Old Yorker

  • What Richard Did

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lenny Abrahamson (2012)

    My prejudices meant that I found the lifestyle of Richard and his friends depressing long before the event occurs that turns their world upside down.  It wasn’t fundamentally the affluence of these sexually and socially confident teenagers that I backed away from – although being well off adds to their apparent self-assurance, and so makes them worse.   Jack Reynor is physically well cast as Richard Karlsen.  With his sharp blue eyes and snout, Reynor exudes a sense of fleshy entitlement.  A good-looking star of the first fifteen at his Dublin school, Richard is clearly someone to be reckoned with when he gets aggressive – and this proves to be the case, with lethal results.  There are unambiguous foreshadowings at an early stage of What Richard Did:  Lenny Abrahamson punctuates the scenes of the kids enjoying each other’s company and messing around with the occasional hostile, avid glint in Richard’s eye as he watches his rugby teammate Conor (Sam Keeley) and his girlfriend Lara (Roisin Murphy) together.  Richard likes the look of Lara and therefore thinks he has a right to her.  I found Richard not only intimidating but, although it’s hard on the excellent Jack Reynor to say this, repellent.

    Although it’s plain to see what Richard did, it’s often harder to hear what he says.  His inaudibility is the downside of the fine naturalistic acting that Abrahamson gets, from Reynor especially and from nearly everyone else in the film:  Roisin Murphy and Patrick Gibson, as the rookie in the rugby team, are particularly good.  The playing of Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother), as Richard’s father Peter, is a little more theatrical.  Peter decides to cover up what his son did; his guilty sobs at a memorial service for the ill-fated Conor (a relatively melodramatic scene all round) are enough to draw unwanted attention to him.  Mikkelsen is strong, though, in the sequence in which Richard admits responsibility for Conor’s death.  He didn’t mean to kill him although he did mean to kick him in the head.

    His mother (Lorraine Pilkington) thinks Richard can do no wrong:  she’s never seen again in the film once her son confesses to his father.  This striking omission is probably intentional.  Given the way Peter is behaving, Abrahamson and the screenwriter Malcolm Campbell (who has written mainly for television) would need to show the mother’s not noticing something’s up with her husband or her reaction to what he tells (or doesn’t tell) her:  either would be an inconvenient complication.  Campbell’s screenplay is adapted from a 2008 novel Bad Day in Blackrock by Kevin Power.   This was inspired by a real-life crime, the killing of a boy called Brian Murphy, kicked to death by school friends outside a Dublin night club in 2000.  Murphy’s death occurred when the Irish economy was riding high.  It’s possible that What Richard Did is set in this recent past but, if so, I didn’t pick that up and assumed it to be describing the Dublin of today; as a consequence, the emphasis on the characters’ material wealth – it seems that Peter Karlsen works in the financial sector – is a little surprising.

    I’ve read a couple of reviews of What Richard Did, by Philip French and Hannah McGill, which suggest that it’s an allegory about the financial decline of Ireland.  It’s hard to believe that anyone watching the film, other than a fully-briefed critic, would receive it as such but McGill adduces as evidence the fact that Richard’s father, who helps conceal his son’s crime, is Danish and that ‘Denmark helped to bail Ireland out with a €400 million bilateral loan in 2010’!   I hope this isn’t what Lenny Abrahamson had in mind.  But even if it was, and although I didn’t like this film, I’ll look out for what Lenny does next.

    19 January 2013

  • To Each His Own

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mitchell Leisen (1946)

    Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas may be the paradigm but self-sacrificing mothers weren’t exactly a rare breed in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s (The Old Maid, Mildred Pierce and so on).  The children of these women might be (a) illegitimate or (b) spoilt, brattish ingrates or (c) beneficiaries of their mother’s unstinting hard work and knack for making money – or all three.  These various elements of what amounts to a sub-genre all feature in To Each His Own, starring Olivia de Havilland.  Mitchell Leisen’s film, with a screenplay by Charles Brackett and Jacques Théry, begins and ends in London during World War II.   Josephine ‘Jody’ Norris (de Havilland), a forty-something spinster, is fire-watching with a middle-aged English gent (Roland Culver).   Their exchanges are tetchy until he nearly falls from a church roof and Jody saves his life.  She then warily accepts his invitation to dinner.  Lord Desham (as he turns out to be) begins to talk about his sad past and presently solitary life.  He’s sure that he’s spotted in Miss Norris a lonely kindred spirit.

