Old Yorker

  • Champion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Robson (1949)

    Carl Foreman’s screenplay (from a story by Ring Lardner) and Mark Robson’s direction are as ruthlessly efficient as the film’s protagonist, Michael ‘Midge’ Kelly, is in the ring; but perhaps you need either an appetite for the fight game or a detailed knowledge of boxing movies – or both – to enjoy and appreciate Champion.  Even these two things together may not be enough to warm to the film.  Manny Farber’s criticism repeatedly discloses a real enthusiasm for sport as well as a gift for describing its realisation on the cinema screen.   In his review of Champion in 1949, Farber starts by noting that ‘the studios have been turning out fight films as fast as they could steal each other’s material’.  He goes on to point out, exasperatedly, that:

    ‘The scenarios seem to have been written by a gossip columnist – they concentrate on spanking the hero for the un-Christian way he breaks training by smoking, the mean treatment he accords to his friends, and, most of all, his crude, ugly approach to women.  He goes with disreputable females, mistreats his mother and the girl back home waiting for him …

    The romanticism of the script is quite restrained, compared to the peculiar business that goes on in the ring.  Whereas real fighters actually hit each other about one sixth of the time, the fearless “phenoms” of the cinema are hitting every second – and never anywhere but flush on the chin or in the stomach; in spite of this, the hero is usually looking around the audience for someone he knows.  … There are no decisions, fights are never stopped …’

    Unless I missed it, Kirk Douglas’s Midge Kelly stays off tobacco.  Otherwise, Champion bears Farber out in all the above details, and plenty more.

    Midge and his brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy) are travelling from Chicago to California, thumbing lifts and hitching on freight trains.  They’re just about penniless, having bought a share in the Los Angeles diner they’re heading for.  They get a lift into Kansas City from a boxer called Johnny Dunne (John Daheim) and his girlfriend, Grace Diamond (Marilyn Maxwell).  Dunne is fighting in Kansas City that night and a promoter offers Midge $35 if he’ll fill in for a boxer who’s dropped out of one of the supporting bouts.  Desperate for funds and game for anything, Midge agrees, although the promoter eventually pays him only ten dollars, claiming the remainder as a management fee.  Midge doesn’t intend to box again but, when they reach LA, the brothers discover they’ve been swindled over the diner share too – and end up waiting tables and washing dishes.  Both Midge and Connie are attracted to Emma (Ruth Roman), whose father runs the restaurant where they work.  Midge gets too close to her:  a shotgun wedding follows.   A fight trainer called Tommy Haley (Paul Stewart) approached Midge after his fight in Kansas City and told him, if he ever needed a break, to come to the gym that Tommy runs in Los Angeles.  Midge, with Connie in tow, soon abandons Emma and heads for the gym.

    It’s the first step en route to the middleweight championship of the world and Emma is the first of a succession of people – the salt of the earth, rotten apples and something between the two – whose trust Midge betrays on the road to the top.  The decent folk include, as well as Emma, Tommy and Midge’s ailing ma (Esther Howard).  Among the wrong ‘uns are the self-serving Grace Diamond and the organised crime bosses who expect Midge to throw a fight against the long-time title hopeful Johnny Dunne.  Connie and Palmer Harris (Lola Albright), who falls for Midge after her husband (Luis Van Rooten) has replaced Tommy as his manager, are relatively ambiguous figures.  Champion goes about its job confidently but so predictably that it’s only in the supercharged melodrama of Midge’s climactic title defence against Dunne – their paths keep crossing! – that the film is undeniably startling.  Carl Foreman, Mark Robson and the editor Harry W Gerstad (who won an Oscar for his efforts) give this last title bout the works:  it feels all of twelve rounds but the fluctuations and the dynamic brutality of the action are compelling.

    This was the first movie produced by Stanley Kramer.  In view of what he went on to do, it’s hard to avoid thinking that Kramer had a big hand in turning the finale into a resounding jeremiad.  The film, before it sets about telling Midge Kelly’s success story in flashback, opens with a ringside commentator’s introduction of Midge as not only a champion but also a popular hero.  By the time Champion reprises the commentator’s spiel – as a prelude to the final fight – we know how hollow his words of praise are.  It’s still a shock, however, that the wages of Midge’s sin are death:  he eventually keeps his title but loses his life (a brain haemorrhage in the locker room afterwards).    Although a large part of its commercial success must have been thanks to the tickets bought by boxing fans, the movie implies that Midge went irredeemably wrong the moment he got into the corrupt and corrupting fight game.

