Old Yorker

  • The Pumpkin Eater

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jack Clayton (1964)

    ‘Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater,
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her;
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well.’

    I guess this is the source of the title of Penelope Mortimer’s novel, which Harold Pinter adapted for the screen.  If you google ‘Peter, Peter’, it regularly comes up on lists of nursery rhymes with darker hidden meanings:  there are suggestions that it may be about uxoricide or that a ‘pumpkin shell’ was code for a chastity belt.   The protagonist of The Pumpkin Eater, Jo Armitage, is the mother of six children from three marriages.  Her psychiatrist suggests to her that Jo can justify having sex only with procreation in mind.  Her marital misery plumbs new depths after her adulterous third husband – Jake, a screenwriter – has persuaded Jo to have an abortion and be sterilised.  She’s then told by an acquaintance called Bob Conway that his wife is carrying Jake’s child after an affair on a film shoot in Morocco.

    The family’s London house and the now disused windmill where they once lived are realised brilliantly by Clayton and his cinematographer Oswald Morris.  We experience the house as if through Jo’s eyes – so that the details of its décor and the textures of the life going on within it seem both barely noticed, because they’re so familiar, and horribly separate, alien.  There are images intersected by door or window frames that convey, strongly but not over-emphatically, a sense of Jo being closed off or closed in.  This sounds consciously artful and so it is – but the visual scheme always connects with the mind of the main character.  Although there are many shots that suggest a bleached out world, Morris’s black-and-white photography is emotionally varied; so is Georges Delerue’s supple, melancholy score.  Jack Clayton’s previous film was The Innocents and there are moments in The Pumpkin Eater when Jo’s brood are not much less disquieting than the brother and sister in the earlier movie.  Because it takes some time to get clear just how many children there are, they’re powerful on an almost supernatural level, yet they emerge as individuals too.  When they’re playing together, the bursts of noise can be violently disorienting.  Wide, long shots of the children emerging one by one from the distance and coming towards Jo are eerily beautiful.

    Anne Bancroft’s face is often mask-like in its shifts between sadness and inscrutability.  Occasionally her head is framed so that it seems a cutout, the dominant part of an image but detached from it and from the rest of her body.   With the help of Motley’s clothes (and hats) and the skilful make-up (George Frost) and hairdressing (Gordon Bond), Bancroft’s angular beauty reinforces the presentation of Jo as a series of facets struggling to cohere as a single identity.   Bancroft is the brittle soul of The Pumpkin Eater and the connection between her and Peter Finch is electric when Jo and Jake first meet (they’re introduced by Jo’s then husband – the second one).   Having not seen him for some time, I’d forgotten how much Finch was able to draw the camera, his ability to express conflicted emotions with remarkable naturalness.  Jake is an impressive character because his charm and (he obviously believes) his decent aspects are not, in Finch’s performance, at all compromised by the increasing evidence of his sexual faithlessness.   As Conway, James Mason’s vocal edge and versatility are thrilling; his grin at first suggests lethal insincerity, then desperation.  Conway invites Jo to afternoon tea at London Zoo and they talk together as Jo’s children, with a nanny supervising ineffectually, enjoy themselves.  Conway reels off the choices on the menu.  A few minutes later, he’s reading from a love letter his wife sent to Jake.  In these passages especially, Mason shows himself a superb interpreter of Harold Pinter’s words.  Pinter provides some coruscatingly nasty lines.  The dialogue is not always so impressive when it’s used for a relatively conventional exchange.

    There’s a lot to admire then in The Pumpkin Eater; its weakness is that, at this distance in time anyway, its subject is just not that interesting.  Within a few years, other movies, as well as sustained public debate, would have addressed issues of female and feminine identity and the tensions between sexual partnership and motherhood.  These themes may have been unusual when Penelope Mortimer’s novel was published in 1962 but it’s hard, coming to the material for the first time now, to find it original.   Even so, it was good to see The Pumpkin Eater – I can’t remember noticing it in television listings for many years.  The strong supporting cast includes Richard Johnson as Jo’s second husband, Cedric Hardwicke as her father and Alan Webb as Jake’s, Eric Porter as the psychiatrist and Cyril Luckham as a doctor.  The young Maggie Smith’s intense eccentricity as an unwelcome (from Jo’s point of view) house guest is compelling.  Yootha Joyce is riveting as a spectacularly unhappy woman who starts a conversation with Jo at the hairdresser’s.   The children include Phoebe Nicholls, Frances White and Kate Nicholls (the last two as the same daughter at two different ages).

