Simon Stone (2015)
Thirty-one-year-old Simon Stone is already a big name in Australian theatre. In 2011, his first year as resident director at the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, Stone directed his own adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. The production won the Helpmann Award for Best Play of the year and was staged in London at the Barbican in 2014. His first feature film is also, according to the closing credits, ‘inspired by’ The Wild Duck. The phrase ‘inspired by’ seems to be used increasingly by film-makers, often to imply more extensive departure from source material than the traditional ‘based on’. The most obvious change to Ibsen in Stone’s screenplay for The Daughter is the relocation of the story to twenty-first century Australia. This is fine in theory but Stone hasn’t troubled to work out the differences in the characters’ attitudes and behaviour that the modernised setting might dictate. He retains a large part of the original plot but he eliminates or degrades the human motives that drive the action of the play. Stone evidently has a strong interest in The Wild Duck but it’s hard to see from this film what he wants to convey. Since The Daughter is bad melodrama, its effect is merely to travesty Ibsen.
In The Wild Duck, the widowed merchant Haakon Werle intends to wed his housekeeper, Mrs Soerby. The marriage is an event in the future but the prospect of it can be said to influence other events that actually occur. In The Daughter, the marriage of the Haakon Werle counterpart, Henry (Geoffrey Rush), to his housekeeper Anna (Anna Torv) not only takes place: it’s in order to attend the wedding that the Gregers Werle character Christian (Paul Schneider) returns from America. (He’s lived there long enough to have acquired an American accent and lost all trace of an Australian one.) Although it’s somewhat surprising, in view of the physical as well as emotional distance between him and Henry, that Christian comes back for the occasion, it’s reasonable enough in an age of easy international travel. What’s harder to accept – in the same age of phone and electronic communications – is that the son discovers only when he arrives, a couple of days before the wedding, he’s going to be the stepson of a woman younger than he is. Christian learns this from Henry just as a homecoming son in nineteenth-century Scandinavia might have done. In other words, Simon Stone exploits his updating of Ibsen to make the marriage pivotal in the storyline of The Daughter; he ignores the passage of time in order to underline the antipathy between Henry and Christian. The redemptive possibilities in the union of Haakon Werle and Mrs Soerby are not sentimentalised but they are real. Haakon recognises that he has done wrong and the need to make amends; Mrs Soerby’s honest apprehension of her future with Haakon dumbfounds his estranged, resentful son Gregers, who blames his mother’s death on his father. It’s clear that Mrs Soerby is significantly younger than her employer but Simon Stone gives added stress to the age difference. Anna is thirty-one. Henry must be at least sixty and is presented as little more than a serial seducer of his housekeepers (see paragraph below) and, by now, a dirty old man. The attenuation of the Mrs Soerby character leaves Anna virtually bereft of motivation.
Here’s another and a more important example of how Ibsen has been turned to Stone. Gregers Werle’s determination that his friend Hjalmar Ekdal should be made to see the ‘truth’ of his family life is the catalyst for the tragic climax to The Wild Duck. Hjalmar’s wife Gina was formerly a servant in Haakon Werle’s household. Gregers tells Hjalmar that Gina and Haakon had a sexual relationship. The latter’s latest injection of financial support for the Ekdal family then drives Hjalmar to the horrified conviction that not he but the elder Werle is the father of Hedvig, the now teenage daughter whom Hjalmar and Gina have raised together. It’s not certain, however, that this is the case. Gina admits to Hjalmar that Haakon had sex with her but the implication is that this happened only once and that Gina was in no position to argue with her master’s wishes. Gina is unsure whether Haakon Werle or Hjalmar fathered Hedvig. The Gina equivalent in The Daughter is Charlotte (Miranda Otto). Like his new wife-to-be, Charlotte worked as Henry’s housekeeper although she’s now a high-school teacher. Christian, during Henry and Anna’s wedding reception, tells his old friend Oliver (Ewen Leslie), the Hjalmar figure, about Henry’s affair with Charlotte. Confronted by Oliver, Charlotte admits not just the affair but that she was in love with Henry at the time, and that she married Oliver only because she was pregnant with Henry’s child and needed security for herself and her baby.
By removing Charlotte’s uncertainty about Hedvig’s paternity and turning the relationship with Henry into a more sustained and consensual one, Simon Stone also turns Charlotte into one of the several villains of the piece. (The titular daughter is the only character in the film who retains her Ibsen name and nearly the only one free of blame.) While Charlotte protests that she has come to love Oliver, there’s no doubt that she married him purely for convenience (and in spite of the fact that social and economic pressures on a pregnant woman to marry were, at the start of the twenty-first century, much less intractable than they had been a hundred or so years earlier). Oliver reacts to the double whammy in uncontrollable shock. Unlike Hjalmar’s reaction in The Wild Duck, however, Oliver’s isn’t a natural, though extreme, expression of the personality that has gradually emerged up to this point. Ibsen’s Hjalmar Ekdal is, thanks to Haakon Werle’s sponsorship, a professional photographer but he’s impractical: it’s Gina, with the help of Hedvig, who seems to keep the business going. Hjalmar also lives under the illusion that an unexplained ‘invention’ that he claims to be developing will transform his situation and reputation. His self-esteem and ambition are ill-founded. Oliver in The Daughter works at the sawmill owned by Henry: at the start of the film, it’s closed down and the workforce laid off, and Oliver struggles to find another job. He’s hugely proud of Hedvig and tells Christian that she’s a ‘genius’. This is over the top, and mildly embarrassing to Hedvig, but it doesn’t characterise Oliver as in thrall to a governing and especially foolish fantasy. He’s hardly the first parent to overrate an only child’s brilliance.
