Film review

  • Out of Africa

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sydney Pollack (1985)

    During her lecture introducing the Katharine Hepburn season at BFI early this year, Hannah McGill briefly compared Hepburn and Meryl Streep.  McGill contrasted the permanency of Hepburn’s screen persona with Streep’s absorption of herself into a character – ‘that whole immersive thing’.  You could hear the irritation in McGill’s voice as she spoke those words.  Streep is famously supposed to disappear into each role that she plays but she obviously doesn’t; if she did, Hannah McGill wouldn’t be so aware of (and annoyed by) watching Meryl Streep.  It’s odd that this ‘whole immersive thing’ has proved such an enduring critical myth.  It was exploded decades ago by Dave Kehr, who gave Streep a consistently bad press back in the 1980s (and perhaps beyond: I haven’t read his later reviews).  Kehr wrote of A Cry in the Dark in 1988:

    ‘[It] has been conceived as a director’s film – a movie that works through imagery and narrative rhythm, through visual and aural resonance.  But when Streep enters a movie (and it isn’t something she can help by now) it immediately becomes an actor’s film, a movie about performance – her accent, her gestures, her walk.  Meryl Streep upstages Ayers Rock.’

    The Vanity Fair piece in the programme note for this month’s BFI screening of Out of Africa refers to Streep,  in her interpretation of Karen Blixen, as ‘submersing herself in character and Danish accent’.  Submersion makes a slight change from immersion but Meryl Streep, in an auteurist context, is less submersive than subversive.  She got on the nerves of at least one notoriously non-auteurist critic too but how irksome Streep’s longevity in cinema must be to those for whom a film should always be ‘a director’s film’.  A performer as outstanding as she is (in all senses of the word) will be problematic even for film students interested in ‘the actor as auteur’, a theme of Amy Lawrence’s 2010 study The Passion of Montgomery Clift.  Lawrence’s idea of Clift as the auteur of his movies depends, however, on his not transforming himself into different people.  It depends not just on the consistency of his screen persona but on the connection between this and his off-screen persona.  (The latter is, of course, something of which modern-day viewers are more aware than were audiences who saw Clift’s films on their original release.)  Meryl Streep is a very strong but very different screen presence.  We don’t think of her as a particular type or as a collection of particular human qualities; still less do we think, as we watch her, about what she might do in her private life.  Dave Kehr and I have very different views of her – I’m pro, he’s con.  But I think he’s essentially right about the Streep effect that he describes.  Whenever Meryl Streep makes an appearance in a film, we register her as a formidable actor.  That is her primary identity.

    It’s also a main reason why Streep’s performance in Out of Africa is one of her most interesting and makes Sydney Pollack’s film much more interesting than it would otherwise be.  (I saw Out of Africa at the cinema when it first came out, thirty years ago; I guess I’d seen it a couple of times on video since then but never again until now on a big screen.)  The BFI screening was introduced by Neil Brand, who spoke well and instructively about John Barry’s music.  Brand pointed out, for example, the sparing use of the score’s main romantic theme:  after the opening credits, it’s not heard again until the plane flight about halfway through the picture’s 161 minutes.  Barry’s score is beautiful and sonorous but I was surprised that Neil Brand found it overwhelming enough to turn Out of Africa into what he clearly experiences as a glorious romantic drama.  I was even more surprised by his concluding description of the movie as proof that ‘any of us could fall in love like this – with the right landscape and the right man’.   One of the clearest messages of Out of Africa is that Karen Blixen’s great love, Denys Finch Hatton, is not the right man.  As she says, in the last words of her eulogy at Denys’s funeral, ‘He was not ours. He was not mine.’  Nor is Kenya hers:  at the end of the film, Karen goes back to Denmark, never to return to Africa.   She doesn’t get to keep her man or the land she farmed, in spite of working hard for them both.  What makes the film’s story fascinating is that – thanks in no small part to Meryl Streep’s salience on screen – the land doesn’t possess Karen Blixen either.