    Jody has a mid-Atlantic accent which, for once, makes sense:  she was born and raised in America before coming to London in her late twenties to live and work.  At the restaurant with Lord Desham, she’s approached by a young man in uniform who recognises her as a former resident of his home town of Piersen Falls.  He mentions by name a US air force colleague, also from Piersen Falls, who’s travelling down from Yorkshire, where he’s been posted, and due to arrive in London imminently.  This news is enough for Jody to terminate her outing with Lord Desham and hotfoot it to Victoria Station.  The train carrying Gregory ‘Griggsy’ Piersen (sic:  his surname and the town’s name are the same) is running very late.  Waiting in the station, Jody remembers her youth – when she helped out in her father’s drug store in Piersen Falls, declined the suit of a couple of beaus, and enjoyed a whirlwind romance with Bart Cosgrove (John Lund), a dashing US Army Air Service pilot.  Bart visits the town on a World War I bond drive.  He and Jody become sweethearts but Bart is killed in action in Europe.  Shortly afterwards, she discovers that she’s carrying his baby.  Although she confides in her kindly father (Griff Barnett), Jody knows that the stigma of having a child out of wedlock will make small-town life intolerable.  A sympathetic nurse on the maternity ward (Victoria Horne) offers to help execute a plan whereby Jody’s baby son will be left on a doorstep in Piersen Falls with a note explaining he’s a war orphan.  Jody, being the kind, conscientious citizen that she is, will take the baby in and raise him as her own.

    Corinne Piersen (Mary Anderson), who married Jody’s suitor Alex (Phillip Terry) on the rebound, has just lost her newborn (first) baby.  The well-meaning Belle Ingram (Alma Macrorie, also the film’s editor) is the local Mother Hubbard on whose doorstep the ‘orphan’ is left.  She gives him to Alex and Corinne.  Jody tries, throughout the childhood of Griggsy (Billy Ward), to spend as much time with her son as she can:  this becomes very difficult once Corinne, already jealous of Jody because Alex stills holds a torch for her, knows that she’s also the boy’s birth mother.  When her father dies, Jody goes to New York, to take up the offer of a job with her other ex-suitor, Mac Tilton (Bill Goodwin).  His line of work turns out to be bootlegging; Jody, undaunted, uses Mac’s hooch-making equipment to create cosmetic products instead and she’s soon a successful businesswoman. When Alex and Corinne fall on hard times, Jody bails out them out in exchange for Griggsy but the child, in spite of being pampered by his doting ‘aunt’, misses the woman who raised him and who, as far as he’s concerned, is his mother.  It’s when Griggsy returns to Corinne that Jody crosses the Atlantic to put her past behind her.

    The first part of the film is the best.  Mitchell Leisen takes time to introduce and start to develop the relationship between Jody and Lord Desham – enough time, and conversation, to ensure, thanks to the actors and the script, that we’re interested in both these middle-aged people in their own right, not just as a means of taking us into the main story.   The abundance of dialogue is less welcome as the film continues.  Bart Cosgrove, on his flying visit to Piersen Falls, is a verbose man of action; there’s a lot of talk throughout To Each His Own.  In the middle part – the main part – of the narrative, it becomes ever harder to shake off a sense that the movie is going through the masochistic motions of a mother-love-and-illegitimacy melodrama.   The war orphan plan is not only bound to go wrong according to the heartbreaking conventions of this kind of movie:  it immediately strikes you less as not quite foolproof than as utterly foolhardy.   It’s not clear, since Griggsy has been legally adopted by Corinne and Alex, what point there is in Jody’s repeated insistence that the boy is rightfully hers.  (She doesn’t insist in a way that suggests she’s irrationally unable to face facts:  she seems to be stating a reasonable claim.)  Corinne, as played by Mary Anderson, is exceedingly unappealing – we don’t feel this woman’s understandable anxiety and insecurity about Jody’s unintended hold on Alex and her profound connection to Griggsy.  It doesn’t help either that Griggsy himself is far from endearing, though Billy Ward is better when the kid is upset than when he’s acting cute.

    The post-flashback climax to the film, although it’s no less anchored in formula, is effective enough.  Having the same actor play Bart Cosgrove and the grown-up Griggsy is an obvious idea but it pays off – even if John Lund is no great shakes in either role.  (Lund, already well known as a stage actor, was making his movie debut here.  Although he went on to do other films, he never became a screen star.)   During Griggsy’s few days in London, Jody continues to deny herself, in order to indulge the son who knows he was adopted but still doesn’t know the identity of his biological mother.  Griggsy’s insouciant-verging-on-ungrateful acceptance of Jody’s relentless help is rather startling – probably more startling than it’s meant to be (‘And youth is cruel, and has no remorse’). Griggsy is desperate to marry his English sweetheart Liz (Virginia Welles); Lord Desham, who proves able to ‘pull strings’ whenever the script requires, makes this happen.  At the wedding reception, where the bride and groom and guests dance, Liz mentions to Griggsy that Aunt Jody is looking at him ‘as if you were her own son’ and the penny drops. ‘I think this is our dance, mother,’ is the last line of the film, as Griggsy and Jody go into a waltz.  Olivia de Havilland was only thirty when she made To Each His Own: what’s remarkable about her (Oscar-winning) performance is that she’s more interesting and persuasive as the middle-aged Jody than she is playing the woman closer to her own age.  As the older Jody, de Havilland’s line readings are more strongly felt and distinctive.  Her movements and mannerisms are natural – her make-up and costumes look right too.  Roland Culver – deftly humorous, emotionally subtle yet incisive – is excellent as Lord Desham.

    11 July 2016

Posts navigation