Film review

  • Akeelah and the Bee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Doug Atchison (2006)

    Manipulative, dramatically primitive, extremely difficult not to like – too difficult for me, anyway …   It has its place in cinema history too as the film whose big words you spell along to.   The heroine lives in South Los Angeles with her widowed, working mother, her two brothers, her sister and the sister’s little daughter.   Akeelah goes to a middle school whose kids have low educational aspirations and achievements; she’s unhappy and unsettled there – largely because she’s bright and feels she doesn’t fit in.  She’s persuaded by the well-meaning principal to take part in the school’s first spelling bee, which she wins easily.  The shape of the story is a familiar one:  the movie describes the emotional roller-coaster of Akeelah’s progress through the various stages of the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee[1], up to the finals in Washington DC.  Her tutor and mentor is Dr Joshua Larabee, a former head of department at UCLA who’s mysteriously abandoned his high-flying academic career.   The mystery is short-lived:  just as Akeelah’s life was turned upside down by the death of her father so was Larabee’s by the death of his daughter and the consequent break-up of his marriage.  As a teenager, Larabee himself reached the final of the National Spelling Bee.  Racially proud (at one point he quotes the words of Harvard’s first black graduate), Larabee sees in Akeelah a reflection of the adolescent triumph he didn’t quite have and the daughter he’s lost; this testy but humorous figure of authority is also, of course, a father figure  to Akeelah.

    It would be kind to describe this kind of plotting as tidy and the way the writer-director Doug Atchison prepares the ground for the later rounds of the National Spelling Bee as efficient – it’s obvious from the start that, although they come from the same region, the main players in the finals will include Akeelah, an eccentric Mexican-American boy called Javier Mendez, who has a crush on her, and a desperately competitive Chinese-American called Dylan Chiu, runner-up in the national finals in both the last two years.   We know Akeelah’s school is under-resourced but the staff-student ratio is alarming:  there seem to be about two and a half teachers, including the ubiquitous principal.  The disqualification of a horror Mom-driven boy in the regional heat, which reprieves Akeelah, is clumsily unconvincing (it’s one of Akeelah’s supporters who unmasks him as a cheat).  When Larabee is first testing Akeelah’s spelling, the word that trips her up is ‘pulchritude’; that’s the word she has to spell correctly to triumph eventually.  (What’s an easy word to spell is a highly subjective judgment but looking at the winning words over recent years of the real contest suggests that ‘pulchritude’ is a much softer option than usual.)

    Has there been a decline in American television drama that means this kind of heartwarming moral instruction once again has a better chance of being commissioned for cinema than as a TV movie?   However it came to be a feature film, Akeelah works both emotionally and as the dramatisation of a competition:  Atchison is shamelessly confident.   When Akeelah has to spell ‘pulchritude’ at the end each of the letters is spoken – in her mind and on the screen – by a different person who means a lot to her.  This sounds cheesy but it’s actually a neatly surprising way of delivering the climactic moment.    Akeelah is pleasurable too simply on the level of giving information, in an entertaining way, about the culture and history of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which dates back to 1925.  (At Larabee’s prompting, Akeelah learns to spell all the winning words from the first year of the Bee onwards.)  I was interested to see that, unlike competitors on the international Scrabble circuit, Bee contestants are encouraged to learn not just the correct sequence of letters in a word but its meaning and etymological source.

    As Akeelah, Keke Palmer doesn’t do anything especially inventive but she’s assured without being irritating – in fact she’s very likeable.  As Larabee, Laurence Fishburne, who also produced, isn’t entirely comfortable with the awkward academic lines he’s sometimes given to speak but his blend of defensive authority and vulnerability makes the role work.  Because he’s such an imposing presence, Akeelah’s peppy impertinence in her exchanges with Larabee is much more engaging than it would otherwise be.  Angela Bassett, who plays Akeelah’s irritable, harassed mother, is a tight, limited actress but she connects in her scenes with Fishburne (these two go back a long way).   J R Villareal plays Javier, Sean Michael Afable is Dylan and Curtis Armstrong the school principal.

