Old Yorker

  • None But the Lonely Heart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clifford Odets (1944)

    Cary Grant is Ernie Mott, a Cockney lad, a charmer but a ne’er-do-well, who returns to his home in the East End and, when he learns that his mother is terminally ill, decides to be the son to her that he’s never been but that she’s always deserved.  Cary Grant is a charmer but he is otherwise dead wrong for the part.  The fact that he started life in Bristol, in poor circumstances, as Archie Leach, probably made matters worse – Grant may have thought he could bring to the role something within himself but his efforts are counterproductive.  His accent is an extraordinary concoction:  it’s as if he’s trying to reach back, from the voice that he constructed in America, to his English roots – with Hollywood Cockney then overlaid.  The problem isn’t so much that Grant – and most of the others in the cast – can’t do the accent.  It’s rather that they try hard to do it and the effort makes them often lose the sense of the lines (and sometimes intelligibility).  Barry Fitzgerald – as Ernie’s friend and counsellor, Henry Twite, who’s full of streetwise philosophy – sensibly sticks to Irish, even though I missed any other indication in the script that Henry actually was Irish.  As a result, Fitzgerald’s voice and characterisation at least are clear and coherent.  The children in the cast, who either can’t or don’t attempt to conceal American accents, also come off relatively well.

    The movie’s conscientiousness makes it worse than it might have been if approached less seriously.  Clifford Odets wrote the script and this is one of only two Hollywood features that he also directed (the other is a 1959 movie called The Story on Page One) but the source is not one of his own plays but Richard Llewellyn’s second novel, the successor to How Green Was My Valley.  None But the Lonely Heart is a mishmash of social conscience and antique melodrama – the former is mixed up with implications of fighting for a better world through World War II although without any explanation of how defeating the Axis powers will remove the poverty and gangsterism, and their toxic interaction, which are main features of the lives being shown on the screen.    The characters – Ernie especially – are prone to portentous rhetorical questions such as ‘When’s the world coming out of its midnight? When does the human soul get off its knees?’  The timeframe and Ernie’s age in particular are baffling.  His middle name is Verdun, which suggests that he was born after the Great War in which his father fought yet at one point Ernie seems to say he’s thirty-five.   (Cary Grant was forty when the film was made.)  I also didn’t get what eventually happened to Ernie’s bull terrier Nipper:  the dog looks as if he may have some symbolic importance but Odets seems then to forget about him.

    The crime sequences are among the most convincing – a physical assault of two Jewish characters, a car chase and crash.  The look of the movie is certainly distinctive although self-consciously so.  There are some good bits in the more casual moments such as the echoes of Ernie and Henry’s drunken voices in a tunnel.  Several of the actors are remarkable – June Duprez, as a gangster’s ex, has an exhausted prettiness:  her face and voice suggest someone who’s terminally ill, as Ernie’s mother is.  In the latter role Ethel Barrymore’s presence dominates the picture.  The noble mother is a cliché and Barrymore may be a little too grand for a working-class version of it but she’s absorbed the character, she does convey the temper of an East End matriarch, and her watchfulness, taking in everything and letting the audience do so as well, is impressive.  So too are her emotional intimacy with Ernie, once he’s trying to be a good lad, and her cry of shame just before Ma dies in a prison hospital.  Barrymore’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was not undeserved but Cary Grant’s Best Actor nomination was an example of the Academy’s persistent belief that when someone is doing something different from what made them a star it must be better than usual.  Apart from being much worse than usual, Grant is not different enough.   In working clothes and a cap he looks like Cary Grant in disguise; when Ma buys him a suit he looks like Cary Grant.  The title is that of a piece of Tchaikowksy music, played on the cello by the respectable girl (Jane Wyatt) who holds a torch for Ernie and on whose door he knocks the ‘hopeful’ end of the film.

