Old Yorker

  • Life During Wartime

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Solondz (2009)

    Todd Solondz made this film more than ten years after Happiness – I saw it ten minutes after I’d seen Happiness for the first time.   I normally try to judge a film on its self-sufficient merits but it was hard to do that in the circumstances.  Having just watched and been impressed with Happiness, I couldn’t help comparing the characters and performers with their previous incarnations.  The first picture’s dramatis personae are so taking that, when a new character is introduced in Life During Wartime, he or she seems, at least at first, like an intruder.  Besides, Solondz seems to expect the audience to regard the characters, now played by different actors, as déjà vu – as the opening sequence of Life During Wartime, imitating the first scene of Happiness, illustrates.   The new film has its moments.  All in all, though, it’s a disappointing demonstration of the problems of making a sequel with a life of its own.  Although Wartime is unusual compared with most American films that get released over here, it seems pretty conventional beside its subversive progenitor.  I didn’t even register that the Jordan family in Happiness was Jewish.  Their Jewishness is much more salient here – there’s a bar mitzvah complete with ‘Haga Navila’ and conversations about spending one’s autumn years in Israel – and this made me wonder whether Todd Solondz (who once considered becoming a rabbi, according to Wikipedia) was drawing on autobiography more than before.  Life During Wartime is visually more smooth and accomplished than Happiness – yet that too seems to reflect a diminution of energy and imagination.

    One of the great strengths of Happiness was Solondz’s refusal to chicken out of scenes at the point at which (you’d think) they became more difficult to write.  Perhaps the one exception to this was eliding the reaction of Trish, the middle Jordan sister, to the revelation of her husband Bill’s paedophiliac behaviour.  You were all the more conscious of the absence of a scene showing how she received the news because Trish seemed (relatively) the most self-confident and optimistic character in Happiness.  It’s unlikely, given the interval between the two films, that Solondz planned a sequel from the outset – but it may have been that, in writing the screenplay for Life During Wartime, he wanted to rectify the omission from Happiness and to make Trish the central character in the new film.   At any rate, she becomes central, thanks to Allison Janney’s verve and emotional precision and colouring.   Wartime starts at the point at which Trish has found herself a new man, a regular guy named Harvey, and Bill is released from prison.

    Among Trish and Bill’s three kids, the main focus in Happiness was on Billy, the eldest, who’s now in his final year of college (majoring in anthropology).  As the older Billy, Chris Marquette has a pasty, blurred quality.  He’s convincing in that he seems indefinitely unhappy, and as if his life is in suspense – but a scene in which his released father visits Billy in his room at college is artificial, and foreshadows the final sequence in which Billy’s younger brother Timmy admits that, ‘I just want a Dad’.   When they meet, Bill and Billy rehearse arguments about forgiving and forgetting which feel schematic, not least because they recur in conversations between other characters, notably Timmy and Harvey.   In Wartime the younger generation spotlight is on Timmy and Dylan Riley Snyder who plays him, although he’s very proficient, is more knowing and less interesting and affecting than Rufus Read, who played Billy in Happiness.   (Solondz also seems to cheat slightly with Timmy’s age.  He’s now coming up for thirteen and bar mitzvah – he surely wasn’t as young as three in Happiness?)   Still, Dylan Riley Snyder does good things:  quite early on in the film, Trish tells Timmy, ‘If anyone ever touches you, scream’ – advice which is too obviously going to come in useful in due course.   The payoff scene works only because Snyder shows us the confusion of Timmy’s feelings – that he wants to get rid of Harvey, the prospective new father figure (who makes the mistake of hugging the boy), but also needs him.

    In spite of being the strongest screen personality, Allison Janney also manages to have more connection with her equivalent in Happiness than anyone else.  I can’t describe just how and why Janney is so brilliant when, for example, she and her sister Joy meet for lunch, Trish orders a salad nicoise with dressing on the side, then struggles to reprimand the waiter when she doesn’t get what she asked for.  Shirley Henderson, who plays Joy, is a striking actress; she too connects with her precursor – you can believe that Joy has physically shrunk to this mid-fortyish version of herself.   But Henderson’s fey quality skews the ghostly reappearances of the old flames whom she’s caused to commit suicide – Andy (who topped himself in Happiness) and Allen (the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in the first film, who follows suit here) – and makes them insufficiently disconcerting, even though Allen is very well played by Michael  Kenneth Williams.  The eldest Jordan sister Helen, because of her good looks and professional and sexual success, gets a raw deal from Solondz in Happiness – the same thing happens more crudely here, with Ally Sheedy in the role – as Helen, now a successful television writer, drops name after name (Keanu, Salman, the Emmys).  The worse casting mistake is Ciaran Hinds as Bill:  he’s dully, lugubriously melodramatic, lacking not just the nuances of Dylan Baker’s portrait in Happiness but any sense of what Bill was like before he went to prison or therefore what prison has done to him.   Of the new characters, a woman played by Charlotte Rampling, with whom Bill has a one-night stand on his release from jail, seems to be something out of a much more familiar weltschmertz drama but Harvey (Michael Lerner) and his son Mark (Rich Pecci) win you over.   Although he’s conceived basically as a comedy sketch character, Mark’s paranoid monologue at the dinner table, when he and his father first visit Trish and her children, is one of the highlights of the movie.

