Film review

  • Pretty Woman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Garry Marshall (1990)

    Pretty Woman is often, and reasonably, described as a ‘modern Cinderella story’.  To complain, as a friend did the other day, about the easy transformation of the heroine, Vivian Ward, from experienced prostitute to (as he put it) girl next door, is to ignore an important ingredient of the original Cinderella, whose clothes and humble social position merely and temporarily disguise her intrinsic beauty, of body and soul.  At one point in the film, Kit De Luca, Vivian’s friend and colleague on the streets of Los Angeles, remarks that she always looked good, even as a hooker.  With Julia Roberts in the role, this is an understatement: whether dressed as a streetwalker or in couture gowns, she always looks great.  If you Google the meaning of ‘girl next door’ one of the first definitions to come up is ‘perceived as familiar and dependable, typically in the context of a romantic relationship’.  This is a pretty good description of part of Julia Roberts’s appeal, early in her screen career anyway, although it doesn’t begin to describe other parts of that appeal – her lovely vividness, her warmth and humour.   Roberts was perfectly cast in Pretty Woman:  her combination of straightforwardness and spectacular good looks enables her to embody easily – and simultaneously – Cinderella-Vivian’s essence and destiny.  Her personality also helps to muffle the stuffy implication of the plot that a whore is a woman in need of salvation.

    Vivian becomes plagued by doubts about the future of her relationship with the rich businessman Edward Lewis, who engages her for a week for bedroom and other services.  She asks Kit to come up with an example of this kind of pairing actually working out:  the answer she gets is ‘Cindefuckinrella’.  As Kit, Laura San Giacomo makes the moment funny and J F Lawton’s script includes a few other amusing profanities but Pretty Woman gets off to a bad start in its description of the ‘reality’ of Vivian’s working life before Edward arrives in it:  a sequence in which the LAPD is investigating the murder of one of the prostitutes is tasteless as scene-setting.  What sticks more persistently in the craw is the film-makers’ confusion of true love and financial clout as transformative agents.  (The confusion is certainly thoroughgoing; it’s harder to tell how intentional it is.)  Edward’s commercial wheeler-dealing, although to some extent necessary to the plot, is mostly tedious – and Richard Gere, who plays this degraded Prince Charming, is tedious too, whenever he has a scene without Julia Roberts in it.  The one entertaining money-talk sequence is a dinner with two generations of the same family, James Morse and his grandson, whose business Edward is planning to acquire:  the occasion is enlivened entirely by Vivian’s being at the table and by the old man’s taking a shine to her.   Edward increasingly uses Vivian as an escort in affluent society, without revealing the secret of her professional history.  This brings to mind Pygmalion rather than Cinderella and references to Edward’s personal immaturity supply a further hint of kinship with Henry Higgins.  (Professor Higgins, unlike Edward, may not have been in therapy but he clearly should have been.)  It’s Richard Gere, though, who’s the statue in the set-up here and he doesn’t come to life.  Gere’s blankness is sometimes an effective complement to Roberts’s vitality and he has a good moment when Edward takes Vivian to the opera and registers her being moved by what she sees and hears there.  On the whole, though, his languid, impersonal, male-model presence means that Gere’s Edward isn’t sufficiently changed, let alone enhanced, by Vivian.

    Laura San Giacomo’s character is a cliché – the foul-mouthed, good-hearted broad – but she does it well; Ralph Bellamy, in his last screen appearance, is enjoyable as James Morse; and Hector Elizondo – as the hotel manager Barney Thompson, who turns into Vivian’s fairy godfather – is by far the best thing in Pretty Woman after Julia Roberts.  Elizondo gives Barney a subtle, witty watchfulness that’s incisive and very satisfying – except that, after not having seen the film for some years, I was disappointed he has so little time on screen.  It’s a mark of what a strong impression Elizondo makes that I remembered his role as much larger.   Otherwise, the supporting parts are played as crudely as they are written – which means that Jason Alexander as Edward’s slimy lawyer is especially awful.  Much of the comic element of this rom-com is ropy.  Edward sends Vivian out with money to buy expensive clothes; in her hooker’s outfit she’s treated like dirt by the staff at a high-end Beverly Hills boutique.   When Edward accompanies her shopping the following day, the fawning of a store manager is stupidly overwritten; it’s clumsy too that this shop is different from the one where Vivian was insulted, which then features in the anti-climactic scene that follows.

    None of this matters much, however, when the result is that the film’s leading actress acquires further outfits, designed by Marilyn Vance, in which to dazzle; and Julia Roberts does much more in Pretty Woman than wear costumes wonderfully.  The screenplay is uncertain how dim or smart Vivian is meant to be but Roberts gives her a coherent intelligence.  She also gives Vivian, in the early stages of the film, a forthright, almost angry walk – it stays with you and makes you feel it’s being suppressed when Vivian is being passed off as a society belle.  Roberts’s mile-wide smile is so expressive, an anxious mask as well as an expression of pleasure or joy.   And her laugh is wonderful.  When Edward opens a case containing the necklace he’s hired for Vivian to wear, she looks amazed; as she puts her hand forward, Edward claps the case shut.  Richard Gere, whatever the shortcomings of his performance, deserves thanks for supplying his co-star with this unscripted and justly famous moment.  Julia Roberts pulls her hand away quickly and laughs, in momentarily alarmed surprise.  However often you see this clip from Pretty Woman, you always laugh with her, in delight.