    Playing Midge Kelly made Kirk Douglas a star.  You get a powerful sense of the actor’s relish in landing so emphatically dominant a leading role and his pride in the physique he gets to show off.  (His musculature is so developed beside John Daheim’s that poor Johnny Dunne never looks to have a chance against Midge – though I’m not sure Douglas’s upper body actually resembles the typical prizefighter’s physique of the time.)  Kirk Douglas’s surplus dynamism on screen sometimes went to waste.  There’s no risk of that happening on this energetic assignment and his acting meshes perfectly with the style of Champion.  This means, unfortunately, that he’s also somewhat monotonous:  like the film as a whole, it’s only in the in extremis closing stages that Douglas is truly extraordinary.  The contrast between the brothers is comically overdone by giving Connie a limp and a walking stick but Arthur Kennedy does well in the part – particularly in the lovelorn Connie’s scenes with Emma.  (Kennedy has a fine moment when – after Emma, in distress, has removed the wedding ring that binds her to Midge – Connie gently and regretfully puts it back on her finger.)   The actresses in the three main female roles have, in dramatic terms, similarly thankless tasks but the casting of Ruth Roman, Marilyn Maxwell and Lola Albright ensures they’re effectively contrasting presences in the story.

    4 September 2016

  • Things to Come (2016)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’avenir

    Mia Hansen-Løve (2016)

    In a Miranda July film called The Future that appeared in 2011 the plot centred on the adoption of a stray cat.  Finding a new home for a feline features in Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest too.  Perhaps L’avenir has been released in this country as Things to Come to avoid any risk of confusion with July’s The Future – and on the reasonably safe assumption that few people will get it mixed up with earlier Things to Come.  This title evidently comes along in cinemas once every forty years.   According to IMDB, the estimable H G Wells-inspired science-fiction film of 1936 was followed in 1976 by a low-budget sci-fi sexploitation movie, with the tag line ‘Soon … There Will Be Machines That Can Do Anything!’  The new Things to Come is too refined to have any tag line at all.

    Hansen-Løve’s story is set mostly in Paris, where its main character, a middle-aged philosophy professor called Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert), lives and works.   Nathalie is married to Heinz (André Marcon), also an academic philosopher.  The couple have two adult children, Chloé (Sarah Le Picard) and Johann (Solal Forte).  The main action begins in 2007, when student protests against Nicolas Sarkozy’s university reforms were making headlines.  The protests remind Nathalie of her own distant radical youth; an unexpected meeting with Fabien (Roman Kolinka), a gifted former student now involved with a leftist-going-on-anarchist group of writers, evokes her more recent past.  Hansen-Løve shows scenes from Nathalie’s current working and family lives:  she teaches; she listens to a publishing outfit’s plans to repackage, in a more eye-catching format, the scholarly texts she wrote some years ago;  she repeatedly visits her neurotic mother Yvette (Edith Scob).  Then Heinz informs Nathalie that he’s been seeing another woman and is going to move in with her.  Yvette goes into a care home and dies there, leaving her cat an orphan.  The crass publishers decide not to republish Nathalie’s work.  She and the cat go to spend a few days in Fabien’s household in the Alps above Grenoble, where the animal briefly goes missing and Nathalie feels out of place.  A year later, Chloé has a baby.  Nathalie returns to the Alps, for one night only, to drop off the cat, which Fabien has now agreed to take in.  Nathalie comes back to Paris to prepare a Christmas meal.  The film ends with a pleasant family gathering:  her son, her daughter and Chloé’s partner relax at the dinner table, while Nathalie sings a lullaby to her grandchild in the next room.

    Mia Hansen-Løve succeeds in avoiding the obvious in Things to Come – Nathalie doesn’t rekindle her past through renewed political engagement or an affair with Fabien – but fails to find much to replace the obvious with.  When he drops her off at the station near the end of the film, Fabien remarks to Nathalie how solitary she is.  She cheerfully refutes this – she reminds him she’s now a grandmother – but there is, for the first time, a look of concern on Fabien’s face as he starts his journey back home.  Whether the look is meant to suggest that he’s in love with Nathalie or is just worried about her isn’t clear but Fabien was certainly right about the heroine’s aloneness.  On one occasion, a few of her current students call at her home; otherwise, she has no friends or work colleagues or former students whom she sees socially – although there’s no suggestion that she’s anti-social.  An only child, she appears to have no relatives other than her mother and her children:  Yvette dies and, once the story is underway, Nathalie’s contact with Chloé and Johann is restricted to special occasions (the maternity ward, the Christmas get-together).  For a mother and a middle-class professional with a substantial academic career behind her, Nathalie is remarkably isolated.  As the protagonist of a movie drama about the disappearance of old certainties and having to face new challenges, she’s isolated in just the way you’d expect.  In other words, she’s a woman alone for the film-maker’s convenience.

