Old Yorker

  • Three Kings

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David O Russell (1999)

    This satirical comedy-drama, about a gold heist that takes place at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, is made with tremendous panache.  Russell, whose third feature it was, often seems too pleased with the brilliant visual dynamism.  In juxtaposition to the startling images of warfare and bloodshed that he’s describing, that self-satisfaction can be jarring but Three Kings is an impressive piece of work; and the élan of the film-making is such that Russell’s high spirits are often infectious.  (The cinematographer was Newton Thomas Sigel, the editing by Robert K Lambert.)  According to Wikipedia, there’s still argument about the authorship of the screenplay – between Russell, who got the credit, and John Ridley, who gave him at least the story; but there’s no denying that it’s a clever piece of plotting, with a good deal of grimly witty dialogue.   Four American soldiers remove a piece of paper from the backside of an Iraqi prisoner of war and find that it’s a map to bunkers where Saddam Hussein has stashed gold stolen from Kuwait.  They go after the money and (in a nod to Kelly’s Heroes rather than The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) soon find it.  The Americans’ motives are gradually complicated as mercenary impulses get compromised by humanitarian ones.

    George Clooney is superb as the senior soldier, Major Archie Gates:  he goes a long way into the character.  Clooney is charismatic or closed off as the occasion demands – when Archie Gates is trying to get his own way, Clooney fixes the opposition with a penetrating expression in his eyes that’s unarguable.  He’s equally skilled at making himself opaque to suppress difficult thoughts.  Clooney gets decent support from Ice Cube, Spike Jonze and Mark Wahlberg.  There’s a gripping, well-written sequence in which the Wahlberg character is interrogated and tortured by a group of Iraqis led by Saïd Taghmaoui (who’s excellent).   Nora Dunn’s portrait of a television journalist who wants a good story at all costs has verve but is relatively crude – so is the writing of this character.  Russell’s direction gives the story a disorienting, relentless rhythm – that in turn gives an edge and immediacy to the crazy behaviours of the people on screen.   There’s an effective score by Carter Burwell and the American pop classics we hear on a jeep radio – The Beach Boys’ ‘I Get Around’, Chicago’s ‘If You Leave Me Now’ – are, in this desert setting, both bizarre and touching.

    13 August 2011

  • Thirteen

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Catherine Hardwicke (2003)

    In the opening shot of Thirteen, the protagonist Tracy (whose age is the film’s title) looks straight at the viewer and asks to be hit.  The camera pulls back to reveal the person she’s actually talking to – another girl, Evie.  The sequence that follows, in which the two of them, laughing hysterically, whack each other increasingly hard (both end up with minor facial injury), is startling but the gaze of Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Tracy, immediately raised doubts in my mind.  Wood is looking at you all right but there’s nothing much to see in her face.  She suggests not the desperately rebellious early teenager that Tracy turns out to be but a young actress trying and failing to shock by her uncompromising stare (it’s like a screen test that really means business).  In what follows over the next hundred minutes, Tracy is often in extremis but Evan Rachel Wood’s acting throughout is strenuously hollow.   She was fifteen when Thirteen was made; Evie is played by the year younger Nikki Reed, who co-wrote the screenplay with Catherine Hardwicke.  (The latter had been production designer on films such as Three Kings and Vanilla Sky.  This was her first feature as director; she went on to make the first Twilight movie.)

    According to Hardwicke (in an interview with Rebecca Murray for about.com, used for the BFI programme note), the character of Evie is:

    ‘… the combination of about three or four girls that Nikki [Reed] knew and two girls that I knew that I met a little bit later in my life.  They had that kind of super-alluring and intoxicating personality that’s actually very toxic.’

    What happens to Tracy, who falls under Evie’s baleful influence, is supposedly based on Nikki Reed’s own experiences earlier in her teens and, to a lesser extent, on Hardwicke’s too:  although ‘I wasn’t gorgeous like Nikki’, Hardwicke spent time ‘trying to get in with the popular kids’.   After the violent prologue, the story moves back four months, to the start of the school year.  Tracy is a good student at middle school; she even writes poetry (to make clear to the audience that she’s essentially sensitive); but she wants to be accepted by her more popular peers and, as a result, to become more popular with boys too.   Tracy starts thieving and, as Evie takes over her life, they do more and more together:  they play truant, share a bed, drink, smoke cigarettes and drugs.  Tracy gets her tongue pierced, then her navel, and is pretty soon into self-harming, repeatedly cutting her arms with a razor blade.  The basic set-up puts Evan Rachel Wood at a disadvantage:  since she is ‘gorgeous’ to look at, it’s hard to believe that Tracy would be derided by her classmates or desperate to ingratiate herself with them – Wood certainly isn’t actress enough to make you believe otherwise.

    Nikki Reed, although she’s striking as Evie, is also very self-aware.  Both of them – and everyone else in Thirteen – are trapped in a visual scheme which, given the grim and shocking subject matter of the story, is terribly obvious.  There’s lots of urgent hand-held camerawork; Catherine Hardwicke and her cinematographer Elliot David bleach out the colour so that the images appear to be losing blood, just like Tracy.  The only performer able to rise above the direction is Holly Hunter, as Tracy’s mother Mel.  She is, in the words of the Wikipedia synopsis, ‘a recovering alcoholic and high school dropout, who struggles as a hairdresser to support Tracy and her older brother’.  The role may be clichéd but Holly Hunter manages to blur the difference between Mel’s strengths and weaknesses, particularly her kind heart, and to create a layered character.

    21 August 2014

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