Old Yorker

Bill Forsyth (1987)

Marilynne Robinson creates virtually a dual narrative in her novel Housekeeping.   Although the story of the sisters Ruth and Lucille, and their unusual childhood and adolescence, is told by the former in the first person, Robinson’s prose is so carefully and meticulously worked that the reader seems to hear a voice ‘beyond’ Ruth’s.  Bill Forsyth’s screen adaptation begins with sizeable chunks of first-person voiceover from Ruth yet its effect – and that of the film as a whole – is curiously toneless.  You hear the voice and you see the images on the screen.  The voice is imparting plenty of information and the images of the Idaho landscape (although the film was actually shot in Canada) are painterly and magnetic – the skaters, the mountains, the bridge, the lake.  (Water is the dominant element of the novel.)   Yet there’s no real connection between sight and sound.  The suicide of the girls’ mother Helen is all wrong:  the actress playing Helen (Margot Pinvidic), as she prepares to drive her car off a mountainside, doesn’t suggest either a mask or suppressed fear or that she’s beyond caring:  she seems merely, aberrantly affable.   In the small town of Fingerbone, the orphaned Ruth and Lucille live with their grandmother (Georgie Collins) until she dies; two worrywart spinster great aunts (Anne Pitoniak and Barbara Reese) hold the fort briefly; then the girls’ long-absent aunt Sylvie, a bag lady for much of her adult life, arrives and takes over the housekeeping.  When Christine Lahti as Sylvie appears on the scene, she immediately provides the film with a focus and pulls all of it together, for a while.

Ruth and Lucille are played by Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill respectively.  Long, tall Walker is physically distinctive and has an occasionally affecting passivity; Burchill’s characterisation of the sharper Lucille is clear; yet these two young actresses don’t get anything going between them, although Christine Lahti brings them to life somewhat.  (Neither Walker nor Burchill has gone on to do much else.)  Lahti’s Sylvie is gently but thoroughly eccentric and beguilingly uncertain.  Lahti’s expression of her instant shifts of mood – Sylvie’s face is translucent one moment, the light is switched off the next – is very skilful.  Her hand movements when Sylvie is eating perfectly capture Marilynne Robinson’s description in the novel.  But there are two essential, related disadvantages in bringing this character from page to screen.  First, Sylvie can’t be kept under wraps and revealed gradually through the narrative – especially as it’s Lahti, rather than either of the girls, who takes the camera.  Second, Sylvie becomes the dominant character of Housekeeping – without your getting a strong sense of what she means to Ruth.  Forsyth’s fluid film-making in effect replicates the larger voice of the novel but Sara Walker’s limitations mean that Ruth as the central consciousness of the story disappears (especially because the first-person narration on the soundtrack is increasingly, and understandably, rationed).

The novel describes the inexorable movement of Lucille towards conventionality, and acceptance in conventional society, as Ruth becomes bound by more mysterious family ties, reaching back to the watery deaths of the girls’ mother and grandfather.  Sylvie resonates with both girls, in that she’s as driven as Lucille, but to escape conventionality, and, like Ruth, seems drawn to the meaning of the lake in the history of the family.  Whether the trio’s psychological and actual movements amount to progression or regression remains unresolved in the novel but what persists is the importance of Lucille in her elder sister’s mental and emotional life – even after the pair are separated, as Ruth leaves Fingerbone to go on the road with Sylvie.  In Forsyth’s telling of the story, Lucille more or less disappears.  I found Housekeeping saddening to watch, for various reasons.  Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill aren’t really up to their roles.  Although Marilynne Robinson is a hugely accomplished writer, I’ve found an exquisite dullness in all three of her novels; yet it’s clear that Forsyth didn’t succeed in doing justice to this one – that’s saddening too because he’s such a gifted film-maker and the book evidently meant a lot to him.   Housekeeping was the first of the three movies that comprise Forsyth’s relatively short and unsuccessful directing career in America.  The novel, as a paperback, is around 250 pages long and Housekeeping isn’t a short film – yet it feels like a short story stretched very thin.  There are suggestions too that it may have had to be cut rather urgently:  Lucille’s dissatisfaction with life with Sylvie, like the accumulation of empty tins and other domestic debris, materialises too quickly.  Since the girls don’t age after Sylvie arrives (two younger girls play them when they first arrive in Fingerbone with Helen), it’s hard to tell how much time is passing.  Yet even though the film doesn’t work, Forsyth’s light, sensitive touch is often in evidence.  I especially liked his staging of the Fingerbone locals posing for photographs with the few objects retrieved from the lake, after the train carrying the grandfather, who is the beginning of the family history of Housekeeping, disappeared into its depths.

15 January 2014