Film review

  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Daldry (2011)

    It’s a sad story and a poor film:  the combination makes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a dispiriting (and long) two hours.  Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel is formally inventive and self-confident.  Stephen Daldry’s screen version, from a screenplay by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), is neither.  The book may be successful only in parts – but those parts include the main one:  the first person narrator, nine year old Oskar Schell, whose beloved father, Thomas, died on 9/11 when the South Tower went down.   This extraordinary kid has more than a touch of Asperger’s in his obsessive volatility and the mass of facts and figures he can keep in his head but he has a capacity for off-centre introspection too.  The character is a big challenge for a child actor – he needs to be on Oskar’s singular wavelength and to get inside his whirring brain.  One of the reasons I felt unhappy throughout the film was because it seemed unkind to think so badly of Thomas Horn, who plays Oskar.  This fourteen-year-old – he looks like an adolescent Frank Lampard – can act.  In terms of technical skill, he’s in a different class from, say, the children in Hugo.  And Stephen Daldry has had great success in the past directing boys, of different ages, on screen – Jamie Bell in Billy Elliot, Jack Rovello in The Hours.  Horn isn’t as free a performer as either of them, though, and his accomplishment is self-defeating.  Oskar is a brilliantly unstable personality; Thomas Horn is too evidently in control and his lack of essential eccentricity means that he isn’t funny.  In the book, Oskar’s humour and ability to make you laugh are crucial in complementing his anguish.

    Although Oskar is in all but a few scenes of the film, he’s not the presence that he is in the novel.  The amount of voiceover narrative is modest but Daldry and Roth haven’t found anything to replace Oskar’s persistent voice.  The picture is handsomely shot by Chris Menges but it’s full of images and montages which, because they don’t express any point of view, are empty technical flourishes.  The soundtrack is dominated by an incontinent Alexandre Desplat score.  Oskar isn’t the sole narrator of the book:  his paternal grandparents also tell the story of their courtship, their lives together, their separation in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.   Jonathan Safran Foer connects 9/11 with other atrocities.  This works well enough when Oskar chooses Hiroshima as the subject for a school project but references to the bombing of Dresden in the grandparents’ recollections seem to be stretching a point.  It’s not much of a point anyway – just a fairly obvious reminder that Americans and their allies have shown themselves capable of inflicting as much harm on civilians as the 9/11 terrorists were.  Much of the grandparents’ story is in epistolary form.  The letters that may or may not have been received or read by those to whom they’re addressed are the basis of the novel’s failure-to-communicate theme, elaborated by the grandfather’s decision to stop speaking (and write things down instead to keep a conversation going), the halting walkie-talkie dialogue between Oskar and his grandmother whose apartment is on the opposite side of the road from the block where Oskar and his mother live, and the messages left on cell phones on what Oskar calls ‘the worst day’.  The accumulation of these variously problematic forms of communication is overworked by Safran Foer but it is at least coherent.   The paring down of it in the film reduces what’s left – mostly the grandfather’s pen-and-paper responses to Oskar’s torrent of spoken words – to contrived oddity.  It’s disconnected and tedious – not least because, of course, the old man’s speed-writing still slows scenes down.

    Jonathan Safran Foer is a showoff writer, especially in his linguistic grandstanding.  (I liked Extremely Loud enough that I then started on his earlier success Everything Is Illuminated, which I found unreadable beyond fifty pages.)  His attempts to universalise Oskar’s story work only in part.   At one point in the novel, Safran Foer, through Oskar, perceives that, ultimately, we’re all trapped in a burning skyscraper.  The insight is offensive, since the victims of 9/11 were trapped in a real burning skyscraper as well as a metaphorical one.  He’s more successful in making you feel, through the unique details of Oskar’s horror and bereavement, for all the young children who lost parents on 9/11.  The text of the book is interleaved with photographs of the falling man and assorted other visuals.  I guess many people will regard this as meretricious and tastelessly eye-catching but I could accept it.  The photographs not only connect with Oskar’s obsessions but seem to admit that these are the definitive description of 9/11, which a fictional treatment can’t get beyond.  What holds the novel together are the detail and relentlessness of Oskar’s fertile imagination, and his quest to find the lock for a key he’s discovered in his father’s wardrobe, in an envelope with the name ‘Black’ on it.  In life, Thomas Schell loved to design complicated, clue-based ‘assignments’ for his son:  Oskar loved to carry these out, in partnership with his father, and the search for the lock is a post-mortem continuation of the family tradition.  This is all an admittedly obvious metaphor for the boy’s trying to make sense of the baffling fact of his father’s death (although Thomas Schell’s body was never found) but it works because the quest for the lock is realised in a highly individual way.

