Old Yorker

  • Wolf

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Nichols (1994)

    A man gets bitten by a wolf and starts turning into one.  He bites another man.   The second, younger man, who has recently usurped the first man in a publishing firm, is also having an affair with his wife.  The first man has developed a lupine keenness of smell – it draws him to the second man’s apartment where he discovers his wife en deshabille.  This sounds like the premise of a comedy of manners; with Mike Nichols at the helm and Jack Nicholson as the lycanthropic cuckold, your anticipation of a jaunty social satire is increased.  The high-powered cast – which also includes Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, Christopher Plummer, Kate Nelligan, David Hyde Pierce, Richard Jenkins, Eileen Atkins, Om Puri and Prunella Scales – evinces a faintly self-satisfied air of participating in something deeply witty but, for a good part of its two hours, Wolf is just an unimaginative and uninvolving horror movie.  You don’t associate Mike Nichols with that genre.  He may have wanted to confound expectations by focusing more on this aspect of the screenplay (by Jim Harrison, Wesley Strick and an uncredited Elaine May) than on its comedic side.  But Nichols’s heart isn’t in the horror and, by soft-pedalling the comedy, he succeeds only in making what is, in my experience, his worst movie.

    The only thing that’s vaguely funny about Wolf is having Jack Nicholson exhibit – through special effects – a wolf’s speed and athleticism.   Nicholson has often used his wall-eyed look and trademark leer to suggest animality but he gives a lazy, underpowered performance.   When, near the end of the film, he tells Michelle Pfeiffer – as the daughter of the tycoon (Plummer) who owns the publishing house – how much he loves her and that when he looks at her ‘I know what God intended’ – it seems we’re meant to think he’s being sincere but Nicholson’s tone is merely, mildly sarcastic.  More crucially, you don’t get a strong sense of what his character was like before the wolf bit him so the transformation (which, not unexpectedly, comes and goes as the plot requires) hasn’t much impact.  James Spader, as his rival at work and in bed, is considerably worse.  Bitten by Nicholson, he too turns into a wolf:  Spader is so laboriously creepy from the start that he needs every bit of the hairy-face-and-yellow-eyes make-up for us to notice any change.  It’s striking that one of the few scenes in which the werewolf theme is more or less ignored is just about the best in the film – a tetchy exchange between Nicholson and Pfeiffer, as they drink milk and crunch toast.   Pfeiffer is mostly wasted, though – as is Richard Jenkins, even if he does manage to bring a bit of eccentric individuality to the role of a police detective.   The music is by Ennio Morricone and the cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno, two more talents who were wasting their time on this picture.

    16 March 2012

  • Last Orders

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fred Schepisi (2001)

    Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning novel of 1996 is conscientious, sensitive and respectfully unimaginative.   The main characters are an elderly trio of friends and drinking buddies from South London. Swift’s title refers to, as well the traditional pub call, the instructions left by the recently deceased meat butcher Jack Dodds that his three old pals scatter his ashes at Margate.   Vic (an undertaker), Ray (who bets on the horses) and Lenny (an ex-boxer) are driven to the Kent coast by Jack’s adopted son Vince (a used car salesman).  Vince was taken in by Jack’s wife, Amy, when the child’s parents were killed in a World War II air raid.  Amy doesn’t accompany the men to Margate:  it’s her day for visiting her and Jack’s only biological child, the mentally retarded June, who’s spent the fifty years of her life in care.  (Jack would never have anything to do with his daughter.)  The journey is punctuated by flashbacks to the characters’ pasts and relationships with each other over the decades, and to a more recent conversation, immediately after Jack’s death, between Amy and Ray, who’ve long been fond of each other and who once had a brief affair.  The narrative structure mirrors that of the novel and is integral to the story’s themes – love and friendship, loyalty and betrayal, change and decay – but the whole thing is literal and even-paced; and some flashbacks are perfunctory – mere visualisations of remarks being made by the characters in the present.  It’s as if bringing the material to the screen is an end in itself.

    The actors are good but the film’s lack of momentum has a curious effect:  you can somehow hear the call of ‘Action!’ at the start of each scene and see the actors start to perform.  This is especially the case with the conversations between Amy and Ray beside the Thames even though, once these get underway, the playing of Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins is particularly good.  When Lenny and Vince come to blows, the physical expression of the tensions between them comes almost as a relief yet the sequence feels too prepared then doesn’t leave any residue.  In the flashbacks, Kelly Reilly has a wonderful bloom as the young Amy (J J Feild is young Jack).  The contrast between her and the increasingly tired and dowdy older woman is affecting – and there’s a fine moment when Helen Mirren’s laugh connects Amy to her younger self.  Mirren has to work hard to be this unglamorous but she does well.  In a cast that also includes Michael Caine (Jack), Tom Courtenay (Vic), David Hemmings (Lenny) and Ray Winstone (Vince), Bob Hoskins is outstanding.  (He also looks right at different ages – most of the actors do, thanks to the skill of the costume designer Jill Taylor and the hairstyling team.)  In the back of Vince’s car, Ray laughs along with the others but he does a lot of thinking too.  Hoskins is especially expressive in stillness and silence, as Ray sits alone in Canterbury Cathedral, which the men visit shortly before they reach their final destination.  The racing details are unusually credible:  Ray, trying to pick a winner for the dying Jack, is surrounded by Timeform and Raceform volumes; the commentary on the race that his selection wins is over the top but Fancy Free is meant to be running in the 3.30 at Doncaster and the race shown on screen really is at Town Moor.   Brian Tufano’s lighting of the long-ago flashbacks gives them a nostalgic sheen and the climactic image of the men throwing ashes into the sea in rainswept Margate is gravely beautiful.

    27 January 2015

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