    Karen Dinesen was born near Copenhagen in 1885, into a well-off bourgeois family.  She married into Scandinavian aristocracy:  after a failed romance with her Swedish second cousin, Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke, she became engaged in 1913 to his twin brother, Bror.  They moved to British East Africa, where their wedding took place the following year, and used family funds to develop a coffee plantation in Kenya.  Sydney Pollack, the screenwriter Kurt Luedtke and Meryl Streep quickly convey essential aspects of Karen’s personality – her bossy sense of entitlement, her blundering impulsiveness.  We see these qualities in her spur-of-the-moment switch from Hans to Bror (both played by Klaus Maria Brandauer); in the way she strides heedlessly into the men-only members’ bar of the Mombasa hotel where she and Bror will shortly exchange their marriage vows.  Streep gives the character a singular combination of determination and self-doubt:  throughout the film, Karen Blixen is a control freak who is easily made to look – and to feel – silly.  As her train approaches Mombasa, the bride-to-be Karen is ordering African railway workers to handle with care the china and crystal she’s brought with her from Denmark; she also has her first encounter with Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford), although she doesn’t yet know who he is (a big game hunter, well known in the local colonial community).  Hearing her chide the Africans, Denys makes a lightly sarcastic remark about the china and crystal.  Karen’s concern with possessions and Denys’s reaction to this translate, in due course, into deep-seated tensions in the affair between them.  Although he’s attracted to and admires her, Karen’s insistence on managing things, including their life together, pushes Denys in the opposite direction.

    Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, written under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, isn’t easily adaptable into a big-budget romantic drama, and Kurt Luedtke also draws on two biographical studies of Blixen (Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Story Teller by Judith Thurman, and Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski).  Luedtke shows skill in organising the various source material, and developing the principal characters in Blixen’s episodic memoir, but the result is an accumulation of short scenes that often amount to no more than bits of a linear narrative that spans nearly twenty years.  And though Sydney Pollack’s direction is intelligent, his storytelling lacks momentum.  The cinematographer David Watkin’s palette is beautifully varied, and he achieves some wonderful lighting effects (especially nocturnal ones), yet Pollack, even in visual terms, sometimes seems to be going through the motions.  Robert Redford’s Finch Hatton was widely ridiculed as a ludicrous example of star system casting.  Redford’s acting is emotionally precise and eloquent but it’s hard to justify his thoroughly American interpretation of Finch Hatton, especially (a) since some of Denys’s lines make little sense if they’re not spoken by a British colonialist and (b) in light of Meryl Streep’s painstaking Danish-accented English.  Having Redford in the role is seemingly premised on the idea that a member of Hollywood royalty is naturally right as a member of the British aristocracy.  (It’s nearly inconceivable that a big American actor would be cast as Finch Hatton if the film were made today – when British actors are increasingly playing Americans in American movies.)

    Redford is right in one important respect, though; in his case too, this rightness connects to his essential characteristics as a screen actor.   As in The Way We Were, an earlier Sydney Pollack movie, Redford’s mixture of effortlessness and inaccessibility contrasts sharply with the acting style of his female co-star; as in The Way We Were, there’s a strong correspondence between the two stars’ differences of approach to performing and the dynamic of the relationship between the characters they’re playing.  Karen Blixen always wants more of, and from, Denys Finch Hatton – just as Barbra Streisand’s Katie Morosky kept pushing for Redford’s Hubbell Gardiner in The Way We Were to become the man she was determined that he could be.  (That relationship didn’t work out either.)  Scenes which would have been romantic highlights between the leads in an old-style Hollywood picture don’t come to fruition as such in Out of Africa.   Yet the not coming to fruition – the frustration that Karen and Denys, for different reasons, both feel – is absorbing.  To be fair to Pollack and Kurt Luedtke, this sense of anti-climax is implicit in the script and direction; it isn’t only the result of what the actors do (and who they are).  The big aerial sequence – Karen’s first experience of air travel, with Denys, in his bi-plane – is the most famous in the film, as the craft soars above spectacular African flora and fauna (the flamingos are outstanding).  But John Barry’s music, even as it soars too, expresses an aspiration to happiness rather than the achievement of it.  As Karen reaches her arm back to grasp the hand of the pilot, she conveys not only exhilaration but also (one might say heavy-handedly) a need for the exhilaration to be sustained.