    6 May 2013

  • Noah

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darren Aronofsky (2014)

    What’s incomprehensible is that some critics think Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is a crazy but unarguably entertaining farrago.  It’s so boring – the oppressive music, the actors’ relentless misery, the mainly gloomy colouring, the repeated movement of the camera pulling out to reveal one apocalyptic panorama after another.  (Aronofsky’s usual collaborators, Clint Mansell and Matthew Libatique, were responsible for, respectively, the score and the cinematography.)  Shortly before the film opened, the New Yorker ran a profile of Aronofsky and the making of this film.   It’s true that I’ve seen only his two most recent movies but it’s beyond me how this kind of treatment is merited.  Perhaps the New Yorker was doubtful too:  it certainly seemed to give undue emphasis to the green agenda of Noah, in which the title character is portrayed as the first environmentalist.  This contemporary, politically correct angle allowed some intelligent people to feel intelligent enjoying Avatar and the only relief in Aronofsky’s movie is that the environmentalism doesn’t come across as prominently as I’d feared (though there may be more sermonising than I was able to hear).  While the mostly grim landscape and outfits suggest dystopian sci-fi rather than Hollywood biblical epic, Aronofsky reverts to biblical supernaturalism whenever he needs it.  The spiritual power of Noah’s grandfather Methusaleh turns a barren girl fertile.  The dove that signals the flood is over is modern only in that it’s a CGI bird.  Some of the meteorological highlights are presented as heavenly interventions in a fairly traditional way (the film concludes with a rainbow over the restored world).  Aronofsky’s professed ‘non-denominational’ approach is laughably shallow (although it still seems to have managed to offend various groups).  He simply refers to ‘the Creator’ rather than ‘God’.

    It’s easy enough to find things to deride in Noah:  the Ark, a wooden drilling platform outside and a Tardis inside; the time-lapse (to put it mildly) photography sprint through creation (strobe effects were created on the first day so I had to look away for most of this); the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so misshapen by corruption that it couldn’t have been appetising; the Watchers, a group of fallen angels who help Noah out as required – they’re a cross between a giant’s Meccano set and massive, concatenated broccoli.  (It’s beyond a joke that so much money has been spent on this film.)  In Genesis, Tubalcain is a very minor character but he is a descendant of Cain and ‘the forger of all implements of bronze and iron’ so this is enough to make him the chief villain of Noah.  A hubristic industrialist and borderline atheist, Tubalcain is played by Ray Winstone so when he yells to the skies that he will create ‘a race of men in my own image’ it is a truly alarming prospect.  To be fair, though, Winstone occasionally looks almost distinguished and tries to sound it but the Sairf London vowels keep showing.  There was plenty of stuff in the New Yorker (in David Denby’s review of the film as well as the Aronofsky profile) about how incredible and outrageous it was that God should have wanted to kill off everyone except Noah and his family.  Aronofsky and Ari Handel, who co-wrote the script with him, negotiate this neatly.   Even at the start of the picture, there seem to be very few people around except the family.  Tubalcain’s brutal collective are most of the world population and you’re more than happy to see the back of them.

    Russell Crowe plays Noah with considerable, if futile, integrity.  Noah is not just a stern, don’t-pick-the-flowers environmentalist and, in his interminable Ark-building, a humourless DIY fanatic.  He also believes so strongly that men are disposed to do wrong that he wants to see humanity wiped out.  If men and women survive the flood, he says, they’ll repeat the sins of Adam, Eve and, especially, Cain all over again.   He therefore expects his three sons to be the world’s last men and he’s horrified by Methusaleh (Anthony Hopkins)’s magic touch that means that Shem’s wife Ila can conceive after all.  When he prepares to kill Ila’s twin baby girls but finds his infanticidal hand stayed by human kindness, Crowe brings off Noah’s change of heart as only a fine actor can (but I didn’t understand who Noah thought was going to impregnate these girls in due course).  The film reunites the husband-and-wife pairing of A Beautiful Mind:  as Mrs Noah, Jennifer Connelly’s strained anxiety is, as usual, a pain.  At least the melodrama here wrenches some volume out of her.  Emma Watson as Ila is irrepressibly twenty-first century home counties.  Douglas Booth as Shem is somewhat less dull than Logan Lerman as Ham but it’s Leo McHugh Carroll as Japheth who’s the most distinctive of Noah’s three sons:  he’s so weirdly androgynous that I wondered if Japheth, who his father expects to be the last man of all, might be able to continue the line by himself.  The Watchers are voiced by, among others, Nick Nolte and Frank Langella although I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read it.

    15 April 2014

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