    Would you enjoy Akeelah in the same way if the protagonists were the white middle-class kids that Akeelah’s friends worry about her mixing with?   Obviously not:  there are certain films whose charm makes you root for the main characters to succeed at something you’d normally despise (Working Girl is an example) – in this case, the competitive ambitions of an eleven year old African-American girl and the teenage sons of Chinese and Mexican families (even though both seem affluent enough) have an edge and appeal.   Besides, the script’s homiletic tendencies require Akeelah, Dylan and Javier, in their different ways, all to question what and how much winning means to them – this is how Doug Atchison manages to keep the final competition suspenseful.   You think surely Akeelah can’t simply win; then wonder how, if she doesn’t win, the film can avoid leaving you disappointed; then laugh at yourself for not realising the obvious solution.  It’s a tie.

    10 August 2010

    [1]  According to Wikipedia, ‘An insect bee is featured prominently on the logo of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, despite the word “bee” being completely unrelated to the name of the insect. The origin of the word “bee” as used in “spelling bee” is unclear. “Bee” refers to “a gathering”, where people join together in an activity, and the origin of this sense of “bee” is related to the word “been”’.

  • Winter Sleep

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kış Uykusu

    Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014)

    Based on short stories by Chekhov (I don’t know which ones), this is a long film (196 minutes).  But Winter Sleep isn’t at all difficult to sit through:  the dialogue is abundant and, from the start, the interactions between characters are closely observed and dynamic.  Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who, as usual, co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Ebru, wastes no time in setting up storylines.  Aydin, the middle-aged owner of a hotel in the mountains of Cappadocia, is asked by one of his guests about the horses that feature on the hotel’s website.  (The old Persian name for this region of Anatolia is Katpatuka – ‘the land of beautiful horses’.)  Aydin replies that the hotel doesn’t actually have any horses but his next move is go out and buy (a wild) one; he evidently feels the need not to disappoint his customers.  Aydin owns, as well as the hotel, several properties in the vicinity; as he’s going round the area with his driver Hidayet, he’s startled by a rock that crashes through the car window.  The rock-thrower is a young boy called Ilyas, the son of one of Aydin’s tenant families.  Ilyas’s father, Ismail, has recently been in prison and the family is behind with the rent:  their television and refrigerator have already been confiscated and they’re being threatened with eviction from the property.  (The removal of possessions has been carried out on the landlord’s behalf – an unsurprising arrangement but an early suggestion, nevertheless, of the distance Aydin puts between himself and other people.)  The purchase of the horse is strange and upsetting (see below).  The projectile through the car window is ominous.  The two narrative threads combine to draw the viewer in.

    When the action moves back inside the hotel, Nuri Bilge Ceylan reveals more of Aydin’s background and relationships – with his much younger wife, Nihal, and his sister, Necla, who has broken up with her husband and is living at her brother’s place.  Perhaps Aydin is too many things:  as well as a hotelier and landowner, he’s a former actor, a self-regarding intellectual, and a would-be author.  His career in theatre and film is, not unexpectedly, a clue to Aydin’s mask-wearing and his tendency towards pretence:  he’s writing a history of Turkish theatre but one of the last shots of Winter Sleep suggests he hasn’t yet progressed beyond the title of his magnum opus.  What Aydin does write regularly is a column for a local newspaper.  He takes pride in this – in what he sees as public expressions of his freethinking, although the examples he reads out to his sister suggest these opinion pieces are both pompous and facile (and they irritate Necla).  For Turkish speakers, the ironically symbolic side of Aydin must be more obvious:  his name translates as ‘enlightened’.  The lines the Ceylans have written for him are, however, much less obviously critical of the man than the above implies and Haluk Bilginer is wonderfully alert and varied in the role:  he captures very well Aydin’s mixture of self-involvement, condescension and (it seemed to me) basic decency and charm.

    The long dialogues involving Aydin, Necla (Demet Akbag) and Nihal (Melisa Sozen) are remarkable.  This is partly because they are so long, and include much discussion of differences of philosophical and literary opinion. (This is especially true of the first conversation between Aydin and Necla:  the meaning of what it means to ‘resist evil’, and whether it’s right to do so, which Necla raises here, percolates subsequent exchanges between her and Nihal, and between Nihal and Aydin.)  The exchanges are remarkable also because the movement of Ceylan’s camera subtly and acutely captures the shifts in mood and in the balance of power that occur during the characters’ arguments – these conversational sequences are never static except when stasis is the dramatic point.  You do feel afterwards, though, that a main purpose of the dialogues has been to ‘expose’ Aydin’s evasiveness or the other shortcomings for which his wife and sister take him to task.  (The fact that Necla is never seen again once she’s said her piece rather reinforces this.)

