Film review

  • Rage

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sally Potter (2009)

    I’m glad it was after seeing the film that I read the interview with Sally Potter in the BFI programme note.  Rage is a highly unusual viewing experience – fourteen characters, variously involved in a New York fashion show, are filmed by the unseen maker of the film, Michelangelo, on his mobile phone over a period of seven days.  Until the closing moments, the entire picture comprises these interviews (and includes little camera movement); they are interspersed with the bits of text that Michelangelo composes to introduce each day’s footage.  (We know from what we hear that he is young – we might assume this is some kind of student project.)  The images (photographed by Steven Fierberg) are beautifully defined.  The design is excellent – the changing colour of the backgrounds behind the talking heads (and their upper bodies), the costumes (by Marina Draghici), the make-up.  (According to the credits, several of the actors had their own individual make-up artist.)  Overall, the style of performance is highly effective – it’s definitely theatrical but the cast are strong enough to distil and express the essence of the people they’re playing – even though a fair number of the characters are written according to type (the flamboyant, up-himself designer, the anxiously affable PR man, the drily excoriating critic et al).  But the inherent improbability of the set-up is an increasing problem and the film – which at 98 minutes is much too long – gets less and less interesting.   The fashion show is overwhelmed by a sequence of horrific offscreen events, on and around the catwalk.  From an early stage, we hear the sounds of protesters outside the building where the show is taking place and some of the dramatis personae are critical of the inhuman, exploitative ethos of the world of high fashion.  As they reflect on the grim happenings, several turn increasingly penitent and politically correct.  It’s evident from the BFI note that, in doing so, they become mouthpieces of the writer-director.

    From the point at which the first death occurs (on day two), some of Michelangelo’s interviewees start getting jumpy about his filming them.   Understandably so – although if  Potter didn’t introduce this element you might be more likely to suspend disbelief and accept continuation of the filming as a comment on the characters’ need to be taken notice of, or to confide in someone, or both.  Injecting a drop of realism into the situation, Potter draws attention to its unreality.  By the time it emerges that Michelangelo is posting the interviews online and the combined forces of the show’s publicity people and the detective called in to investigate the deaths of two models aren’t happy about that, it’s ludicrous that Michelangelo is being allowed to carry on.   There’s another fundamental problem with the script:  once the fatalities begin, it seems clear where Rage is headed.  Potter does nothing from this point on to surprise; nor do the horrors multiply in a way that might have turned the proceedings into black comedy.  Potter puts the lid on them until the necessary top-of-the-bill carnage on the seventh day.

    Watching Michelangelo’s composition of his introductory text is amusing (the title starts as ‘All the Rage’ and we hear his mind working in the pause before the first two words are deleted).  And Potter has given her cast plenty of witty lines, although quite a few are too obviously sarcastic to be satisfying.   Those who make a living in and on the periphery of the international fashion industry seem a rather easy target – so much so that Potter doesn’t need to elaborate on why people are protesting about the show.  The audience can supply plenty of reasons:  the distortion of beauty, the deification of image, the exploitation of cheap labour – all for the sake of profit.  But reason not the need:  Potter puts plenty of words in her characters’ mouths to explain where she’s coming from.  I don’t have a problem with her inveighing against the mores of the creatures of the world of high fashion.   I do think it’s a bit much when she says that ‘the issues could apply to people working in any high-pressure industry’ – without acknowledging that not many  high-pressure industries would be capable of supplying stock characters as easily entertaining as these.

    The satire is rarely thoughtful or imaginative but that makes you grateful for the rarities.  Early on in the film, Miss Edith Roth (is the name a nod to Edith Head and Ann Roth?), whose firm makes the clothes on display in the show and who’s lived all her life in this world, tartly reminds us that what’s now known as the ‘fashion industry’ used to be called the ‘garment trade’ (a more honest description in her view).  When things turn darker and we’re told that the celebrity designer Merlin, whose latest work is being launched at the show, is presenting ‘shrouds’, I took and liked this as a comment on his ability to turn anything to his self-promoting advantage (I may have misunderstood:  it may be meant metaphorically rather than literally).  But even though the politics of Rage are objectionably crude, Potter gets something much finer from her cast.  Not all the performances are equally successful but every one is intelligent and skilful.

    Simon Abkarian makes Merlin’s egotism enjoyably theatrical.   Patrick J Adams is a callow blue-eyed-blond-haired adman, whose ideas are as obvious as his career advancement during the turbulent week is rapid.  Bob Balaban gets demoted – the wages of relative sensitivity.  Riz Ahmed is both likeable and disturbing as a young pizza delivery man eager for an even better job and whose motor bike plays a key role in the story.  It was great seeing Adriana Barraza (marvellous in Babel) again:   her emotional transparency allows Barraza to rise above the condescension implicit in her role as a Latina seamstress.  Although the casting is a bit obvious, Steve Buscemi is as witty as ever as a photographer whose professional heartlessness doesn’t quite conceal his professional desperation.  It’s clear that the Swedish actor Jakob Cedergren has a lot more to him than the weak part of the edgy PR man allows him to show; Eddie Izzard’s role as a financier is likewise too thin for him to be able to do much with.  As Lettuce Leaf, a model, Lily Cole looks extraordinary (her face is being used to sell the film) and she acts well too.   In her first appearances, Lettuce Leaf, with her doll-like face and hair, seems artificially constructed – so it’s particularly effective when Cole (she has the quality of a sexualised version of one of those children you see on Victorian scraps) starts showing emotion – when she’s crying, with smudged mascara, she begins to suggest a human being trapped in a body which can only be used for its commercial possibilities.

