Film review

  • Casting JonBenet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kitty Green (2017)

    Before The Assistant (2019), her dramatic feature debut, Kitty Green made three documentaries, culminating in this one.  How you receive Casting JonBenet depends on, inter alia, how much you know in advance about the murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, in Boulder, Colorado on Christmas night 1996.  The case has become an enduring international cause célèbre – enduring largely because the murder officially remains unsolved – and Green, who is Australian, assumes prior knowledge of the essential details.  Either I never knew or I’d forgotten most of them.  I was aware the victim was a child beauty queen:  I carried an image in my head of a doll-like figure in a huge blonde wig and glittery pageant costume.  I had the idea that a bogus abduction and ransom demand were involved, and that no one had been convicted of the killing.  But that’s about all.  I gleaned what else I now know about the case – including theories about who killed the little girl – from Green’s numerous talking heads.

    Casting JonBenet is a nifty idea.  Green conducts auditions for roles in a reconstruction of the events of Christmas 1996.  The people auditioning are also invited to talk about JonBenét’s murder and about themselves.  They’re a motley crew of professional and non-professional actors, variously employed.  Thanks to a combination of menacing aspect and the nature of his part-time work, one of the least forgettable is a self-described ‘sex educator’, who attempts to demonstrate to the camera how to use a flogging whip (comically, and fortunately, without anyone on the receiving end).  What unites these people is that they all live in or around Boulder.  In other words, as well as serving an ulterior motive in relation to the proposed reenactment, they’re a means of illustrating the diverse memories and myths about the murder that have built up in the local community.

    These aspiring cast members assert the guilt or innocence of family members who’ve been suspected of killing JonBenét – her mother Patsy, father John, elder brother Burke – and discuss the possibility that the culprit was an intruder in the family home.  They opine on the authorship of the ludicrously lengthy ransom ‘note’ police found on the premises (it ran to several pages) and rumours about the Ramsey parents’ involvement in a paedophile ring.   Some interviewees have their own barmy theories.  One woman claims a sixth sense about the crime in more ways than one:  she sees it as significant that JonBenét died at the age of six, in 1996, perhaps in the early  hours of December 26th (sic!)  Others relate what happened to their own traumatic experiences of the death of a child, the murder of a sibling, a cancer diagnosis.  (Patsy Ramsey overcame cancer years before, and died of the disease a decade after, her daughter’s murder.)

    For this viewer, eager to know more about the case and fascinated by acting, the documentary’s first half is intriguing – enough to subdue, if not expel, suspicion that this is at heart an exploitation film.  You naturally start assessing the potential actors.  One young boy is vividly, naturally eccentric as he describes to the interviewer (never seen or heard) a day he spent auditioning for a mattress commercial:  I was glad to see him briefly turn up as Burke Ramsey in a later scene.  The layers of pretence involved in the spectacle of would-be JonBenéts – made up and bewigged, in gruesome pageant uniform – are queasy but compelling.  An actor called Dixon White is memorably creepy reading for the role of John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed to the murder years after it was committed.  But, by the time another actor explains his soul-searching before deciding to audition for John Ramsey, the benefit of the doubt has worn very thin.  By the end of Casting JonBenet, you feel that Kitty Green has been doubly exploitative – of a murdered child and her family, and of some of the living people she’s put on camera, albeit they had a choice in the matter denied to the Ramseys.

    As in Robert Greene’s nearly contemporary Kate Plays Christine (2016), the proposed dramatisation of real-life events that is the film’s launch pad gradually recedes from prominence.  A difference lies in the extent of clear complicity between the film-maker and the actor(s) involved.  In Kate Plays Christine you come to see that Kate Lyn Sheil, who is researching the life of the late TV news journalist Christine Chubbuck in preparation for playing her, knows what Greene has in mind.  In Casting JonBenet you increasingly wonder quite how the director sold the project to prospective participants.  Did Kitty Green give them an idea of what, if anything, her narrative of the crime would suggest actually happened?  Were they told in advance that the reconstruction for which they were auditioning would comprise only a minor part, in terms of both screen time and impact, of the eventual film?   What few reconstruction scenes there are amount to incidents peripheral to the murder.   That pleasant middle-aged man who searched his conscience before going for the part of John Ramsey says he decided that, by getting involved, he ‘might actually do some good’.  It’s impossible to see from the end result what he thought that good might be.

