Old Yorker

  • The Snake Pit

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anatole Litvak (1948)

    Many mental illness movies later, it’s not hard to find things in The Snake Pit that now seem corny and overwrought.  Perhaps they looked that way even in 1948 but this was a seriously ambitious film – an interesting and sometimes persuasive one too.  The ambition delivered real changes in mental health care in the United States.  According to Wikipedia, ‘Publicity releases from 20th Century Fox claimed that twenty-six of the then forty-eight states … enacted reform legislation because of the movie’ albeit ‘This is a very difficult claim to verify because few of the bills introduced, regulations changed or funding increases implemented specifically mentioned The Snake Pit as a motivating factor’.   The film, with a screenplay by Frank Partos and Millen Brand, is based on a 1946 novel of the same name by Mary Jane Ward.

    Virginia Stuart Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) is a mental patient at the Juniper Hill State Hospital.  She hears voices in her head, suspects the people she encounters aren’t who they appear or claim to be, and is disconnected from reality – to the extent that, in an early scene, she can’t recognise her husband Robert (Mark Stevens).  Before long, he is describing to Virginia’s therapist, Dr Kik (Leo Genn), how the couple first got to know each other in Chicago, how they met up again and married in New York.  Robert’s acknowledgement, in conversation with Kik, that there were small warning signs of mental instability from an early stage in the relationship is an understatement – in the flashbacks that we see Virginia’s outbursts of seemingly irrational anxiety are hardly minor.  But we get the point Robert is making:  when you’re in love, you’re not on the lookout for symptoms of something wrong.

    Freud’s photograph keeps watch on the wall of Dr Kik’s office and the film is a conscientious attempt to do Freudian psychotherapy justice.  As you’d expect, The Snake Pit is structured as a mystery story, and the solution to the mystery is to be found in Virginia’s past, but there isn’t a single traumatic event that reveals all – rather, as Kik explains in due course, a complex of contributory factors.  There are positives and negatives to this relatively nuanced approach (relative, that is, to Hollywood conventions of the time and for decades afterwards).  We learn that Virginia was so shocked when her pompous, calling-the-tune boyfriend Gordon (Leif Erickson) decided they should marry that she asked him to turn his car around and take her back home; they crashed on the way there, Gordon was killed and Virginia has been mired in guilt ever since.  The psychological mystery narrative then marks time until we discover why Virginia was appalled by the prospect of marriage but Anatole Litvak puts some of that time to good use.

    The description of life at Juniper Hill isn’t merely a series of melodramatic incidents.  Litvak and the screenwriters get across – mostly economically – an idea of the tensions among the senior staff of the institution and the anxieties of some of the nurses.  There’s transference at work in Virginia’s feelings for Dr Kik; there’s also a frustrated passion for him on the part of the sinister Nurse Davis (Helen Craig).  The presentation of issues in contemporary mental health care provision – the controversy of electric shock treatment, a lack of resources to cope with increasing numbers of patients – isn’t subtle or imaginative.  The fact that these issues are being presented at all commands, however, a deal of respect for what the movie is trying to do.  Alfred Newman’s hysterical score tends to give unwanted assistance to the action although my impression was that Litvak used the music increasingly sparingly.  At any rate, there’s one scene – among the film’s most potent scene – in which its absence is striking.   Virginia and Robert, along with other patients and their visitors, are sitting in a café.  There are moments here when the boundaries between the residents of Juniper Hill and those from the ‘normal’ outside world are blurred.  As a result, the outbursts of disruptive behaviour in this sequence have a startling impact.

    There are crudely overdone things in the film. On her first interview with senior staff of the hospital to determine if she’s well enough to leave Juniper Hill, Virginia is traumatised by one of the doctors (Howard Freeman), who remonstrates with her by gesturing angrily, a couple of inches away from her face, with a very phallic cigar in his hand.  According to the numbering system for wards in the hospital, the lower the number the closer a patient is to release:  Virginia, after progressing to Ward 1, misbehaves, is put in a straitjacket and gets relegated to Ward 33.  This provides the opportunity for a sequence in which the hopeless cases of Ward 33 dance or sing or talk to themselves in a choreographed set piece – in other words, in the time-honoured fashion of inmates of mental hospitals located on a movie screen rather than in the real world.  The image that gives the piece its title – Virginia experiences the sense of looking down on herself and the other patients from a great height, of seeing them and her writhing like snakes in a pit – is very showy, although it’s undeniably distinctive.  There are some good highlights too.  After a nurse has warned the women to keep off an allegedly expensive rug in the centre of the general room on one of the wards, an elderly patient (Bee Humphries) immediately launches herself transgressively onto the rug – and into a vivid song and dance to ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’.