    25 April 2010

  • Leviathan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Leviafan

    Andrey Zvyagintsev  (2014)

    The first chapter of the Book of Job presents the protagonist as extraordinary in terms of both his material wealth and his moral stature:

    ‘1 There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil, …

    3 His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east. …

    8 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

    9 Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?

    10 Hast thou not made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

    11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.’

    When, later in the story, he rails against the misfortunes which God has visited on him (or, to be precise, which God has permitted Satan to inflict), Job complains not only about these particular, and particularly undeserved, calamities.  He also laments his mortality.  In other words, the author of the Book of Job seems to have been at pains to characterise Job both as especially privileged and righteous and as Everyman.  A twenty-first century artist looking to reinterpret the story in a modern setting needs to decide not only how to balance the unusualness and the ubiquity of the ordeals suffered by their Job figure but also whether he will be a religious man.  The original audience for the story would easily have identified with Job’s God-fearing nature; a latterday Job with strong religious beliefs is liable to be seen as an anachronism.  Yet Job’s devoutness is so essential that an adaptation of his experiences with an irreligious man on the receiving end can’t, I think, be meaningfully described as a retelling of the Old Testament story.

    Leviathan has been called by several reviewers a ‘modern reworking’ of the Book of Job but Andrey Zvyagintsev, who co-wrote the screenplay with Oleg Negin, is more cautious about the connection.  According to Variety, Zvyagintsev says that the story of his protagonist Nikolai (Kolia) is no more than loosely based on that of Job.  Kolia lives in a small town in Northern Russia; the house he has built there looks out onto the Barents Sea; his car repair business is situated next to the house.  He lives with his younger wife, Lilya, and Roma, his early teenage son from an earlier marriage, who strongly dislikes Lilya.  (I missed how Kolia’s marriage to Roma’s mother ended.)  Kolia makes a decent living as a car mechanic and his house is enviable but he’s not wealthy.  He believes in God although he’s not, as far as one can tell, a churchgoer:  his religion may amount to little more than superstition (a miniature icon hangs in his car).  He’s a decent, hard-working man who’s also quick-tempered, a heavy drinker and a chain smoker.  There’s no suggestion that he’s morally exemplary in the way that Job is.  The beach beyond Kolia’s house is dominated by huge, dark rocks and by the skeleton of some enormous creature that’s washed up there.  The latter clearly points to the sea monster described in Chapter 41 of the Book of Job:

    ‘1  Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

    2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn?’

    Later in the story, when Kolia is mired in misfortune, a priest whom he encounters quotes these verses to him.   But Zvyagintsev also has another Leviathan in mind – the forcefully authoritarian government conceived in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 treatise (Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil) and which is represented in the film by the twenty-first century Russian state.   Vadim Sergeyich, the mayor of Kolia’s town and a Putin apparatchik, wants to get hold of Kolia’s land.  When Kolia refuses to sell it, Vadim adopts more aggressive tactics in order to get what he wants.  Leviathan begins with the arrival at the town train station of Kolia’s friend and ex-army colleague, Dmitri (Dima).  Kolia has asked Dima, now a successful lawyer in Moscow, to help him try and legally prevent Vadim from destroying his home and business.

    Throughout the first hour or so of Leviathan, Zvyagintsev develops a gradually intensifying balance between the tensions and betrayals that dominate the private lives of Kolia, his family and best friend Dima, and the public corruption and criminality against which they vainly struggle.  Kolia, about to leave his house, tells Lilya, ‘I love you’.  Her face and her words in reply – ‘I know’ – make clear the feeling is not fully reciprocated.  On the first night of Dima’s stay, a good deal of vodka is consumed (as it is throughout the film).  Lilya observes, stony-faced, the easy physical affection between Kolia and his old army pal that develops as the men get drunk.  Next morning, one can read in their tones of voice and body language a connection between her and Dima too.  Later that morning, when Kolia and Dima go to the police to complain about Vadim Sergeyich’s threatening behaviour, the hotheaded Kolia finds himself arrested by the police for the same.   After Dima has made representations direct to the mayor, Kolia is released from the cells.  He arrives home later, while Dima and Lilya are together in Dima’s hotel room.  The revelation of their affair to Kolia and others occurs during a shooting and drinking expedition to celebrate the birthday of another of Kolia’s acquaintances.  This is a masterly episode.  The atmosphere among the party is highly charged:  there’s so much going on between the characters – thanks both to what one already knows about them and their relationships, and to the actors’ being able to suggest that these relationships are about to take a new turn.  The sense of foreboding is strong yet it’s a shock that what is revealed – yet not seen on camera at this point – is Lilya and Dima’s betrayal of Kolia.  The lovers return to Dima’s hotel, from where, next day, he’s summoned for a meeting by Vadim.  Kolia, in discovering Dima’s treachery, has given his friend a bloody nose and a black eye but these are nothing compared with the beating that Dima receives from the mayor’s heavies.  He escapes with his life and back to Moscow.