    As Mona Carvell, the acerbic fashion journalist, Judi Dench is an absorbing camera subject although it’s a bit distracting that she sounds to be in two minds whether to bother trying an American accent:  the critic’s eventual access of humanistic grief is such a dreary idea that it needs a Judi Dench to redeem it (which she just about does).   As Minx, a transsexual model, Jude Law has one of the weaker roles – Potter loads the character with an explanation of the kind of personal backstory which belongs in a more conventional film. Law does well to be more convincing when he speaks in Minx’s real (American) voice than when he’s using her professionally faked Eastern European one – but the performance doesn’t quite work:  there are effective moments but you keep catching looks at the camera which you can see are the actor’s.   John Leguizamo has an underwritten role as the financier’s security man but David Oyelowo does very well as the detective, whose enthusiasm for Shakespeare (and propensity for quoting him) is one of the few surprises in Potter’s writing of the characters.  Last but best of all is Dianne Wiest as Miss Roth.  From the moment she appears, her squinched smiliness is accompanied by minute but unmissable intimations of terrible unease.   When Miss Roth tells us she really wanted to be a lawyer or an academic but couldn’t desert her garment trader parents, Sally Potter is laying the ground for her finally joining the protest against her own company.  But she doesn’t prepare us for how brilliantly Dianne Wiest conveys Miss Roth’s guilty delight at this act of rebellion.

    14 October 2009

  • The Fisher King

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terry Gilliam (1991)

    Jack Lucas is a big-name shock-jock on New York radio.  One day he goes too far:  he derides a phone-in caller as a sexual no-hoper and the young man concerned walks into a Manhattan bar and shoots several people dead.  Three years later, Jack, his career a distant memory and suicidally depressed, goes off one evening from the apartment he shares with his girlfriend Anne Napolitano (she runs a video store) to kill himself.  He looks so rough that he’s mistaken for a homeless person and is attacked by a gang.  Jack is rescued by a sword-wielding man called Parry, who is homeless and evidently crazy:  he’s on a mission to find the Holy Grail and invites Jack to help him.  Jack learns, though not from Parry himself, that Parry’s wife was one of the victims and he is one of the survivors of the Manhattan shootings – news that transforms Jack’s feelings of responsibility for his new acquaintance.  Parry had been a teacher; when his wife died, he became catatonic and stayed that way for several years before waking with his obsession with the Grail and the legend of the Fisher King.  (In Arthurian legend, the Fisher King was charged by God to guard the Grail but, through his overweening pride, failed to do his duty and, in punishment, was physically and spiritually afflicted.)

    Jack tries to help Parry find the Grail and to redeem himself.  He also engineers a meeting between Parry and Lydia Sinclair, a pathologically shy young woman (she works for a Manhattan publishing house) whom Parry loves at first sight.  Parry, Lydia, Jack and Anne go out for a jolly dinner in a Chinese restaurant; later that night, Parry is attacked and badly injured by the same thugs from whom he rescued Jack.  He re-enters a catatonic state, from which he’s eventually woken by Jack’s getting hold of the Grail, which turns out to be a trophy kept in an Upper East Side mansion.   Parry emerges from the mental hospital to which he’s been sent.  He and Lydia are reunited.  Anne and Jack, who break up at one stage, also end up together again.

    This is a fine example of a director and a star actor, both highly idiosyncratic, finding a project that’s ideally suited to their talents.  The Fisher King is a very appealing film – poetic, in the sense that Terry Gilliam makes you feel you follow its inner direction even when you (or I anyway) would be put hard put to explain what exactly is going on.  This is true at least until the picture starts to lose momentum in its last quarter.  Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay is a terrifically lively farrago, which hits problems only when he starts having to tie things up.  The ending is pretty weak – even though it’s salvaged, emotionally anyway, because all ends well for characters whom you’re rooting for.  LaGravenese and Gilliam use the legendary framework flexibly.  For example, Jack is sometimes Percival to Parry’s Fisher King, sometimes it’s vice versa.  (Percival is the good, simple-minded helper of the afflicted Fisher King.)  Parry is repeatedly frightened by visions of the fiery, death-dealing ‘Red Knight’, a figure who crops up several times in the Arthurian canon  (In one instance, Perceval slays then himself becomes the Red Knight.)

