Film review

  • Jude

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Winterbottom (1996)

    BBC4’s Thomas Hardy season got off to a fine start with A Haunted Man, a 1978 drama-documentary focusing on the breakdown of Hardy’s first marriage to Emma Gifford and the remorseful love poems that he wrote after her death.  Cyril Luckham and Billie Whitelaw appeared as Hardy and Emma in short dramatic reconstructions; their readings of poems and diary extracts were exceptional – really wonderful – and Caroline Blakiston supplied a well-judged narrative voiceover.  The next evening’s line-up featured Jude, preceded by one of BBC4’s short ‘X Remembers … Y’ pieces.  I’d not previously seen Michael Winterbottom’s version of Jude the Obscure and there’s no denying that ‘Christopher Eccleston Remembers … Jude’ coloured my reactions to the film.  I’ll try not to let that dominate what I write next though I’m sure Eccleston’s view of Hardy’s novel and its protagonist got in the way of his performance.

    A typical edition of Jude the Obscure runs to several hundred pages; this screen adaptation, scripted by Hossein Amini, is barely more than two hours long.  Thomas Vinterberg’s similarly compact remake of Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) is a good film but I recall watching it grateful that I could relate Vinterberg’s streamlined version to the larger context of the novel, which I know fairly well.  In contrast, I’ve never returned to Jude the Obscure since struggling through it as a teenager.  Even with a limited recollection of the book, though, Winterbottom’s film feels exceedingly abbreviated – feels like ‘Scenes from Jude the Obscure’.  The film omits a lot, and not only peripheral elements.  For example, Hardy’s Jude Fawley is a religious believer in his youth while his cousin, Sue Bridehead, with whom he falls in love (as she does with him), is agnostic – she has no time for the Christian church or its institutions.  By the closing stages of the story, these positions, thanks to a series of traumatic events in the pair’s lives, are effectively reversed but Winterbottom hardly bothers to show Jude moving away from Christianity.  The film ends with what may be his and Sue’s parting company for the last time but which isn’t the final parting that Jude’s death in the novel puts beyond doubt.

    When Jude Fawley is still a young boy (James Daley), the village schoolteacher, Mr Phillotson (Liam Cunningham), points out on the far horizon the spires of a town called Christminster:  if you want to be anything in life, Phillotson tells Jude, this place of learning is where you need to get to.  It’s where Phillotson, about to leave the village, is now heading.  (In ‘Remembering …’ Christopher Eccleston said that ‘we all know’ Christminster is Cambridge:  most people have taken it to be Oxford.)  The young man Jude (Eccleston) has taught himself Latin and Greek, and is determined to be a scholar.  His plans are derailed by a romance with a local girl, Arabella Donn (Rachel Griffiths); when she tells him she’s pregnant, Jude feels obliged to marry her and gets work as a stonemason.  Arabella isn’t pregnant and, a few months later, leaves her husband.  Jude heads for Christminster, at first earning his living there as a stonemason but hoping to gain admission to the university.  He also meets up with Sue Bridehead (Kate Winslet) and renews acquaintance with Phillotson, now a primary school teacher in Christminster.  At Jude’s urging, Phillotson takes on Sue as an assistant and falls for her, despite the large age difference between them.  Although she loves Jude, Sue, when she learns about Arabella, reluctantly accepts Phillotson’s proposal and they marry.  It’s poignantly apt that, at the wedding service, Jude gives Sue away.

    The hero’s frustrated scholarship, crucial to the novel, is central to Jude too but the compressed narrative makes it hard for Winterbottom to convey Jude’s love of learning as well as his academic ambition.  Every so often, Eccleston’s Jude, at his books, reads a bit of Latin or Greek aloud but you’re not sure why:  in retrospect, these bits seem like rehearsal for one of the film’s big sequences, when Jude recites the Nicene Creed in a busy pub.  In his cups, he tells his fellow stone workers that he knows the creed in Latin; a Christminster undergraduate, also drunk, overhears and goads Jude into proving it.  As the derisive student, David Tennant, in his first feature film role, is on screen for just a few seconds, long enough for you to see why he got more work.  The scene goes wrong, though.  As soon as he leaps onto a table and starts the recitation, Eccleston drops Jude’s inebriation in favour of righteous anger.  There are different social groups in the pub – the posh undergraduates, various working men.  When Jude abruptly reverts to English to jeer at the company – they’ve no idea, he announces, whether or not he’s got the Latin right – no one replies, even to tell him to shut up.  Once he eventually does so, the pub’s other customers just resume drinking.  In one sense, you can understand their lack of reaction – everyone must be relieved when Jude’s performance is over.  But is vague anti-climax what Winterbottom intended?