    The relative straightforwardness of Karen’s relationship with her husband is well conveyed. When she arrives in Kenya, she learns from Bror Blixen that he has invested their money not in the dairy farm they planned but instead in land for coffee-growing – a project doomed to economic failure.  Bror is serially unfaithful to Karen and gives her a life-threatening case of syphilis into the bargain.  (This necessitates her temporary return to Denmark for treatment and convalescence.) After they have separated, Bror keeps coming back to Karen for money.  He’s so consistently a scoundrel that he’s relatively easy for her to cope with emotionally.  Klaus Maria Brandauer’s well-judged playing of Bror shows us his charm without making him likeable.  There are good supporting performances too from Michael Kitchen, as Denys’s friend, Berkeley Cole; Malick Bowens, as Karen’s head servant, Farah; and Suzanna Hamilton, as Felicity, a sexually ambiguous English equestrienne.

    Karen narrates the film in retrospective voiceover and in one of Meryl Streep’s few unsuccessful accents.  (It’s the only one, as far as I know, that has been jokingly parodied over the years – the repeated line ‘I had a farm in Ah-free-car …’ has been, anyway.)  The awkwardness may be caused by the stress of both sustaining the accent and assuming the voice of an older woman.  Streep was in her mid-thirties when the film was made.  The book Out of Africa was published in 1937, when Karen Blixen was fifty-two; she died at the age of seventy-seven.  I’m not sure how old Pollack and Streep mean the narrator Karen to be but she sounds excessively ancient.  Still, it’s a compensation that the most effective part of the voiceover comes with the important closing lines.  Streep’s voice throughout the live action of the story is far more convincing – she has other actors to spark her delivery of the lines – and this is another instance of her finding, through technical skill and imagination, plenty of humour in a foreign accent.  She also realises most impressively Karen Blixen’s self-image – evident in her Seven Gothic Tales (1934) – as a kind of Scheherazade.  Karen claims that she can invent a story from any opening sentence.  After dinner with Denys and Berkeley one evening, the former sets her the task of doing just that.  Meryl Streep’s storytelling is hypnotically charming.  She concludes Karen’s invention for her rapt guests by fusing her own penchant for arresting gesture with Blixen’s determination to impress as a spellbinding teller of tales.

    There are so many fine details in Streep’s work:  the tension between self-assertion and timidity in her walk (and how this is modified when Karen’s gait has been affected by syphilis); Karen’s placing of her hand beside Finch Hatton’s on the arm of the chair in which he’s sleeping.  The coherence of her portrait of Karen Blixen goes well beyond what the script supplies.  When they first meet, at her wedding reception, Felicity admires Karen’s bridal dress but light-heartedly deplores her choice of hat.  It’s the first of several hats in Out of Africa that does Meryl Streep no favours – the tight-fitting bonnets emphasise the length of her face and especially her nose.  But the effect of this headgear is also to reinforce the viewer’s sense of the character that Streep has created.   Karen is anxious to reach out to her closest friends, as well as to the Kikuyu house staff, farm workers and children for whom she sets up a school.  Yet this pushy but fretful woman persistently finds herself boxed in – and often by her own nature.