    Although this is obscured for a while by one’s interest in finding out key facts of the case and in the auditions, Kitty Green, from an early stage, does little to conceal her sly, stylish priorities.  The women in the running for Patsy Ramsey are all dressed in red, except for one in blue; the latter, also uniquely, wears the pearl necklace that, she explains, was the original’s hallmark accoutrement.  (This woman does resemble several of the others, though, in looking too old for Patsy, who had her fortieth birthday a few days after JonBenét’s death.  John Ramsey, who is still alive, was thirteen years his wife’s senior.)  JonBenét Ramsey was strangled to death after being bashed on the head.  Green reaches her antic point of no return with an insert that follows discussion among her interviewees as to whether nine-year-old Burke would have been physically capable of inflicting on his sister the cranial damage she suffered.  By way of analogy, Green shows a succession of small boys, in goggles and rainwear, who use a torch to try and smash open a watermelon.  The last of these kids, when he succeeds in doing so, instinctively eats a bit of the fruit – a detail whose charm doesn’t come close to reducing the ugliness of the sequence’s conception.  In the finale to Casting JonBenet red-clad Patsys swarm onto a constructed set of the Ramsey home.  The composition is nothing if not visually rhythmical, tonally striking.  As such, and as Kitty Green’s film as a whole turns out to be, it’s also morally bankrupt.

    7 February 2021

  • Malcolm & Marie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sam Levinson (2021)

    It was no surprise but still an apt coincidence that two of 2020’s stronger films mostly confined their characters to the same indoor location.  No surprise because Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and One Night in Miami were originally (and, on screen, still essentially are) stage plays.  One of 2021’s earliest releases, Malcolm & Marie, is a different matter – a movie conceived and developed in the lockdown world.  A two-hander, shot within or just outside a private home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, Sam Levinson’s film ‘was the first Hollywood feature to be entirely written, financed, and produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, with filming taking place in secret in June and July 2020’ (Wikipedia).  Malcolm & Marie may thereby have a place in cinema history but it’s an unsatisfying, in some respects troubling, piece of work.

    Malcolm Elliott (John David Washington) is a film-maker.  Marie Jones (Zendaya) is his girlfriend.  They return to a rented Malibu beach house after the premiere of ‘Imani’, a movie that Malcolm has written and directed.  When they first get in Malcolm’s on a high but not for long.  Marie is hurt that, when he spoke at the premiere and thanked various people, she wasn’t included.  What’s more, the title character in his film is a woman of colour and a self-harming drug addict; Marie, who also fits that description or did until she kicked her habit, accuses Malcolm of basing his protagonist on her.  He refutes the charge at length, listing facets of the character inspired by his other previous girlfriends before claiming that Imani is modelled chiefly on himself.  He then recites angrily, and even more wordily, Marie’s many faults.  She doesn’t say much back.  Once he’s shouted himself out, they reconcile.  Until the next thing that gets Malcolm going.

    That’s how Malcolm & Marie is structured.  Although written directly for the screen, the script has stage-play features.  Actors with lots to say and do in the theatre need a break every now and then.  The couple’s short ceasefires supply that.  (After he and Marie have made up the first time, Malcolm goes for a pee.  Both characters regularly visit the bathroom – virtually the wings, except that the camera keeps them company there.)  What’s more, the writer-director needs to organise his material to spin it out to feature length (106 minutes), cutting what in essence is a continuous set-to into slices – or slabs – of dialogue, which are usually Malcolm monologues.  When he returns from his loo break Marie, who used to be an actress, asks why he didn’t cast her as Imani.  He yells, ‘So that’s what all this is about!’ and goes off on one again.  He may be right about what’s really eating Marie – it emerges she auditioned for the lead in Malcolm’s film – but you feel that Sam Levinson (Barry’s son) has delayed this wodge of discord not as a psychological insight but for his own practical purposes.  Whatever, it makes for an awkward transition.  It’s as if, while Malcolm was out of the room, Marie was working out how to wind him up next.