    That quest gives the story road-movie potential and the succession of characters that Oskar meets on his journey – working his way, on foot and alphabetically, through all the Blacks in the local directory – are wonderful.  As I read the book, I kept thinking how good these encounters could be in a dramatisation; when I saw the cast for the film adaptation, the prospect was mouthwatering.  It’s one of the biggest letdowns of Extremely Loud on screen that there’s never any momentum to Oskar’s search and that most of his meetings are abbreviated to almost nothing – no more than is needed to fix each Black that he visits with a single characteristic or two.  As Abby Black, Oskar’s first port of call on his journey, Viola Davis is once again very impressive – she’s able, with great economy and in spite of the thin writing, to suggest a complete character – and, although the staging of the crucial later scene between Oskar and Abby’s (ex-) husband isn’t imaginative, Jeffrey Wright plays the latter sensitively.  For the most part, though, the actors in smaller roles are wasted.   John Goodman as the apartment block doorman Stan and Zoe Caldwell as Oskar’s grandmother have virtually nothing to do.

    Max von Sydow is powerfully expressive in the early stages when, as the silent Thomas Schell Sr, he’s listening to Oskar and to the voice messages the boy’s father left at the apartment on the morning of 9/11.  But even von Sydow can’t transcend the writing-not-speaking routine.  (This is one of the ideas in the novel that’s ridiculous once it’s exposed to physical reality.  After not very long, the only thought it provokes is wondering how many notebooks the grandfather must get through.)   Tom Hanks’s warmth and flair for eccentricity make his casting as Oskar’s father understandable but he looks a bit too old for the part and the lack of spark between him and Thomas Horn is disappointing.  Oskar feels cut off from his mother, Linda, which probably gives Sandra Bullock an advantage over Hanks.  She gives a well-judged performance although the climactic scene in which she explains to her son that she knew what he was up to all along when he left the block with his backpack is so protracted that it dilutes the power this revelation has in the book.  (The idea that his mother, unbeknown to Oskar, is keeping an eye on him gives added poignancy to his father’s no longer being there to do so.)

    The film’s rendering of how Oskar and other people in his life get the better of their own fears and weaknesses is so pallid that it’s not even annoying.   It says everything about this movie that its most emotionally affecting moments come when Linda Schell takes a call at work to learn from her husband that the work meeting he’s gone to was in the World Trade Center.  She looks out from her office window and watches the burning Twin Towers as Thomas assures her that he’s fine.   Sandra Bullock plays and Tom Hanks speaks this conversation very well but it’s a generic 9/11 scene – it doesn’t connect at all with the particularity of Jonathan Safran Foer’s treatment of the subject.   It’s also confusing:  if Thomas knows Linda is at work, why does he keep leaving messages on the answering machine at home (unless he expects Oskar to be picking them up – but why would he?)?

    Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a smart title.  It’s simply right for 9/11.  It includes what are revealed, in the book’s (though not the film’s) narrative, to be Oskar’s two favourite adverbs.   It refers specifically to the way his grandmother sounds when she inexpertly tries to take part in the two-way radio conversations with Oskar.  It refers more largely to the intolerability of feeling too much about other people and the impact of losing them.  This is why Oskar can’t pick up the phone in the apartment and Thomas has to leave his final message, and why Oskar then buys a replacement answering machine and secretes the old one containing the messages so that his mother and grandmother don’t have to hear them.  The film, rather desperately, justifies its name in its closing stages when Linda Schell discovers a(n unfinished) book that chronicles an earlier assignment that Thomas set for Oskar – the front page lettered with ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’. Safran Foer’s title is, as well as clever, irritating (partly because it’s clever).   Critics enraged by the film have been able to get their own back by cheaply insulting it as ‘Extremely Tiresome and Incredibly Manipulative’, or words to that effect.  One of the few elements of the novel that emerges clearly here is the metaphoric aspect of the story that Thomas tells Oskar about the disappeared sixth borough of New York City.  It comes eventually to stand for the community of the dead of 9/11 (Thomas’s sixth voice message was his last).  ‘The Sixth Borough’ might have been a better title for the film.  On the subject of numbers:  this is Stephen Daldry’s fourth cinema feature and his first thoroughgoing failure.

    18 February 2012

  • The Wolf of Wall Street

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Scorsese (2013)

    There are moments when Martin Scorsese seems to be aiming for something similar to what Bob Fosse achieved in Cabaret – making the audience feel, and be tempted by, the fetid energy of the culture that he’s also critiquing.  But the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street, adapted by Terence Winter from the real-life New York stock swindler Jordan Belfort’s memoir of the same name, are neither ambiguous nor interesting so the effect is very different.  Scorsese has been criticised for revelling in the violently hedonistic (sometimes just violent) behaviour that he describes.  You wouldn’t want him to adopt a condemnatory tone towards it for three hours yet it’s hard to argue with the aforementioned criticism because he doesn’t seem to have anything much to say – other than what Jordan Belfort has to say.   Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) keeps popping up with narration to camera and – perhaps partly because of Scorsese’s continuing love affair with his lead actor – his presence and point of view dominate, or at least fuse with, Scorsese’s.  Two of the strongest sequences in The Wolf of Wall Street – they’re absorbing partly because their mood and tempo is very different from the film’s prevailing hectic register – take place on Jordan’s yacht and in a seminar room in Auckland University, New Zealand.  In the first of these sequences, Jordan is interviewed by Patrick Denham, an FBI man who’s investigating his business dealings at Stratton Oakmont, the company Jordan set up and has made a fortune through:  there’s a real tension in who has the upper hand in the tight, well-written exchange between them but Jordan scores a hit when he tells Denham he knows the cop once had hopes of a Wall Street career himself.   The seminar in Auckland is the setting for the film’s final scene and introduces Belfort’s career as a motivational speaker since his release from prison in 2006.  (He served twenty-two months for securities fraud and money laundering.)  The mostly young men in his Kiwi audience look dull and dim; when Jordan hands a pen to one then another of those in the front row and asks them to sell it to him, they fail ineptly.  But their whey faces nevertheless express a wimpy longing for what Jordan has to offer.  Both these sequences suggest that everyone really wants a part of this kind of action – that only hypocrites would claim, or fools think or feel, otherwise.  The international commercial success of The Wolf of Wall Street must be due in no small part to Scorsese and Terence Winter tapping into this but I’m a fool.  Just about every example of the life that Jordan and his kind enjoyed was horrifying to me.

    Scorsese must have realised that he could make a movie the look and rhythms of which would correlate with the speed – the drugs and the get-rich-quick ethos – of the world of Jordan Belfort.  It looks as if the excitement of realising this, and the stimulus of staging the various and elaborate scenes of debauchery and abuse, took over.   Scorsese also expects the audience to be magnetised by Leonardo DiCaprio.  This film is by some way their most successful work together (with the potential exception of Gangs of New York, which I’ve not seen through).  And DiCaprio’s acting here is the best I’ve seen from him since What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?  For a while in The Wolf of Wall Street, I thought he was liberated by playing someone outrageous – liberated from trying to create a nuanced, conflicted character, which he’s often tried and failed to do (The Aviator, Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island, J Edgar and so on).  But then I realised there must be more to it than that:  DiCaprio played a more thoroughly vile man in Django Unchained and still seemed lightweight.  In Tarantino’s film, however, he was up against the likes of Christophe Waltz and Samuel L Jackson.  Scorsese makes it much easier for DiCaprio to dominate here:  there’s some good work in supporting roles, especially from Kyle Chandler as the FBI man, but, with the sort-of (and peculiar) exception of Jonah Hill, as Jordan’s pal and colleague Donnie Azoff, there’s no one to challenge the star’s charisma, on Wall Street anyway.  The other men whom the camera spends time on are either strikingly bad-looking or have been cast for their anonymity.  It’s interesting when Jordan goes to Switzerland (so that he can stash millions there) and DiCaprio confronts Jean Dujardin, in a witty cameo as a corrupt banker.  For the few moments that DiCaprio has to share the screen with another good-looking male star, the dynamic shifts.