    Knowledge of the novel will also ensure a better understanding than a viewer gets from the film alone of Jude and Sue’s determination, after her marriage to Phillotson fails, to live together but not wed.  It seems they’re not legally prevented from marrying, even though Jude, unlike Hardy’s novel, blurs the terms on which Phillotson agrees to let Sue go off with Jude.  (It is clear in the film that Jude and Arabella divorce.)  There’s a brief scene in which Sue volubly disparages the Church and marriage but it’s hardly enough to explain why, later in the story, she and Jude don’t at least pretend to be husband and wife.  By this stage, they have three young children to care for but face repeated difficulties because they’re upfront about their unconventional partnership.  Jude, working on a masonry assignment, is fired by a regretful church official (Paul Copley) because parishioners have complained that the mason and his woman are living in sin.  (Jude seems astonished to get the push – a reaction that’s rather astonishing in itself.)  Homeless and nearly penniless, the family then gets a roof over their heads but only for one night – this again because Jude and Sue aren’t Mr and Mrs.

    The eldest of the three children is Juey (Ross Colvin Turnbull), the son of Jude and Arabella, who wasn’t expecting when she tricked Jude into marriage but was by the time she deserted him and emigrated to Australia.  She made a bigamous marriage there.  Arabella returns to England temporarily to ask for a divorce; soon afterwards, Juey arrives to live with his biological father.  Once Sue overcomes her aversion to having sex, she and Jude have two children of their own.  When Juey asks why they can’t stay more than one night in their new lodgings, Sue rashly replies that it’s because ‘there are too many of us’.  This greatly troubles the boy and Jude’s reassurances are in vain; next morning, Jude and Sue come back to the lodgings, buoyant because Jude has found employment, to discover a note from Juey.  All three children are dead, Juey having killed his half-siblings and hanged himself ‘Becos we were to menny’.   Winterbottom’s staging of this terrible discovery – a tragedy that triggers Sue’s guilt-ridden embrace of religion, separation from Jude and eventual return to Phillotson – is, like the pub scene, strangely indecisive.  When Jude picks up each of the dead children, you could understand if he performed the action either with great tenderness or, in an attempt to shut out the horror of what’s happened, in a seemingly businesslike way.  Christopher Eccleston suggests neither of those things.

    This half-heartedness isn’t at all typical, however, of Eccleston’s playing.  In his curtain-raiser slot, he railed against the British class system that thwarted the likes of Jude Fawley and which, according to Eccleston, continues to prevent working-class actors like him from realising their full potential – and is getting worse.  (Eccleston said that if he were starting out today he simply couldn’t be an actor.)  A strong but undifferentiated resentment dominates his portrait of Jude.  Whether things go wrong in his romantic life or he receives a rejection letter from the university at Christminster advising him to stick to his trade rather than try to use his brain, Eccleston is oppressed in the same way, passionately but fuzzily pissed off.  His ‘Remembering’ monologue sometimes verged on it’s-grim-up-North spoof (bringing to mind Jim Broadbent’s writer in the Victoria Wood sketch, a man who ‘bleed[s] for the North’ but lives in Chiswick).  Eccleston explained his fellow Lancastrian Winterbottom’s insistence on filming the rural scenes not in Dorset but in Yorkshire and Lancashire – because the film’s ‘psychological landscape … it’s hard and it’s tough and it’s rugged’.  One in the eye for softie southerner Thomas Hardy, though perhaps some consolation to him that, as Eccleston went on to acknowledge, they also did location filming in New Zealand.

    It must be said that DP Eduardo Serra’s cinematography is expressive whatever the landscape and Eccleston reasonably praised Adrian Johnston’s fluid music for the film.  What chiefly saves Jude, though, are the main performances other than the lead’s.  Kate Winslet, in an early cinema role, is amazingly vivid and sparky – so that Sue’s increasing melancholy, unlike Jude’s, has real impact.  (Eccleston’s best moments come when he lets down his political guard – lets himself react naturally to Winslet.)  The narrative condensation means that Rachel Griffiths’ Arabella keeps turning up like a bad penny in a nearly comical way but Griffiths is nuanced and makes it easier to sympathise with the character than you might expect.  Liam Cunningham is surprising casting:  he’s probably too young and good-looking to play a man whose twenty-plus-years younger wife finds him physically repellent.  (He’s fourteen years older than Kate Winslet and only three years older than Christopher Eccleston.)  Yet Cunningham’s face conveys Phillotson’s different disappointments – with how Christminster and how marriage turn out for him – in ways that you miss in the film’s Jude.  June Whitfield is also good, in the smaller but important role of Jude’s loving but alertly critical aunt, whose warnings to her nephew that the Fawleys ‘aren’t cut out for marriage’ prove powerfully ironic.