    As she prepares to leave the farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills, Karen Blixen disposes of household goods, including at least some of that china and crystal.  Inside the farmhouse, though – when Bror arrives to tell her that Denys has died in a plane crash – Karen is surrounded by packing crates, ready for the return journey to Europe.    At the end of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen muses as follows:

    ‘If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?  Will the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I have had on?   Or will the children invent a game in which my name is?  Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me?  Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?’ 

    Her thoughts appear to express a regretful awareness of her unimportance in the vast of the region she has come to love and with which, as with Denys Finch Hatton, she seems to have longed for a union that she can’t have.  Yet the very fact that Blixen asks these pathetically fallacious questions is testimony to her demanding egocentricity.  You feel that, if Africa doesn’t know a song of Karen Blixen, it’s because she’s incapable of giving herself fully to the continent.  She may have thought she wanted ‘that whole immersive thing’ but part of her remains a Danish haute bourgeoise who married into a title.  She may have loved the landscape but she continued to stand apart from it.  Those packing crates in the emptied house are an apt image of the cargo – the baggage, as we would now say – that she never loses.

    19 November 2015

  • Barry Lyndon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kubrick (1975)

    This adaptation of Thackeray’s story of the rise and fall of an eighteenth-century Irish adventurer is absorbing.  Although it’s also often unsatisfying, what Kubrick succeeds in doing is memorable.  The visual compositions that bring to mind the portraiture and landscapes (and figures in landscapes) of the period are awesomely beautiful.  By suggesting that the characters are constrained by a picture frame (whether in a fine art or a cinematic context), Kubrick also conveys the sense of their being governed by their time and place, and the mores of that time and that place.  The technically highly sophisticated visuals also have a simple magical effect:  they bring to life a bygone era – a period of history is animated through its art history.  The lushness and delicacy of the colour scheme that Kubrick and his cinematographer John Alcott create are essential to that magic.  The choice of music, if not as startlingly eclectic as in A Clockwork Orange, is very shrewd.  It’s not just that (especially) the Handel sarabande and the Schubert piano trio give added depth to the moving pictures on screen.  The marriage of score and image makes you feel you’re witnessing something important – and makes you excited about what’s coming next.  But this powerful effect also reflects a weakness in Barry Lyndon:  the effect is achieved by the allure of what we see and hear rather than by the meanings beneath the externals.

    Kubrick, for all his meticulous planning of the technical aspects, didn’t sufficiently think out how he wanted the characters played, or didn’t keep a close enough eye on the cast – or both.  The performances are a very mixed bag, in terms of acting style, as well as quality.   There are episodes such as Barry’s attempts to buy a peerage which work thanks to the sure satirical touch of the actors playing the smooth dealers with whom Barry tries to ingratiate himself – Bernard Hepton, Andre Morell, Anthony Sharpe.  There are other actors in small parts – and, like the aforementioned three, best known from British television – who recall the overdrawn characterisations that detract from A Clockwork Orange:  Frank Middlemass, as Lady Lyndon’s first, invalid husband;  and, for all his talent as a physical comedian, Leonard Rossiter, as Barry’s opponent in a duel the outcome of which starts the hero’s picaresque progress.  Dominic Savage[1], the boy who plays the infant Lord Bullingdon (Lady Lyndon’s son and heir), is wonderfully – and realistically – convincing, as we watch his naturally melancholy disposition harden into a calculating, superior loathing of the upstart Barry.  There’s no continuity of soul, however, between this child and the empty-headed milksop that the young adult Bullingdon has become.  Watching Leon Vitali in the role makes you uncomfortable because the weakness of the character is inseparable from that of the actor (at times, Vitali sounds relieved to be remembering his lines).  Marie Kean is impressive as Barry’s mother:  the performance goes through different registers but there’s a sustained thread of possessive loyalty to her son, as well as of crafty opportunism.  It’s clear in several scenes that Mrs Barry is holding in considerable force and reserves of anger.   These are gradually unleashed in her confrontation with the Reverend Runt, Lady Lyndon’s chaplain – so that the final return to controlled quietness, once Barry finds himself in reduced circumstances (in more ways than one), is all the more powerful.  Murray Melvin is excellent as Runt.  His extraordinary appearance allows him to create, it seems effortlessly, a comically expressionist study of a cold-blooded creep; but it’s the combination of Heepish servility and smug authority in performing his public, professional duties that makes this a richly satirical portrait.  Runt seems completely realised intoning the funeral rites of Barry’s young son.