    The film’s splendid tagline is ‘A Modern Day Tale About the Search for Love, Sanity, Ethel Merman and the Holy Grail’ but the story of the Fisher King – which at one hushed point of the film is beautifully told by Robin Williams as Parry – seems designed to give a mythical dimension to a message which is, ultimately, more wetly conventional:  something to do with human redemption and helping people when they need you.  There is, however, plenty more diverting philosophy than that along the way, especially the long-suffering Anne’s theological explanation to the often insufferable Jack:

    ‘I don’t believe that God made man in his image.  ‘Cause most of the shit that happens comes from man.  No, I think man was made in the Devil’s image.  And women were created out of God.  ‘Cause after all, women can have babies, which is kind of like creating.  And which also accounts for the fact that women are so attracted to men … ’cause let’s face it … the Devil is a hell of a lot more interesting!  Believe me, I’ve slept with some saints in my day, I know what I’m talking about.  So the whole point in life is for men and women to get married … so that God and the Devil can get together and work it out.  Not that we have to get married.  God forbid.’

    Gilliam goes in for strong-arming at the start of the film.  The city looks darkly malignant and playing ‘The Power’ on the soundtrack during the sequences illustrating Jack Lucas’s heartlessly irresponsible celebrity is too obvious.  Yet the exaggerations are oppressively effective:  the synergy of the pounding accompaniment, Jack’s spiel and the infernal outlook really does get on your nerves.  The apocalyptic ominousness of New York in The Fisher King is, to me, more powerful than in the Batman pictures that I’ve seen – I think because Gilliam’s people are, in spite of their various extremities of character and behaviour, essentially believable and their environment therefore counts for more.   The film is also a paean to New York:  in the nocturnal scenes in Central Park; in the dream-like waltz sequence, during which Parry sets eyes on Lydia, in Grand Central Station; in the mental ward chorus of ‘How About You?’; and in the illumination of the cityscape at the end of the film.  The movement of the story from the hectic hell of the beginning to this conclusion is striking:  although it’s forced and anti-climactic, it is a fairytale ending, at least to the extent that the main characters go through trial and tribulation to reach it.  Gilliam is well served in this progress by George Fenton’s score and Roger Pratt’s cinematography.  (The BFI’s print, though, didn’t seem to be the greatest – a tenebrous look is one thing but the images were sometimes so dark that it was hard to make them out.  I can’t believe that was a problem with the original.)

    Robin Williams is ideally cast as Parry.   At the height of his success, Williams seemed increasingly drawn to nobly suffering roles – in Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting – yet he was always more or less reduced in that kind of part (less reduced in Dead Poets Society, where the teacher he plays is at least a star turn in the classroom, than in the other two).  Parry, the homeless, psychically chaotic Grail-seeker, is a noble sufferer too but a one-of-a-kind noble sufferer.  The role allows Williams to give full expression, in beguiling combination, to his subversiveness and unpredictability and his sweet-natured quality.  He’s very funny describing the mystical experience of having a shit (perhaps the defining moment of Robin Williams’s screen career).  When he does little dance routines in the street, when his face suddenly looms up close to Jack’s, Williams is drawing both on the ways we expect vagrants to behave (and which make us feel uncomfortable) and on his own individuality as a performer.  This works well in reminding you that every one of the street people has a personal history that brought them where they are now.  (It works so well that you’re almost prepared to overlook Gilliam’s use of the marginalised – the winos, the mental ward patients – as a corps.)

    Jeff Bridges has to work hard to become more interesting and likeable than the selfish bastard Jack Lucas has been presented as at the start but a regular supply of good, funny lines and Bridges’ likeability from earlier roles get him through successfully.   Amanda Plummer is genuinely eccentric and affecting as Lydia and Mercedes Ruehl as Anne is amazing:  vocally and physically, she is slightly stylised, in a way that makes her characterisation all the wittier and – a piece of acting magic – all the more real.  (That’s essential since Anne, although sometimes desperate, is by some way the most grounded of the principals.)  Michael Jeter is flamboyant and touching as a diminutive gay singer with a huge voice:  his spectacular delivery of ‘Everything’s Comin’ Up Roses’ seems not far off Ethel Merman’s own volume.   Tom Waits brings his wry presence to a cameo as a disabled war veteran based at Grand Central.

    The Fisher King is uneven.  One of the most enjoyable scenes of all (and the competition is strong) is the Chinese meal – which perfectly blends situation comedy with illustration of how relationships are developing within the quartet of diners.  One of the crudest bits is Parry’s flashback to the shootings in the bar, particularly the explicit revelation that the look of the Red Knight in his imagination is connected with the spray of blood in which his wife died.  One thing that remained unclear to me was whether (and, if so, when) Parry realises who Jack used to be.  Reading the plot synopsis at the start of this note brings home to me how gruesome The Fisher King sounds on paper but how good it actually is.  The actors and Terry Gilliam’s phantasmagoric flair carry the day.

    15 August 2009

     

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