Old Yorker

  • World Trade Center

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Oliver Stone (2006)

    In the opening scenes of World Trade Center, New York City, as photographed by Seamus McGarvey, looks beautiful – prelapsarian – in the early morning sun of 9/11.  Even the shots of street life that appear in so many New York films are poignant because we know what’s coming.  This being an Oliver Stone picture, the images are, however, too emphatic:  they’re in your face rather than glimpsed out of the corner of your eye.  It’s almost a relief that 08:48 hours arrives so soon:  9/11 is too vast to be subjected to the grim suspense of extended it-was-just-another-day-until treatment.  World Trade Center focuses on two of the last people to be rescued alive from the ruins of the Twin Towers – police officers of the NY Port Authority called John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno.  Complaints were made at the time of their release that this film and United ’93 had been made with indecent haste after the event.   In theory, these movies, whatever the motives for making them, might have helped audiences learn more about their own feelings about the events described.  In fact, most of the people in the Richmond Odeon where we saw World Trade Center were on their feet as soon as the images stopped and the list of the names of the dead from 9/11 appeared on the screen.  I doubt this was because they couldn’t cope with the strength of their emotions.  It may seem unfair to blame Oliver Stone for audience insensitivity but his staging is so deliberate – so lacking in any fluidity or documentary feel – that the contrasts with the actual events we see on TV screens everywhere during the picture are jarring.  The real thing is being juxtaposed with, and seems disconnected from, forced, clichéd melodrama.  It’s the clumsiness of the film-making – rather than the fact of a film about 9/11 being made so soon after the event – that’s offensive.

    It should have been possible to make us feel that, in witnessing the experience of McLoughlin’s and Jimeno’s families, we were seeing what so many families went through in New York on 9/11.  As it is, we soon seem to be in generic territory:  a picture about two people trapped in physically perilous conditions and a familiar partnership – a responsible, wary veteran (McLoughlin) and a keen, more impulsive youngster (Jimeno).  When their loved ones are assured that the men have been rescued and that they’re OK, you know it can’t be as a simple as that because there’s more than half an hour still to go and this false dawn is part of a formula.  Thus do Oliver Stone and the screenwriter Andrea Berloff manage to make a true story (a true story like no other in our time) unbelievable.  The music by Craig Armstrong doesn’t help in that you’ve also heard this kind of score – portentously tragic, shot through with notes of hopefulness, and duly flowering into triumph-of-the-human-spirit plenitude – often before.  The film is occasionally moving – but this is only because Stone and Berloff can rely on the viewer to supply a deeper context for the mechanical dramatisation.

    Nicolas Cage is McLoughlin:  he looks gaunt and careworn from the word go and, in his early scenes, registers strongly as a man who’s as humourless as he’s hard-working.   We root more for Michael Peña’s Jimeno once the Towers fall.  The best performance comes from Maggie Gyllenhaal, as Jimeno’s pregnant wife Allison.  Gyllenhaal’s height and physicality make her well equipped to convey Allison’s claustrophobia in the world above the rubble.  She has a fine moment when their young daughter asks if her father is coming back and there’s a pause before Allison says she doesn’t know and watches for the child’s reaction with a horrified curiosity.  Maria Bello is Mrs McLoughlin.  Stephen Dorff plays an ex-marine involved in helping with the rescue effort:  this expressionist study of a vengeful fundamentalist Christian soul is especially crude and unconvincing.  The characterisations of the other rescuers are pretty perfunctory.