    31 October 2024

  • A Raisin in the Sun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Petrie (1961)

    The Talk of the Town (1942) is a funny movie but it’s a sobering thought that I reckoned George Stevens’ comedy much better than any of the new films I saw alongside it at the recent London Film Festival.  They-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to feelings persisted in this first post-Festival visit to BFI, for A Raisin in the Sun.  Interesting to watch it so soon after Malcolm Washington’s version of The Piano Lesson – to compare and contrast these screen versions, more than sixty years apart, of successful stage plays by African-American writers.  I much prefer the older film.

    Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson are both centrally concerned with the competing claims of cultural tradition and ambition – and the seismic debates these generate – within a Black American family.  Wilson’s piano once belonged to the man who also owned the Charles family’s ancestors, as slaves in Mississippi.  More recent ancestors stole the piano, which now stands in the Black family’s Pittsburgh home.  One of the younger Charleses wants to sell the piano with a view to buying land once owned by the slavemaster.  At the start of A Raisin in the Sun, the Younger family, who live in a poky apartment on Chicago’s South Side, await the arrival of a life insurance cheque.  The insurance policy has paid out $10,000 – an unheard of amount for the hard-up Youngers – on the death of the deceased paterfamilias, whose widow, Lena (Claudia McNeil), now means to buy the house that she and her late husband always dreamed of getting together but never did.  Lena’s son, Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier), is anxious to quit his job as a white man’s chauffeur, and to invest in a liquor business with a couple of pals.  His sister, Beneatha (Diana Sands), a medical student, is eager for funds enough to finance the remainder of her studies.  Walter’s wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee), favours Lena’s plan to move to a bigger place in a better neighbourhood:  Ruth’s priority is the future of her and Walter’s young son, Travis (Stephen Perry), and of the second child she’s now carrying.

    The films of A Raisin in the Sun and The Piano Lessons have casts dominated by actors reprising the roles they’d played in a recent Broadway production.  Hansberry’s play opened on Broadway in March 1959; Daniel Petrie’s film, for which Hansberry did the screenplay, reached American cinemas in May 1961; all the main adult parts were played by the actors from the original Broadway cast.  The Piano Lesson was revived on Broadway in 2022; Malcolm Washington’s cast includes all the main male actors from the revival but not the main actress.  There are two particularly conspicuous differences between these screen adaptations.  Inevitably for a Hollywood production of the time, A Raisin in the Sun had a white director.  The second difference is the extent to which the films open up the play’s action into locations other than the main one – which, in both cases, is the family home.

    I’m guessing Lorraine Hansberry’s play takes place on a single set throughout and the film of A Raisin in the Sun largely stays put – unlike that of The Piano Lesson, with its repeated excursions from a Pittsburgh home of the 1930s into visualised flashbacks in and around a Mississippi plantation house, two decades earlier.  When Daniel Petrie does move outside the Youngers’ two-room apartment – to a local bar, where Walter Lee drinks with two friends and, later, his mother finds him drowning his sorrows because she’s gone ahead with buying property – it feels quite natural.  The only instance where a change of location draws attention to itself comes in the family’s visit to the house Lena’s going to buy (which looks palatial not just to the Youngers but to most pairs of eyes on the British side of the Atlantic).  It isn’t the case that these differing attitudes to stage drama – how much can it be trusted to stand up as screen drama? – reflect nothing more than the film-making priorities of different eras.  The opening-up dilemma was, if anything, more of an issue for Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s, when screen versions of high-profile Broadway hits seemed to happen almost routinely – and the choices that film-makers made, varied widely.  It helped that in this case Lorraine Hansberry was able – to the credit of producers Philip Rose and David Susskind – to adapt her play for the screen rather than obliged to hand it over for treatment.

    Petrie’s largely unchanging scenery doesn’t result in a film that’s static or stagy:  he and his cast exploit the confines of the family’s apartment very effectively.  Sidney Poitier is the most important contributor to this.  His terrific physical energy is all the more expressive in a cramped space.  His line readings are similarly dynamic but dexterous, too:  Walter Lee is remarkably volatile – sometimes funny, often furious.  A Raisin in the Sun is further proof of what an exciting actor Poitier was at this stage of his career – before he became, in the later 1960s, an irreproachable figure in mainstream Hollywood drama and, as such, an emblem of the industry’s ‘acceptance’ of African-American talent.  Perhaps the crossover film in Poitier’s career was Ralph Nelson’s Lilies of the Field (1963), for which he became the first Black winner of a Best Actor Oscar.  I’ve still not seen Nelson’s film but hope to rectify that soon:  it’s good news that BFI will be running a Sidney Poitier season in early 2025.