    Canny use is made of Nathalie’s academic field too: Things to Come wears philosopher-king’s new clothes.  The writer-director encourages us to admire the seriousness of her intent by sticking in passages from Rousseau, Montesquieu et al – she gets a strong emotional effect from having Nathalie read at her mother’s funeral a piece of Montesquieu about religious belief and doubt.  The camera pans across shelves of philosophy books in the Chazeaux home:  Hansen-Løve knows that plenty of viewers will be flattered into thinking these volumes signal they’re watching a movie of greater depth than they would be if the shelves were crammed with cheap ornaments.  When it comes to realising intellectual life under her own steam, however, Hansen-Løve backs off.  Nathalie lends Fabien a book that she admires.  He calls round at the family home (when Heinz is still part of it) to pick up some other texts, returns ‘The Radical Loser’ and Nathalie asks what he thought of it.  Fabien acknowledges the book is well written but feels it preaches to the converted, and confuses radicalism and terrorism.  In response to both charges, Nathalie says only, ‘I don’t agree’.  Unless we’re meant to think she has feelings about Fabien that get in the way of her arguing with him (and that isn’t substantiated by anything that follows), there seems no justification for Nathalie’s feeble reply other than that Mia Hansen-Løve couldn’t write a better one.

    There’s more Rousseau in the closing stages, on the achievement of happiness and the greater importance of continuing to desire:  this interesting proposition is empty of dramatic meaning since we don’t know whether – and, if so, what – Nathalie continues to desire.  This illustrates a besetting weakness of Things to Come.  Mia Hansen-Løve gives us no sense of what the break-up of her marriage means to the heroine, beyond disputed ownership of a few of the philosophy books.  The same goes for her mother’s death.  (While Yvette is alive, Nathalie is a rather grumpily dutiful daughter – her foolish mother takes up too much of her valuable time.)  Hansen-Løve doesn’t appear to be interested in this kind of complication:  all that matters to her is that Nathalie’s marriage and mother are long-standing fixtures in her life that come to an end.   It’s no surprise that the script is equally negligent about relatively minor details.  Nathalie insists that a feline allergy means she can’t herself take on her elderly, underweight mother’s elderly, overweight pet.  Nathalie briefly gets more attached to the animal (although a burden-of-the-past, the cat is also all-she-has-to-remember-her-mother-by) and it sleeps beside her, with no sign of an allergic reaction resulting.  The fact that the cat, which has spent all its life in a Paris apartment, is dispatched to alpine countryside implies a startling lack of pet rehoming opportunities in and around the French capital.

    By depriving the protagonist of the family, social and intellectual consolations that might be available to a woman in her position, Hansen-Løve raises questions in the viewer’s mind as to how typical Nathalie’s experience is meant to be – and what the point of the film is if she’s not somehow typical.  The answer to these questions may well be found in the short Wikipedia article on Things to Come.  This claims that Mia Hansen-Løve ‘wrote the role of Nathalie with Isabelle Huppert in mind’ and ‘admitted that the character of Nathalie was loosely based on her own mother who was a philosophy professor who separated from her husband later in life’.  Hansen-Løve’s previous film Eden was inspired by her brother’s experiences:  once again, she’s assumed that the great immediate importance to her of the biographical material with which she’s working is inevitably conveyed by the movie she’s made from it.   The assumption is fundamentally wrong but Things to Come is more successful than Eden and there’s a simple explanation for this:  the lead actress.

    When it comes to unworthy husbands, André Marcon is evidently the go-to man in French cinema just now (he partnered Catherine Frot in Marguerite); Roman Kolinka’s somewhat cross-eyed good looks give the underwritten Fabien a bit of distinctiveness; but Isabelle Huppert is virtually the whole show.  She holds the film together and she holds your attention.  Her kind of expressivity – lapidary, controlled – is very effective here:  the strict rationing of overt emotion makes for greater impact when Huppert does allow herself smiles, tears or anger.  She also confirms her place in the tradition of French screen actresses who achieve the visual equivalent of what fine-voiced British actors were proverbially reckoned to do reading the telephone directory.  Like Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman or Juliette Binoche in Hidden, Huppert’s Nathalie is fascinating to watch simply going about routine domestic business.  (A sequence in which she’s at a movie and pestered by a man in the sparse audience is muffled by the rather daft joke of Isabelle Huppert sitting in a cinema seat watching Juliette Binoche on the screen.)  Huppert’s charisma and lack of theatrical mannerism combine to draw you to Nathalie and to make her seem real.  She disguises what a sketchy, careless film Mia Hansen-Løve has made.  Huppert does this so successfully that the 2016 Berlin Film Festival jury awarded Hansen-Løve the Best Director prize for Things to Come.  To compound the injustice, they didn’t give Isabelle Huppert the Best Actress award.

    4 September 2016

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