    I felt Aydin was being given a hard time by characters who were themselves hard to like or admire.  My sympathies were with him too because Haluk Bilginer’s performance is much richer than that of either of the main actresses concerned.  This is a particular problem with Melisa Sozen as the wife:  Nihal complains to Aydin that she has ‘withered’ as a result of their marriage but Sozen doesn’t suggest a thwarted intelligence or vivacity – it’s hard to believe that Nihal was ever anything but a beautiful whinger.  She takes it into her head to solve the financial problems of Ismail’s family, by giving them a large amount of money she received from Aydin as a donation to the charity in which she’s active (an involvement that crystallises the tensions between her and her husband).  In the climax to the episode in which Nihal visits the family, Nejat Isler as Ismail is superb in his response to her offer of money but you never feel the desperate impetuousness which caused Nihal to act in this way:  you feel rather that she’s silly, and that Aydin wasn’t entirely wrong when he patronisingly told his wife she wasn’t capable of administering donations to the charity.

    The horse that Aydin acquires is a troubling element of Winter Sleep in more ways than one.  I flinched during trailers of the film at the sight of the animal being captured and dragged from a river, and stumbling up the bank.  (Towards the end, there’s also a shot of a mortally wounded rabbit, shot by Aydin, which looks horribly real.  There are online reports, dating from mid-2014, that Ceylan was sued for cruelty to animals during the filming but no indication of the outcome of the lawsuit[1].)  The longest and bitterest exchange between Aydin and Nihal results in his decision to leave the hotel for a while and spend the remainder of the winter in Istanbul.  Before setting out, he releases the horse back into the wild.  This more or less coincides with the departure from the hotel of the guest who first inquired about horses but Aydin’s act seems to mean something symbolically larger and more pretentious.  The horse that he purchased is the epitome of his affluent, constructed life; the showdown with Nihal has proven the falsity of that life and caused Aydin to accept that it can’t be sustained.  Snowfall begins in earnest at the same time:  this comes to represent a lifetime’s accumulation of mistakes and deceits and the snow hasn’t cleared when the film ends.  Aydin eventually decides against trying to get to Istanbul:  this is meant to signify a loss of nerve on his part but the travel disruption caused by the bad weather – the roads are impassable, the airport is closed and there are hardly any trains – makes his decision seem only rational.  (Indeed, it’s his initial determination to make the journey that seems odd, especially when it prompts surprisingly few queries from his driver.)  In other words, there’s something of a conflict between the metaphorical and the realistic aspects of Aydin’s being snowbound.  There’s no doubt, though, that Ceylan and his cinematographer, Gokhan Tiryaki, are very successful in creating metaphorically resonant landscapes:  the image of Aydin staring up the empty railway track with nothing else in sight but snow has stayed with me.

    Ceylan also includes some very effective smaller details to convey both Aydin’s carelessness and the threat of his world disintegrating:  he forgets what he’s said to more than one of those closest to him; he’s affable with reassuringly temporary hotel guests but they appear to be few and both of those with whom Aydin talks regularly take their leave in the course of the story.  Perhaps Winter Sleep as a whole is less than the sum of its parts (a consequence of adapting multiple short stories to make a cinematic novel?) but there are some great parts – like the scene in which Aydin and Hidayet (Aybert Pekcan) arrive at and sit in the freezing railway station waiting room and, especially, a subsequent evening of drinking at the house of Suavi (Tamar Levent), an elderly man who’s known Aydin many years.  Aydin takes refuge there both from the bad weather and in order to hide his failure to travel to Istanbul.  He and Suavi are joined by the schoolteacher Levent (Nadir Saribacak), a particularly active member of the committee for Nihal’s charity.  The drunken acting by Haluk Bilginer and Tamar Levent is some of the best I’ve seen; the whole episode is a brilliantly textured description both of in vino veritas and of the merely daft things that people say under the influence.   The fine cast also includes Emirhan Doruktutan as the quiet, worrying Ilyas and Serhat Mustafa Kilic as his uncle Hamdi, an anxiously ingratiating imam.

    27 November 2014

    [1]  http://tinyurl.com/pkkjjhe

     

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