    Dima’s departure is a loss not only for Lilya, with whom Kolia tries unsuccessfully to reconcile, but for the film as a whole.  Dima’s professional connections have supplied him with evidence that he uses to try and blackmail Vadim into backing off from his plan to appropriate Kolia’s land; at the same time, Dima is deceiving his friend through his relationship with Lilya.  He is the hinge between the public and private worlds that Leviathan explores.  Vladimir Vdovichenkov, who plays Dima, subtly but powerfully suggests a troubled, conflicted man.  This is rarely expressed in words:  Dima is laconic, especially in response to tricky questions.  When Lilya, who finds him frustratingly difficult to fathom, asks Dima, as she does more than once, if he believes in God, he replies that he’s a lawyer, who deals only in facts.  In a conversation with her in his hotel room, Dima is only a little more expansive when he says:

    ‘We’re all guilty of our own faults … everything is everyone’s fault … so no confessions … even confession the law doesn’t regard as proof of guilt …’

    This is still cryptic, at least as far as Lilya is concerned, but Dima’s words gives a sense of his being oppressed both by his own behaviour and by the political system epitomised by Vadim.  As the mayor, the almost comically squat and pugnacious Roman Madyanov has a characteristically Russian appearance (although he also brings to mind Richard Castellano).  At first, Vadim’s buffoonish shape and features and his crude bullying make you wonder if this is too ridiculous a figure to embody, other than comically, the corruption of present-day Russia but the casting turns out to be very effective:  the discrepancy between this silly-looking man and the shocking things for which he’s responsible makes Vadim more appalling.  The acting in Leviathan is strong all round.  As Kolia’s situation worsens and other important characters in the story depart the scene, Aleksei Serebryakov is, in effect expected, to carry the film and succeeds.  Elena Lyadova is the solemnly beautiful Lilya.  As her stepson, Sergey Pokhodaev has a piercing emotionality – his voice hasn’t quite broken but is on the point of doing so:  this allows him to express Roma’s unhappiness in a very particular way.   Anna Ukolova and Alexey Rozin are both good as Kolia and Lilya’s friends Angela and Pacha; so is Sergey Bachurskiy as the man whose birthday celebration is the ill-fated shooting party.   I can’t find the name of the actress who plays a legal official but her lightning-fast reading of the court’s repeated judgments against Kolia cuttingly underlines the absurd injustice of the process that has led to her torrent of words.

    Leviathan is at its least impressive when its connections to the Book of Job are made more explicit – as in the priest’s quoting to the increasingly hopeless and alcoholic Kolia the verses from the start of Chapter 41.  Nevertheless, while Kolia and Job aren’t comparable in terms of their religious belief, the church’s unholy alliance with secular powers-that-be is essential to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s critique and he conveys this well.  When Vadim is considering Dima’s threat of blackmail, the mayor’s priest reminds him that all power comes from God – enough for Vadim to be fearlessly nasty in ignoring Dima and pursuing Kolia’s property.  The final sequences of Leviathan take place in and outside a church.  By now, Kolia has been framed and wrongfully imprisoned for the death of Lilya, who takes her own life; the mayor’s bulldozers have destroyed Kolia’s house; and the homeless and virtually fatherless Roma has been taken in by Angela and Pacha.  During the church service Vadim reminds his own son that ‘God sees everything’.

    The central images of the story, photographed by Mikhail Krichman, are unusually powerful and substantiate the connection between Leviathan as sea serpent and as authoritarian state:  while the skeleton on the shore is inert, the bulldozer that destroys Kolia’s house has the quality of a monster that’s implacably alive.  The scale of the seascape reinforces the sense of human concerns being dwarfed in the world that Zvyagintsev describes.  There is also more than one shot of religious art that’s been eroded by time.  While the tone of the film is predominantly bleak, there is, as well as the satirical humour of the court judgments and Vadim’s blustering megalomania, a good deal of lower-key, funny dialogue in the exchanges among Kolia, his family and his friends.  Zvyagintsev uses as the film’s score music from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten:  it is unmistakeably Glass but a low pulsing within it also evokes Andrey Dergachev’s score for Zvyagintsev’s The Return (2003).  In view of the subject and the views being expressed in Leviathan, it seems amazing that this production was financially supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, however, the film hasn’t received a screening permit in Russia as a result of the country’s ‘anti-swearing laws’.  The best things in Leviathan, and there are plenty, are the best things that I’ve seen in a new film this year.

    13 November 2014

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