    That said, Malcolm is easily enraged and Marie isn’t the sole irritant.  She hears an alarming off-screen roar and stream of expletives and asks what’s wrong:  turns out that Malcolm, anxious to look up the first reviews of his film, is having trouble with the beach house Wi-Fi.  When he does manage to access a crit on his phone this triggers another lengthy paroxysm, at the end of which Marie quietly delivers one of Levinson’s few funny lines:  ‘This is how you react to a good review?’   The notice, from the Los Angeles Times, is by a white female critic:  Malcolm holds forth on how she doesn’t understand what he was trying to do in ‘Imani’.  His tirade includes a couple of sharp comments about the inadvertently racist allowances that a liberal white woman critic might make for a Black male director (allowances she’d be unlikely to make for a white male director) – but the speech is worrying as the climax to a persistent element of the script.

    Malcolm has a great deal to say throughout about films and film-makers.  He’s annoyed that his work will be compared with that of Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins but not with the white Hollywood classics he reveres – The Best Years of Our Lives, Citizen Kane.   The complaint is arrogantly preposterous:  if, as it seems, ‘Imani’ is Malcolm’s first feature, it seems early in his career for him to be compared with anyone.  And how many debutant white directors today get compared with William Wyler or Orson Welles?  Sam Levinson seems to want to suggest the particular frustrations of a Black director but the absurdity of Malcolm’s expectations and the detail of the movie references make you wonder if he’s not a mouthpiece for Levinson himself.  I’m not saying that, as a white writer-director, Levinson has no business attempting to speak for a Black one but nor am I convinced that he has honestly tried to do that in Malcolm & Marie – the assumed African-American perspective feels increasingly hollow.  A different black-and-white issue concerns the cinematography (by Marcell Rév).   In her largely negative review in Time, Stephanie Zacharek says, admiringly, that the film ‘looks fantastic, a black-and-white retro-mod reverie as cushiony as an Eames lounge chair’.  That’s just the problem – Levinson’s monochrome is merely stylish, in contrast to the visuals in, say, Andrei Konchalovsky’s recent Dear Comrades!

    Even allowing that the set-up makes it hard for the actor playing Malcolm not to be tiresome, Zendaya fares better than John David Washington, who is effortful from the start.  When he and Marie return from the premiere Malcolm’s exuberance comes across not as natural euphoria but as Washington’s pumped-up, strenuously achieved high spirits.  In comparison, Zendaya draws the camera effortlessly.  Her more nuanced delivery is reinforced by a lissom physicality – although Malcolm’s repeated chatter about the male gaze has the effect of drawing attention to how much of the film Sam Levinson spends observing his actress in underwear.  Like Zendaya, the score, by Labrinth, has a flexibility largely absent from the writing and direction, and from John David Washington’s acting.

    At the height of the quarrel about not casting her as Imani, Marie emerges from the kitchen brandishing a big knife; Malcolm is terrified she’s going to stab herself or him.  She keeps him in suspense – it’s her turn, at last, to dominate the conversation.  Marie then suddenly switches to calmness:  she was only pretending.  ‘Why didn’t you do that in the audition?’ asks Malcolm.  It sounds like another decent punchline except that his question gives the impression Malcolm knew all along that Marie was kidding – which is not the impression he gave for as long as she had the weapon in her hand.  He should have known, though:  I’d guess plenty of viewers will, as I did, assume throughout the scene that Marie is putting on an act.  If this is what you assume, you may well, as I also did, find the knife pretence one of the film’s more convincing episodes.  That says something about Malcolm & Marie.

    7 February 2021