Film review

  • I Confess

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1953)

    Late one night, in the confessional of a Catholic church in Quebec, a priest hears the church caretaker admit to killing a man whose nearby house he was attempting to rob.  Father Michael Logan, devout and conscientious, is bound by the seal of confession not to disclose what he hears from the other side of the grille. Otto Keller, the killer, is unscrupulous in trying to implicate Logan.  The priest, suffering in necessary silence, goes on trial for murder.  Alfred Hitchcock and Montgomery Clift, the star of I Confess, got on badly.  The tensions between their very different creative approaches, in combination with Hitchcock’s Catholicism, make for an uneven but a fascinating drama.

    Hitchcock’s notorious dictum that ‘actors should be treated like cattle’ (made early in his Hollywood career) was no doubt designed to provoke but a tongue-in-cheek remark often reflects something of the speaker’s underlying view, and this one surely did.  James Mason, who got on well enough with Hitchcock to make three films with him (two more than Montgomery Clift did), felt that he regarded actors as ‘animated props’.  In a 1967 interview with Bryan Forbes at the National Film Theatre (as it then was), Hitchcock recalled the Method actor who told him that ‘We’re taught using improvisation.  We are given an idea and then we are turned loose to develop in any way we want to’.  Hitchcock’s rejoinder was ‘That’s not acting – that’s writing’.  Although that exchange doesn’t refer specifically to Clift and I Confess, Hitchcock’s response to Forbes’s next question does:

    ‘I was doing a film with Montgomery Clift.  He turned up with the scene completely rewritten.  I said to him, “Has it occurred to you that there is another actress in the scene?”  I wouldn’t let him do it.’

    Clift, as well as being the first high-profile Method actor to play a Hitchcock lead, already had form when it came to rewriting dialogue.  It was a habit he kept up throughout his career:  he’d done it on The Search (1948) and would do it for his small but memorable role in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and both films benefited.  Hitchcock’s words imply that Clift was interested in changing only his own lines in I Confess, regardless of Anne Baxter, who played the main female role, though that hadn’t been the case with the dialogue he originated for The Search.  Even so, I Confess wasn’t the best film in which to try to improve the script.  Clift understandably wanted the piece to be a character study but the material, despite the moral dilemma that drives the plot, is a rough-hewn crime melodrama.

    The source material is a 1902 French stage play, Nos deux consciences, by Paul Anthelme (which Hitchcock had seen performed in the 1930s) but George Tabori’s screenplay sets the action in the present day and I Confess, shot in black-and-white by Robert Burks, has a more decidedly noir visual atmosphere than most Hitchcocks.  Otto Keller (O E Hasse) and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas), who is Father Logan’s housekeeper, are German immigrant refugees.  Logan fought in World War II before becoming a priest.  In his pre-War life he had a romance with Ruth (Anne Baxter), whom he’d known since childhood.  After he joined a Canadian infantry regiment, they wrote to each other until Michael stopped returning Ruth’s letters; she married Pierre Grandfort (Roger Dann), a member of the Quebec legislature for whom she’d been working as a secretary.  Ruth and Michael met up as soon as he returned to Quebec but, throughout the twenty-four hours they spent together then, she didn’t tell him she was married.  They were walking near a country estate when a storm broke out and forced them to shelter overnight in a summerhouse in the grounds of the estate.  They were found there next morning by Villette (Ovila Légaré), the owner of the place and the man who, years later, is killed by Otto Keller.  Police investigations, led by Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), reveal that Villette had been blackmailing Ruth, threatening to reveal to her husband what Villette saw and (wrongly) assumes went on in the summerhouse.  After that night, Ruth didn’t see Logan again ‘until the day Michael was ordained’; even then, it seems they had no contact with each other.  That changed, as Larrue discovers, after Ruth, in desperation, phoned Logan to tell him she was being blackmailed, and they met up on the night of Villette’s murder.

    The script repeatedly fails to clarify motive.  Keller, as well as being church caretaker, is Villette’s gardener.  When he kills his employer, Keller is dressed as a priest – whether purely for purposes of disguise or because he’s already intending to frame Logan remains unclear.  If Keller really meant only to steal from Villette and works for him anyway, it’s surprising there weren’t easier ways of carrying out the theft than turning up at his house at dead of night in clerical garb.  Keller is Catholic enough to feel compelled to beg Logan to hear his confession to murder immediately, even though, in the meantime, he has planted a bloodstained cassock among the priest’s belongings.  Why does Michael stop replying to Ruth’s letters while he’s on active service?  And why, since she didn’t tell him she was married, do they break off contact after the summerhouse episode?

    Montgomery Clift could hardly be blamed for trying to probe Father Logan more than the script does and although he hit a brick wall in Hitchcock, he still gives a fine performance:  in Clift’s hands – and face – the pressure of Logan’s tormenting secret is gripping.  What’s more, a dual conflict on Hitchcock’s part makes I Confess genuinely distinctive in his oeuvre.  The first conflict is between his conception of the actor’s function and his appreciation of acting talent.  Clift’s Methodology vexed Hitchcock but you get the sense that he was intrigued by the resulting portrait – not least because he respected the priestly calling and was disinclined to diminish the gravity of Logan’s plight.  There’s also a conflict, though, between Hitchcock’s religious background and his film-making instincts.  Much of the direction of I Confess is, like its protagonist, soberly controlled.  This works well in the trial scenes, where the defendant’s reticence in the witness box is dramatically eloquent.  Thought-provoking, too:  would a priest (as the whole set-up of the story requires) really violate the sacramental seal if he disclosed that, and when, he heard a named individual’s confession – without revealing details of what was confessed?