    I was less keen on Claudia McNeil but am not surprised her performance as the matriarch Lena was widely praised.  A large, imposing presence, McNeil brings to mind Junoesque Sharon D Clarke in this autumn’s BBC dramatisation of Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (in which Lennie James, as Clarke’s errant husband, is brilliant, by the way).  Both Lena Younger and Clarke’s character have crosses to bear and the actresses bear them emphatically:  they strike deliberate, tragic attitudes; their voices resound with pain.  Ruby Dee developed similar tendencies, at least as an older performer, but as worn-down Ruth she hasn’t many opportunities to grandstand, and gives a very good performance.  Even better is Diana Sands, who’s vocally supple and shows lots of wit.  As a doctor-to-be, Beneatha embodies the Youngers’ potential social advancement but she’s also given to fads – that, at least, is how the other members of the family see Beneatha’s new-found passion for all things African, though it’s much more than a fad.  Diana Sands blends her character’s wilfulness and genuine strength of feeling persuasively.

    The remaining men’s parts in A Raisin in the Sun are relatively minor but well played.  Eight-year-old Stephen Perry is excellent as Travis.  Louis Gossett Jr is George Murchison, Beneatha’s decent, humourless suitor; and Ivan Dixon is Joseph Asagai, the assured and charismatic Nigerian, a fellow medical student, to whom she’s attracted.  Joel Fluellen and Roy Glenn are, respectively, Bobo and Willie Harris, Walter’s drinking buddies and partners in the liquor store venture.  John Fiedler is Mark Lindner, the sole white character.  Fiedler, more than anyone else, gives the impression of repeating a performance he’d given plenty of times before on stage.  He is at something of a disadvantage, though.  Lindner appears just twice; the actor playing him hasn’t the scope for getting into the performance rhythm that others in the cast enjoy.

    Lindner is a significant character, nevertheless.  He represents the Clybourne Park Improvement Association – in other words the exclusively white residents of the nice area the Youngers plan to move to.  He comes to the South Side apartment to offer these prospective Black newcomers a bribe to pull out of the purchase.  The financial value of the piano in The Piano Lesson seemed astonishing (enough to buy a piece of land) and $10,000 evidently went a long way in late 1950s Chicago.  Lena spends only $3,500 as a down payment on the Clybourne Park property; she gives the remainder to Walter, instructing him to save $3,000 for Beneatha’s student fees and invest the remainder as he chooses.  He entrusts the whole $6,500 to Willie Harris, who promptly leaves town, taking the money with him.  Walter, in shame and desperation, is on the point of accepting Fiedler’s offer, despite his family’s urgings not to sacrifice their self-respect in this way, but changes his mind at the last minute.  The film ends with the Youngers preparing to move to Clybourne Park, aware of the problems they face but hopeful their determination and family solidarity will see them through.  (They leave the South Side apartment in the company of Laurence Rosenthal’s rather strenuously uplifting score.)

    Although Lindner’s proposition to abandon the move is presented as a racist bolt from the blue, this doesn’t quite make sense.  As soon as Lena mentions Clybourne Park, her son and daughter-in-law are doubtful about moving to an all-white neighbourhood.  The film then puts those doubts on the back burner until Lindner’s diabolus ex machina arrives – by which point Walter Lee and Ruth appear to have forgotten their warnings to Lena.  In nearly every other respect, though, A Raisin in the Sun is an impressive dramatic construction, full of fine dialogue.  Lorraine Hansberry was, as well as a civil rights activist, a committed Pan-Africanist – and assimilation-versus-Africanism is a major theme here.  While you’re left in no doubt of the importance of the debate to Hansberry, she’s too good a writer to use her play as a podium.  The arguments are mediated through the character of Beneatha and with a deal of humour.  Beneatha rejects George Murchison because of what she sees as his inability to understand what his African-American identity really means.  But when Joseph Asagai makes a dual proposal – of marriage, and that she return to Nigeria with him – Beneatha is in two minds.  One of the high points of the film comes when, draped in a Nigerian robe that Joseph gives her, she dances to African music.  Walter Lee comes in after an evening’s drinking.  He competes with his sister in moving and drumming his fingers to the beat of the music, and wins.  He probably won’t even remember this in the morning.

    A Raisin in the Sun takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem, ‘Harlem’.  (The phrase is part of a question – ‘Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?’ – that follows the famous question of the poem’s opening line, ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’)  Lorraine Hansberry died in January 1965 at the age of thirty-four, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963.  The following year, as part of a speech to winners of a creative writing competition, Hansberry said:

    ‘Though it is a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic — to be young, gifted and black.’

    That last phrase became, through Nina Simone’s song, at least as famous as the phrases in ‘Harlem’.  Lorraine Hansberry’s own creative writing, and the quality of the younger actors giving expression to it, make A Raisin in the Sun, devised as a theatre piece, a thrilling experience in the cinema.

    26 October 2024

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