    Virginia’s husband Robert is intelligently underplayed by Mark Stevens:  there’s a surprising but effective resonance between his gentle charm and the more extrovert appeal of Virginia’s father (Damian O’Flynn), in the revelatory flashbacks to her childhood.  (Lora Lee Michel is the six-year-old Virginia, and pretty good; Natalie Schafer is her cold mother.)  While some of the patients – such as Beulah Bondi’s Mrs Greer, swathed in delusions of grandeur – are obvious theatrical turns, others – particularly Ruth Donnelly’s tough-old-broad Ruth – have a penetrating credibility and humour.  The largely silent character of Hester is a familiar and fey conception but Betsy Blair (best known for her role in Marty a few years later) is engaging in the role.   Celeste Holm has only a couple of scenes as a patient called Grace but she’s good, as usual.  As (the symbolically named?) Virginia, Olivia de Havilland gives one of her finest performances.   This is rarely a spectacularly histrionic portrait of a person suffering from mental illness.  Although de Havilland is vocally and emotionally powerful on the few occasions Virginia loses control, her characterisation is more impressive in how persistently believable she makes the protagonist’s confused apprehension of the world around and inside her.  There’s a wealth of well-observed gesture and plenty of comic skill in de Havilland’s playing.

    Late on in the film, the climax to a social for the Juniper Hill inmates is a solo sung by one of the patients (Jan Clayton) to music from the largo movement of Dvořák’s ‘From the New World’ symphony, with lyrics by Williams Arms Fisher:

    ‘Goin’ home. Goin’ home. I’m a-goin’ home.
    Quiet-like some still day, I’m just goin’ home.
    It’s not far, just close by, through an open door.
    Work all done, cares laid by, goin’ to roam no more;
    Mother’s there ‘xpecting me, father’s waiting, too,
    Lots of folks gathered there, all the friends I knew …’

    The whole gathering joins in.  There’s a sea of faces shining with tears and hope for happy returns.  The moment is meant to be heartwarming.  Yet the import of the lyrics, in the Freudian context of the story the film has told, is jarring:  the definition of ‘home’ and the news that ‘Mother’s there ‘xpecting me’ are – for a woman with an Electra complex, as Virginia seems to have – troubling.  The penultimate scene of the film, in which the heroine says goodbye to Dr Kik (before being reunited with her husband), is more satisfying.  She tells him she knew she was getting better when she realised she was no longer in love with Kik.  ‘You never were in love with me,’ he smiles but the look in his eyes as he watches  her move away makes clear that Kik’s feelings for Virginia went beyond a doctor’s sympathy for his patient.   The juxtaposition of these two sequences illustrates the film’s greater success (as a piece of drama) in exploring individuals than in realising the lives of ‘the mentally ill’ generally.

    One unsolved mystery of the movie, while I was watching, was why a fictional character had the extraordinary name of Dr Mark H Kensdelaerik – ‘Kik’, for short.  According to the website http://www.filmsgraded.com/:

    ‘… the novel was autobiographical.  [Mary Jane] Ward had been institutionalized, and effectively rescued by a brilliant psychoanalyst, Dr Gerard Chrzanowski, who told others to refer to him as “Dr Kik” since it was easier for Americans to pronounce’.’

    A couple of other things that I still don’t understand.  First, the significance of the twelfth of May, mention of which Virginia reacts so badly to in her early meetings with Robert:  was Gordon killed and/or did her father die on this date?  Second, is Juniper Hill women-only?  It seems so most of the time but, in that case, where do the male mental patients come from for the social events at the hospital that require their presence?

