school.  This young man (excellent Charlie Tahan) is full of enthusiasm but bereft of cinema knowledge to such an extent that the panel ends up imploring him just to ‘name a movie you’ve seen – any movie’.  Funny as the scene is, it’s pretty obvious – and that goes for most of Solondz’s satire of the pretensions and frustrations of those who want to make it creatively:  Dave Schmerz’s doomed attempts, via one emptily encouraging agent after another, to sell a screenplay; aspiring actress Zoe’s desperate insistence to Nana that the bit part she’s landed is a big deal; the uncompromising, temperamental artist Fantasy (‘which is, actually, his real name’).

    Todd Solondz is working in this film for the second time with Edward Lachman (he also shot Life During Wartime).  Lachman’s cinematography adds lustrous substance to proceedings, whether or not the object of attention is conventionally beautiful.  The most remarkable example of this occurs when Remi’s parents go out, leaving him and Wiener Dog alone in the house together.  Solondz shows boy and dog rolling, in blissful slow motion, in a snowstorm of feathers produced from the insides of a pillow.   This is followed, after Remi has disastrously decided to feed Wiener Dog granola bars (‘I thought they were healthy’), by the camera moving, with fascinated languor, along the products of canine insides:  a seemingly unending stream of diarrhoea.  These juxtaposed sequences are both scored to Debussy’s ‘Clair de lune’.  Solondz’s rapt attention to the physically extraordinary is more discomfiting when he’s looking at people.  It’s discomfiting for this viewer because it makes me worry I have issues with these people’s appearance – until I realise that Solondz is deliberately encouraging this reaction, that it’s he who’s decided that Tommy and April should be a Down’s syndrome couple and to emphasise the extremely slow-moving bulk of Yvette (Marcella Lowery), Nana’s African-American carer.

    Halfway through, Solondz inserts a faux intermission, which introduces a song written for the film by Marc Shaiman. The dachshund travels a good deal in the course of the movie – Ohio, New York (for the Dave Schmerz part) and so on – and the intermission shows the dog superimposed on various American landscapes.  The shots are accompanied by Shaiman’s gutsy folk ballad (‘Wiener dog, wiener dog/Just looking for some shelter and a place to rest her head’).  This serves as a taster for the full song, which is played over the closing credits.  Its comic vibrancy sends you out of the theatre on a high – which is amazing, all things considered.  It will prove there’s no justice in the world – not that Todd Solondz needs proof – if  ‘The Ballad of Wiener Dog’ isn’t nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song.

    16 August 2016

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