    29 October 2006

  • Sparkle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter (2007)

    After we’d finished watching it, Sally mentioned that, according to Radio Times, Sparkle was worked up using a method of script-development-through-improvisation not dissimilar to Mike Leigh’s.  Perhaps this is why the plotting is so poor.   Sam Sparks is a young Scouser who wants to get out of Liverpool and into some kind of big time; the same goes for his mother Jill, still hoping for a late-blooming career as a singer.  In the film’s opening scene, two London brothers, Vince and Bernie, and their aged father are eating in the bar-restaurant where Sam’s a waiter and Jill is about to perform.  There seems no reason for the Londoners to be in Liverpool other than to get Sam and Jill on the motorway south and the story underway.  In London, Vince gets Sam another waiting job:  after an evening pouring fizz at a PR firm’s reception, he ends up in the bed of Sheila, the firm’s middle-aged boss.  He becomes her PA as well as her lover.  Then Sam meets a girl called Kate at another of Sheila’s events:  unbeknown to him, Kate’s her daughter.  Kate is politically engagé:  given her verging-on-hostile feelings about her single mother and about Sheila’s self-serving, venal world, it’s surprising that Kate isn’t remotely suspicious as to how Sam has landed a job in her mother’s office.  It’s necessary, though – so that in due course Kate can be devastated and break up with Sam.  (This happens when she notices his familiarity with what lives where in Sheila’s kitchen.)  The writer-directors Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter (neither of whom has any IMDB credits since Sparkle) appear to be aware that their wispy material is badly in need of shaping and pointing.  They decide that chancer Sam needs to be taught a lesson and the last thirty minutes of Sparkle show him learning it.  Since he has to find out for himself that Kate is Sheila’s daughter, I couldn’t see that Sam was as definitely and solely blameworthy as Hunsinger and Hunter wanted him to be.

    During the first part of Sparkle I assumed that, once in London, Sam was going to get worked into a storyline involving more than personal relationships.  I couldn’t believe this young man’s love life and the satellite relationships (between Jill and Vince, Sheila and Bernie – who turns out to be Kate’s father) were meant to be enough to sustain a feature film.   By halfway through, I realised there wasn’t going to be anything substantially more and grew tired of the alternating slices of sitcom and soap used to move the story forward.   Late on, though, I started to like the film more – partly because Hunsinger and Hunter refused to be fazed by the poverty of their material, partly because the cast is so thoroughly engaging.   Shaun Evans is just about perfect as Sam.  As well as showing a great deal of charm and wit, he also suggests Sam’s discomfort at finding that both his life and his feelings about other people are getting more complicated.  Yet it’s Sam’s resilient desire that sees him through to a happy ending.  Evans is an example of how difficult it is for a young British actor – even one who’s effective as both a  romantic lead and a character player – to sustain a career in cinema, when that depends so heavily on making an impression in American movies.   Evans is great in Endeavour and he was very good (he made watchable) the 2012 television adaptation of Blake Morrison’s bad novel The Last Weekend but his future now looks set to be on TV.   (You can’t say ‘the small screen’ any more – their television is likely to be bigger than the screen  on which many people watch films in the cinema.)

    Although the conception of the role of Vince is condescending, there’s nothing of that quality in Bob Hoskins’s empathetic, amusing playing of this never-got-anywhere bachelor:  it’s one of his best performances.   As Jill (whom Vince adores from the moment he claps eyes on her in Liverpool), Lesley Manville, as usual, looks to be overdoing it but she stays in character so consistently (not to say insistently) that she seems true.   Her singing is just right – it is good (and passionately felt) but you know it’s not good enough for Jill – ‘Sparkle’, as Vince eventually presents her on the flyers for her gig in Bethnal Green – to make it.  Amanda Ryan is emotionally truthful as Kate and her unusual good looks match up well with Stockard Channing’s more eccentric attractiveness as Sheila.  Channing is incisive and witty but, when Sheila and Sam are having their affair, you’re mainly conscious that Sheila is unhappy and capable of making others the same way:  the relationship doesn’t have much life because it’s obvious that Sheila is a wicked queen and will have to be banished eventually to the periphery of the story.  The dependably excellent Ellie Haddington plays Sheila’s wry, rueful office manager and John Shrapnel is Bernie.  The characterisation of the gay couple with whom Kate lives – Anthony Head as her uncle Tony and Richard Cant as his boyfriend Adrian – is pretty desperate.   Sparkle hits rock bottom during Adrian’s supposedly comical fit of hiccups.

    9 October 2013

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