    20 August 2010

  • Then She Found Me

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Helen Hunt (2008)

    Helen Hunt is taking on a lot on her directing debut.  She’s not just in the main part – she’s in nearly every frame.  She can’t have spent too much time behind the camera and it shows – in the lack of rhythm of some scenes, and the frequency of mistimed lines.  Hunt’s career as a leading film actress stalled within a couple of years of her Oscar win for As Good As It Gets.  She can hardly be criticised for deciding that taking charge of as much as possible is the best way of sealing a starring role (she also co-produced and worked on the screenplay).  Hunt is ambitious too in her mutually exclusive aims of making a film that’s moving and harmless.  Whether the fault is with the original (a novel by Elinor Lipman) or the adaptation (by Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, with Hunt), the material is pretty thin and formulaic – but it’s treated as if it had layers and substance.

    Hunt plays April – thirty-nine years old, Jewish; she teaches young children and is desperate for a child of her own, to the point of obsession.   Adopted herself, she’s knotted up with frustrated dismay when family members suggest that adopting a child may be her best bet.  After less than a year of marriage, her mother’s boy husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) walks out.   In the course of the next few days, April’s adoptive mother dies.  She meets Frank (Colin Firth), a single father whose kids she teaches, and is strongly attracted to him.  Her biological mother Bernice (Bette Midler) – a daytime television celebrity – turns up out of the blue.  Within the next few weeks and just as she’s embarked on a relationship with Frank, April finds out that she’s pregnant – her husband’s parting shot.

    As an actress, Helen Hunt has a gift for creating believable, likeable characters – ‘ordinary people’ but without the condescension that phrase implies – and for giving emotionally nuanced inflections to otherwise undistinguished dialogue.    She does it again here; unfortunately, her reality has the effect of aggravating the problems she causes herself by taking the script too seriously.  Because she quickly makes April convincing as an individual, you expect her to get across what it must be like to have your life turned upside down this way in the space of a few days.  It’s an impossible task.  Hunt is such a pleasant actress that you feel bad for feeling disappointed in her but, as director, she has only herself to blame.

    Then She Found Me would work better if it was played in a quicker, lighter style that recognised the farcical quality of the plot’s incredibly rapid sequence of events.  The gallantry of April and Frank gets tiresome.  As usual, Firth tries but you can see the effort more than you can feel the charms he holds for April.  Much of the time, Firth makes his lines sound like lines; when he doesn’t, he suggests a man who’s rather alienating.  Bette Midler can’t help giving the film a comic lift but the director seems mesmerised by Midler’s verve as a performer – the camera gets as much as possible out of her trademark tiptoe-wiggle – and she seems uneasy.  Midler is eventually undone by the film’s relentless moral uplift.   You can just about believe in this woman for as long as she’s shown to be mendacious and selfish but you can’t believe the final happy family scene.  As she breathes in the fresh air of a decent life, her blurry how-did-I-get-here look suggests that it’s the actress rather than the character who can’t make sense of the nice new world she’s landed in.   Bernice’s demanding professional schedule is one of several elements in the film that come and go for the sake of convenience (the importance to April of her Jewishness and even her anxiety for a child are others).

    Then She Found Me is entertaining enough and hard to take offence at – except for its own determined inoffensiveness.   I found myself rooting for April’s husband, not just because Matthew Broderick gives the most successful performance in the film, but because he’s an ignoble character with no excuses.   Broderick is actually a year older than Hunt but looks younger than his forty-six years.  She’s so skinny that she looks older.  Their looks are an amusing expression of their characters – while April is prematurely careworn, Ben’s immaturity ranges from (just) post-pubertal to infantile.  (It’s not the sex he finds problematic in marriage; it’s the bits in between.)     Broderick is very funny.  Ben knows how despicable he is but, whenever he’s given a demonstration of his inadequacy, he literally looks to April to solve the problem.  When he, she and Frank go together to hospital for her ultrasound, Hunt and Firth emit heartfelt expressions of wonder at the images of the embryo on the screen – Broderick echoes them in an exquisitely half-hearted way.

    The greater emotional connection between Hunt and Broderick than between her and Firth is the strongest element in the film because it threatens to subvert its wholesome progress.  (Imagine what Moonstruck would have been like if there’d been a spark between Cher and Danny Aiello but not between her and Nicolas Cage.   One of the things that made Moonstruck such a great romantic comedy was the real, very different friction with both the actors.)  April’s obstetrician, bizarrely, is played by Salman Rushdie.   This might have worked as a one-scene cameo.  It certainly doesn’t when Rushdie returns to announce that the foetus has died, then again to join embarrassedly in a silent prayer as April tries for artificial insemination.   With Ben Shenkman as April’s younger (non-adopted) brother.  The score by David Mansfield reinforces the film’s atmosphere of tentative hopefulness.

    25 September 2008

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