    18 July 2016

  • Wuthering Heights

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrea Arnold (2011)

    ‘Love is a force of nature’, announces the poster – hardly an original choice of tag line for the latest screen version of Emily Brontë, even if it were not identical to Brokeback Mountain’s only six years ago.  Yet Andrea Arnold’s approach to the material is ‘radical’.  The swarthy gipsyish Heathcliff of the novel is now a man of colour.  At one point, he rails at the Linton family as ‘fucking cunts’.  In the first scene, he’s banging his head against a wall and a floor. When the adolescent Catherine and Heathcliff are out on the moors together, she’s in trousers more than once. No doubt research-has-shown teenage girls really did sometimes wear trousers outdoors in the mid-nineteenth century.  Arnold evidently wants a non-verbal Wuthering Heights but she and her co-writer Olivia Hetreed can’t find a way of achieving that in the central part of the story, when Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights a rich man, and it’s here that the film’s inadequacies are fully exposed.  Arnold’s depiction of the adolescence of Cathy and Heathcliff does at least work on its own terms, even if those terms are uninteresting.  She makes things ‘real’ by stressing the relentless arduousness of lives in this time and place – the cold, inhospitable house, the mud, the lousy weather – as if a more nuanced treatment would amount to tame compromise.  (There’s no music except for the odd fragment of song.)  If Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is shot in mostly natural light, the interiors of this Wuthering Heights go one better – natural darkness.   A lot of the time I couldn’t see what was going on inside the eponymous house but I could soon guess it was something grim:   Arnold replaces the novel’s emotional violence with physical violence.  I lost count of the number of times Heathcliff was whipped or beaten by the malignant Hindley.

    The director is back in her comfort zone once Catherine has died:  Heathcliff can climb onto her deathbed and just about have  sex with her and, in her grave, scrabble with his nails on the coffin lid, and try to beat his brains out (that opening sequence turns out to be a flash forward to this point in the story).  But the intervening section, although it contains more yelling and fisticuffs than you’re used to in Wuthering Heights, is mostly dramatised in a less unfamiliar way.  (When Catherine, now married to Edgar Linton and mistress of Thrushcross Grange, sits drinking tea with Heathcliff and her husband in the drawing room, there is even a caged bird in evidence …)  As a result, there are more words:  we see and even more hear the acting limitations of Kaya Scodelario and James Howson as the young adult Catherine and Heathcliff.   According to Wikipedia, Natalie Portman and Abbie Cornish were lined up for Cathy at different stages in the development of this production; Michael Fassbender was in the frame for Heathcliff.  It’s consistent with Arnold’s approach that she ended up with less familiar names:  someone we’ve never or hardly seen before can bring an intense reality to a character that it’s harder for a better-known actor to achieve, and this approach paid off for Arnold both in Red Road and Fish Tank (where she also had Fassbender).  But it’s a pointless exercise if the fresh faces are merely trying and failing to sound like proper actors, as Scodelario and, especially, Howson are doing.  I resent the film’s implication that its take on Emily Brontë is more challenging, does something more difficult than a traditional adaptation of Wuthering Heights could do.  It serves Arnold right that her two leads – and others in the cast – demonstrate so clearly how hard it is to speak lines convincingly.  Lee Shaw as Hindley and Simone Jackson as Nelly Dean aren’t up to much either, although Oliver Milburn and Nichola Burley as the Lintons and Paul Hilton as Mr Earnshaw acquit themselves relatively well.  (The only actor I knew was Steve Evets, in the small part of the servant Joseph.)

    Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is being greatly praised and many of the outdoor sequences are remarkable to look at:  unless the lighting is even more skilful than it appears, it must have taken the crew ages to wait for mists, sunsets and louring skies as perfectly apt as those we see.   There are fine human images too:  Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave, who play the teenage Catherine and Heathcliff, are natural camera subjects in a way their older counterparts never manage to be.  It’s no surprise that Arnold reprises, as a memory of the bereaved Heathcliff, the shot of Beer’s face, dappled with the mud that Heathcliff daubed over Cathy as they rolled around on the moor.  Arnold is better at remembering good shots than she is at sustaining themes.  When Heathcliff returns in his fine clothes, Hindley, now in straitened circumstances, on one occasion calls him, as he always did before, a ‘nigger’ but the abuse now lacks force and merely underlines the abuser’s powerlessness.  No one at Thrushcross Grange registers any surprise, let alone resentment, that a black man has made good.   Andrea Arnold appears to be interested in Heathcliff’s ethnicity only for as long as the opportunities are there to subject him to horribly cruel treatment.  On that subject:  Arnold’s Wuthering Heights presents several examples of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw but there’s one moment I found more troubling than any of these.  Hindley’s young son takes a pup and hangs it by its collar in the yard, and the wriggling dog yelps.   This may be one of the year’s finest bits of CGI trompe l’oeil.   But if this is a real dog in distress I hope the credits (I didn’t stay for them all) don’t claim that no animals were harmed in the making of this film.

    13 November 2011

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