The character most reduced and worst affected by Stone’s reworking of The Wild Duck is Christian. Gregers Werle’s moral absolutism is in large part an expression of his own bad conscience. His campaign to destroy the Ekdal family’s dependence on their various illusions has disastrous effects but is not malicious in intent – he sees it as imperative to do what he does. His pernicious idealism is based on a set of ideas which, although their formulation is inextricably linked with Gregers’ personal inadequacies, are intellectually coherent. Whereas Gregers is unmarried, Christian is waiting for his wife Grace (Ivy Mak) to join him for Henry’s wedding. Instead, Grace tells Christian, who is also a recovering alcoholic, that their marriage is over and he promptly falls off the wagon. Christian’s exposure of his father’s and Charlotte’s history is truth-telling in a limited, in vino veritas way. Motivated by nothing more than desperate spite and deprived of the moral pretension that impels Gregers, Christian is uninterestingly contemptible. In one of Simon Stone’s most garish moments of invention, he has Hedvig (Odessa Young), distraught by Oliver’s rejection, make a play for Christian. He says no – though not, it seems, because she’s a minor or because she’s been raised as the daughter of his best friend: it’s their blood relation through Henry that deters Christian from sex with Hedvig. Her proposition also gives him the opportunity to explain to her that relation and so push her into attempting suicide. ‘Attempting’ is the right word because The Daughter, at well past the eleventh hour and having consistently coarsened the moral fabric of Ibsen’s play, goes soft. Rather than dying immediately, Hedvig is rushed to hospital; Charlotte and the remorseful, anguished Oliver are told by a doctor there he can’t say whether Hedvig will survive. This allows Simon Stone a big, wrenching finish in the hospital corridor. The film’s final image is the unconscious Hedvig in her bed, her life hanging by a thread.
The wild duck itself is part of a menagerie of injured birds and animals looked after by Oliver’s father, Walter (Sam Neill). In a curious exchange between Christian and Hedvig in the closing stages, he asks if the bird has a name, she says no, and Christian proposes she call it ‘Lucky … lucky ducky … ‘ You almost laugh at this – partly in wonderment at how nasty Christian can get, partly because The Daughter has been so unremittingly grim that his suggestion now sounds like a bad joke. That may well be how Christian intends it but he turns out to be right and ducky is lucky: the film’s softening is most striking in respect of the bird. In the play, it’s poignant as an offstage presence but Stone’s acclaimed theatre production included the appearance of a real duck and The Daughter features plenty of shots of the lovely, vulnerable creature. Shortly before shooting herself, Hedvig sets the duck free. You brace yourself for its failing to fly and falling to earth but not a bit of it: the bird flies off into the distance. That always looks good in a movie.
Michael Meyer argues in the foreword to his translation of The Wild Duck that the bird is a double symbol. The duck – disabled by a shot from Haakon Werle’s gun and living as a quasi-domestic pet in the Ekdals’ apartment – is ‘like Hedvig, a by-product of Haakon Werle’s fondness for sport which has been rejected by him and is now cared for by the Ekdal family’. The wild duck also ‘represents the refusal of most people, once they have been wounded, to go on living and face reality’. In The Daughter, this second significance is virtually lost, along with Ibsen’s exploration of lives each of which, until Gregers intervenes, is sustained by a ‘life-lie’ (Meyer’s phrase). As noted above, there’s no equivalent in the film to Hjalmar’s great invention and Oliver’s father doesn’t attempt to relive the past glories of a military career. Walter, like Ekdal père, carried the can – and served a prison sentence – for Henry/Haakon’s shady business dealings but it’s no surprise that he becomes a minor role in The Daughter. The elder Ekdal is among the easily likeable characters in The Wild Duck. Like Anna, in lieu of the admirable Mrs Soerby, he’s a relative cipher in the film. Gregers Werle exhorts Hedvig to kill the wild duck and thereby sacrifice ‘the most precious of your possessions’. Hedvig in The Daughter isn’t devoted to the duck in the same way, not least because she’s already suffered the loss of something precious at an early stage of proceedings. Stone gives Hedvig a short-lived boyfriend (Gareth Davies) who leaves town once they try and fail to have sex among the tall trees that aren’t heading to the sawmill no more.
The strong cast of The Daughter is almost inevitably thwarted by the script and direction although Ewen Leslie makes a strong impression as Oliver. Badly conceived as the late sequence in the hospital is, Leslie is emotionally powerful in it. Paul Schneider’s best moment as Christian is that weird ‘lucky ducky’ bit. He mostly gives the impression that he knows how ill served he is by this version of Gregers Werle. Schneider is too tortured and hopeless from the start (and thus exposes the improbability of Christian returning for the wedding in the first place). Similarly, Geoffrey Rush wears a gloomy mask throughout, as if oppressed by the knowledge of how much better it would be to play Haakon Werle than Henry – perhaps too by a haircut that makes Rush look like Ken Livingstone. Odessa Young gives a committed performance as Hedvig but, in view of what she’s asked to do, I found it increasingly embarrassing to watch. The scene in which Hedvig, in the middle of a school history lesson, accuses Charlotte of infidelity to Oliver is perhaps the most clumsily improbable of any in the whole film. Simon Stone clearly feels that the combination of thoroughgoing misery and distinguished source material are enough for his movie to masquerade as the tragic drama that The Wild Duck genuinely is. Andrew Commis’s brooding cinematography and Mark Bradshaw’s grief-stricken score are designed to confirm the seriousness of the piece but they’re easy to see and hear through. The Daughter is pumped-up soap opera.
31 May 2016