    You sense in both the leads an anxiety to please the master director and an uncertainty as to what he wants them to do.  As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is very beautiful but she seems part of the design – ammunition to critics who see the film as a purely technical exercise.  Berenson is upstaged by her gowns, wigs, hats, and by the perfect co-ordination of her flesh tones with these accoutrements.   The role is too large to be reduced in this way; and although Berenson is no doubt a limited actress, she had shown in Cabaret that, with a skilful and encouraging director, she could be affecting.  Ryan O’Neal’s Barry doesn’t work in a more complex way.   He looks right for the part in terms of build and colouring but there’s not much in his bearing or in what he suggests of Barry’s mind to indicate an adventurous or impulsive spirit.  In the early stages, Barry seems slow-witted and physically ponderous.  Towards the end of the first half, O’Neal gets the chance to show more emotional range – he conveys, in particular, that Barry is starting to realise that, if he rides his luck and takes his chances, he can make his fortune.  But O’Neal’s approach seems fundamentally misguided (or unguided by Kubrick):  it assumes, wrongly, that Barry’s character will be developed in a gradually more penetrating way.  Perhaps Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon isn’t susceptible to that kind of exploration; Kubrick’s Barry certainly isn’t.    What O’Neal gets going towards the middle of the film is bound to be a dead end because Kubrick seems to see Barry entirely as a victim of circumstance.  He doesn’t want Barry to have a personality in any substantial sense.  The way that O’Neal plays him, Barry doesn’t even have much ‘personality’ in the shallow sense of the word (liveliness, easy appeal etc).  A further shortcoming of the performance links to a defect of the direction that goes beyond anything that the actors do.   O’Neal’s physical and emotional motor isn’t quick.  It’s in step with Kubrick’s deliberate pacing of the narrative but at odds with the dramatic arc of the story.  Surely the first part of the film (there was an intermission when it was first shown in cinemas), which covers Barry’s chequered military career and jerky ascent up the economic ladder, needs more changes of pace –  in order to suggest the unpredictable and arbitrary aspects of his climb (which culminates in his marriage to the enormously wealthy Lady Lyndon)?  The second half, charting Barry’s fall from grace and favour, can afford to be slower to convey the grim inevitability of the decline.   In the event, it’s hard to discern any contrast in tempo between the two halves.  I think the second half may seem slower only because the nature of the events it describes also lacks variety – it’s all bad news.

    Michael Hordern reads the voice-over narration wittily but this too moves to a regular beat.  Since Kubrick also has the narrator tell us what will happen before we see it happen, the overall effect is confusing – as if the characters’ fates are dictated less by eighteenth-century social forces than by the omniscient third person voice of the Victorian novel.  The very end of the film, however, provides a real jolt.  A legend appears on the screen, reminding us that the events we’ve seen occurred in the reign of George III and that the people we’ve been watching ‘are all equal now’.  The fact that we read those words rather than hear them has the effect of including the narrator himself among those equalised by death (and the moment has an extra charge now that Kubrick too is no more).  The film is long (187 minutes).  That it never fails to hold your interest is all the more remarkable, given the conscious attempts made to reduce the dramatic impact of key events in the story.

    Academy Awards for cinematography (John Alcott), production design (Ken Adam), costume design (Milena Canonero and Ulla-Britt Soderlund), score adaptation (Leonard Rosenman).  Others in the huge cast include Hardy Kruger and Patrick Magee.

    15 September 2008

    [1] Savage is now himself a filmmaker.

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