    Scorsese directs Leonardo DiCaprio skilfully, recognising that Jordan is too dominant a role for the man to be powerfully nasty for three hours:  DiCaprio’s essentially likeable presence and the hard work that he has to put in to be shocking mean that Jordan isn’t as oppressive as he would otherwise be (even if it also means that, like everyone else in the movie except for the FBI man, he isn’t of any interest either).  And it wouldn’t be fair to understate how much better than usual DiCaprio is.  There’s a physical dynamism and definition of movement and gesture that gives him an unexpected authority.  His voice sometimes has a roughness that gives it a richer quality than before.  Jordan often behaves like an angry little boy and this comes easily to an actor who’s struggled in other roles to seem grown-up.  When Jordan is under pressure, though, as in the exchange with the FBI man, there’s a sustained edge to DiCaprio that I’ve never seen previously.  Scorsese stages the rabble-rousing sequences at the Stratton Oakmost offices very well.  DiCaprio (although with evident effort) gets a rhythm going and he’s helped by what the people playing Jordan’s staff are doing:  the manic esprit de corps of the brokers fuses with actors feeding off each other’s energies.

    Much of the bacchanalia, whether in the office or the bedroom, has a kinetic charge:  Scorsese’s evident delight in realising these sequences meshes with the characters living in the moment.  There’s an excellent choice of songs on the soundtrack – the throb of the music goes with the sex on display, and the sexual drives of Jordan and co merge with their other propelling lusts.  Although The Wolf of Wall Street is way too long for what it is (it’s hardly a richly complex epic of corruption even though it’s the same length as The Godfather), there are some clever changes of pace and tone.   The sequences describing what happens when Jordan is out of his head with his favourite Quaaludes go on forever but, just when you feel the sex and drugs and parties are going to be the whole movie, Scorsese will cut to something more quiet or exuberantly, broadly comic – as when Rob Reiner, as Jordan’s accountant father, is enraged by a phone call interrupting a favourite TV programme (but speaks in a hyper-polite English accent when he actually answers the phone).  The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is vivid, the editing by Thelma Schoonmaker very sharp – although there’s an unbelievable glitch when Jordan, at the end of a bout of love-making, begins a line with his trousers visibly off and, just by sitting up on the bed, ends it with them on.

    Jonah Hill gives another taking performance:  Donnie Azoff has the hyperactive astonishment of a man who can’t believe he’s living the life he’s living.  Hill has a fine moment when Donnie tells Jordan how he loves being stoned and really means it.  Scorsese tends to display the numerous naked women in the movie but it’s the shaving of a girl’s head, in a piece of macho office bravado on her part, that’s more worrying.  The more significant female roles have been cast shrewdly enough to catch you off balance.  There’s a glazed vacancy in the looks of Margot Robbie, who plays Jordan’s second wife Naomi, so that the character’s feistiness then comes as a surprise.   For a British audience anyway, having Joanna Lumley in the role of Naomi’s aunt is a bit distracting although she plays it well enough.  The actresses doing battleaxe authority women are good too, even if the casting of them because of their looks – like all the unprepossessing men – is offensive.  But Scorsese shows again a remarkable ability to get actors in small parts to express their character fully without overdoing it.   The Wolf of Wall Street is evidence that he can still make a technically exciting movie (it’s the first he’s shot digitally rather than on film).  You just wish he’d had a more worthwhile subject.

    18 January 2014

     

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