    19 April 2015

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wes Anderson (2014)

    It’s just as I expected, except that I enjoyed it.  One of the posters for the film comprises cigarette card portraits of its many characters:  the portraits anticipate the design of The Grand Budapest Hotel – stylishly neat, pretty, one-dimensional.  This goes not only for the look of the eponymous hotel, inside and outside:  even the alpine landscapes, beautiful as they are, have a pictorial flatness.  At one point Gustave H, the hotel concierge and the principal character, says to his protégé, the young lobby boy Zero Moustafa:  ‘The plot thickens – by the way, why is that: is it a soup metaphor?’  The plot of this crime caper is consommé.  Because Wes Anderson’s tone is fundamentally facetious the worst moments of his movies tend to occur when you’re meant to take things more seriously – whether this involves human feeling or bloodshed or some kind of energetic physical action, like a chase.   There’s actually quite a lot of chasing in The Grand Budapest Hotel – Gustave H is framed for a murder – and it’s mildly entertaining but the world that Anderson constructs is too shallow to accommodate violent death.  (It’s different with the pet animal killings that have become an Anderson trademark:  the repetition alone is enough to make you feel they matter to him.)

    The screenplay and story, by Anderson with Hugo Guinness, are inspired by the works of Stefan Zweig, a man not considered superficial either in his writings or in the manner of his death.  Zweig left Austria after Hitler came to power and eventually settled in Brazil: despairing for the future of Europe and European culture under Nazism, Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942.   The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional mittel-European state called Zebrowka in the inter-war years.  This era is said to have been the hotel’s heyday but the strong Austro-Hungarian Empire flavour naturally evokes an earlier time and the imprecision of the nostalgia is revealing, given Anderson’s meticulous approach to matters of design.   The exterior of the hotel in its prime suggests an elaborate cake, with floors of pink and white icing; and when Gustave, with a group of other prisoners, escapes from jail, they use tools concealed inside cakes made by Zero’s girlfriend Agatha, who works in Mendl’s, the finest patisserie in Zubrowka.  Mendl’s products are emblematic of Wes Anderson’s cinema – elaborate and even mouth-watering to look at but soon indigestible.  The story moves back in time from the 1980s to the 1930s via a short interlude in 1968, when the unlovely colouring of the hotel interiors, browns and yellows, encapsulates its fall from grace (Zubrowka is presumably by now a communist state) – yet it still looks more designed than real.

    It’s no coincidence that Anderson’s best film remains Fantastic Mr Fox, where you didn’t expect believable, complex people but where the finicky detail of the visual world and the richness of the vocal characterisations of the animals created a one-off satisfying blend.  The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom are the two of his movies that have most got on my nerves – in these films, the people are meant to be people but mostly come across as arch confections.   The Grand Budapest Hotel is full of character types:  the pleasure of the film is that the talents of the actors, who are plainly having a ball, make vivid individuals out of these types.   (In contrast, the signature pet death is less real and distressing than usual – it’s a Persian cat, with a cartoon look, that perishes.)  The prime example is Ralph Fiennes as Gustave H.  Fiennes carries about him an ineradicable air of sadness but, as he showed recently when directing himself in The Invisible Woman, this quality can be intriguing if it’s embedded in an extravert character – if it’s what lies beneath an apparently jolly fellow.  The vitality of his acting here no doubt partly reflects Fiennes’s relish in doing something different from usual but his performance is finely controlled, nevertheless.  Anderson has supplied him with some good lines, which Fiennes handles with skilful comic timing – he’s especially good when a run of suave sentences is broken by an expletive:  this happens every so often, but not too often.  What’s more, Fiennes’s lack of star charisma actually makes Gustave H more interesting; the actor conveys both a carefully constructed front and an unreachable personality that’s kept from view.   Gustave is sexually promiscuous and eclectic (provided the partner is blonde their gender doesn’t matter) but the sex is virtually always happening behind closed doors, which seems right.

    It’s a pity that Tilda Swinton as the dowager Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis is the murderee – neurotically anxious under octogenarian make-up, Swinton is very funny for her few minutes on screen.   Edward Norton is repeatedly witty as a police inspector; F Murray Abraham has a depth as the elderly Zero Moustafa that’s mostly lacking elsewhere in the cast – although the newcomer Tony Revolori (seventeen years old), who plays the younger Zero and who partners Ralph Fiennes well, is able to suggest a potential for sadness.  Jude Law, as the author of a book about the hotel, is disappointingly vague – his voiceover is peculiarly toneless.  Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Bob Balaban are an amusing team of lofty concierges, in various swanky hotels across the continent, who help Gustave in his hour of need; and Jason Schwartzman is likeable as one of Gustave’s successors, decades on, in the Grand Budapest.  Saoirse Ronan is charming as Agatha although the unhappy fate of this character is an instance of Anderson’s difficulties in accommodating real death into his scheme of things.  As Madame Céline’s vengeful son, Adrien Brody isn’t as funny, or as threatening, as he needs to be but Willem Dafoe does well as a hired assassin – his elaborately zipped and buttoned coat has surprising mileage as a running joke.   Mathieu Amalric and Léa Seydoux, the other non-native English speakers in this very international setting, are both effective too.   The cast also includes Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel and Tom Wilkinson.  Another week, another Alexandre Desplat score but this one is a relief after The Monuments Men.

    12 March 2014

     

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