    In the end, though, Hitchcock the cinematic entertainer can’t keep his impulses in check quite as well as Logan does.  The film might be more powerful if it ended in the courtroom albeit the climax to the trial is pretty bizarre.  In answer to ‘How say you – is Michael William Logan guilty or not guilty of murder?’ the foreman of the jury first explains their verdict:

    ‘While we attach grave suspicion to the accused, we cannot find sufficient evidence to prove that he actually wielded the weapon that killed Monsieur Villette.  Therefore, our verdict is not guilty.’

    Discharging Logan, the judge chips in to record his ‘personal disagreement’ with the verdict.   These damning remarks pave the way for Logan to be mobbed by an angry crowd as he leaves the courthouse; for the distraught Alma Keller, who knows the truth, loudly to protest that the priest is innocent; for Otto Keller, fearing what she’ll say next, to shoot his wife dead; for Larrue suddenly to cotton on; and for a melodramatic chase sequence through Quebec’s historic Château Frontenac hotel, which culminates in a stand-off between Keller and police marksmen.  En route to the (otherwise deserted) ballroom where this takes place, Keller shoots a hotel kitchen employee.  Cornered in the ballroom, he accuses Logan, who tries to reason with him, of breaking the seal of confession and shoots at him too.  As he does so, Keller takes a bullet from a marksman.  He asks for forgiveness as he dies in Logan’s arms.  It’s as if the siren call of Dmitri Tiomkin’s garish, hyper score finally got the better of Hitchcock.  The concluding action comes so thick and fast there’s barely time to register the post-trial shootings as fatal consequences of Logan’s noble silence.

    I Confess also devotes too much time to flashbacks of Logan’s romance with Ruth and their tortured, furtive meetings in the immediate aftermath of the murder.  Anne Baxter’s acting is limited and predictable compared with Clift’s though far preferable to the crude overplaying of the murderer and his victim (especially Ovila Légaré – just as well he’s not on screen for long).  Brian Aherne (as the Crown Prosecutor) and Roger Dann are easier to take.  Karl Malden isn’t at his best but Larrue, to be fair, isn’t much of a role.  Although there’s little coverage of Logan’s relationship with the two other priests with whom he lives, Father Millars (Charles André) and Father Benoît (Gilles Pelletier), the latter’s bicycle is a better running gag than might be expected.  The bike is kept in the house, to Millars’s exasperation; it’s an effective moment when it noisily topples over as the domestic atmosphere reaches a peak of tension through Logan’s predicament.  Another good detail, late on, is the woman eating an apple in the crowd outside the courtroom.  The hint of someone enjoying her day out nicely counterpoints the hyperactive hotel chase to come.

    20 April 2022

  • CODA

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sian Heder (2021)

    I didn’t catch CODA during its brief release in British cinemas last summer.  Keen to see Sian Heder’s film but not keen enough to sign up to Apple TV just to do so, I was grateful that BFI set up a few screenings this month in the wake of CODA ‘s Oscars success, and am all the more grateful now.  The Academy’s choice as Best Picture of 2021 is certainly the most enjoyable American picture of the year.

    Adapted by writer-director Heder from Eric Lartigau’s 2014 film La famille Bélier, CODA works to a tried and tested formula.  A young person with a natural performing talent, in circumstances that militate against the talent’s fulfilment, eventually wins through and realises their dream – what might be called the Billy Elliot syndrome.  The latter film was involving and individual thanks to a combination of specific context, a terrific lead performance and an exhilarating demonstration of the protagonist’s dancing gifts and graft.   Heder’s film, whose central character loves to sing, emulates Stephen Daldry’s essentially by the same means.  The pricking sensation behind your eyes. well before CODA reaches its moving climax, tells you that the formula, in the right hands, continues to thrive.

    Of course, there’s a widespread view that CODA is much more than a likeable and entertaining movie because it draws attention to issues around deafness – specifically the experience of families with a single non-deaf member who is the others’ bridge to the hearing world.  The main characters are the Rossis – father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), son Leo (Daniel Durant) and daughter Ruby (Emilia Jones), Leo’s younger sister and the title character.  Frank and Leo are fishermen in the waters off Gloucester, Massachusetts (next door to Manchester-by-the-Sea:  Sian Heder consulted, among others, Kenneth Lonergan, who made the marvellous film named for the place, about aspects of local fishing practice).  Ruby works with her father and brother on their boat early each morning before going to high school.  It’s assumed by all concerned that, once she leaves school, she’ll work with her family full-time, helping Jackie to sell the fish as well as Frank and Leo to catch it.

    At school, Ruby is derided by other kids because her family is deaf; to make matters worse, she sometimes smells of fish.  Her only friend is Gertie (Amy Forsyth).  Ruby’s not much of a scholar but she loves singing – which she’s always doing on the boat – and joins the school choir run by Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez).  ‘Mr V’, as he’s known, is a drama queen and a hard taskmaster but he knows talent when he hears it and Ruby, after a false start, begins to impress him.  She and Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), the choir’s star male voice, are chosen to duet at the forthcoming autumn concert.  Mr V also encourages Ruby to apply, as Miles is doing, for a place at Berklee College of Music in Boston.  She’s attracted to Miles from the start and the feeling is soon mutual but Ruby’s interest in singing baffles her parents, especially her mother, and the idea of college is beyond the pale.  Frank and Jackie can’t afford either the fees or to let Ruby go.

    The film’s name neatly articulates the acronym ‘Child of Deaf Adults’ with the musical connotations of ‘coda’.  Although its formulaic nature means that you usually know what’s coming, the performances and the distinctive family set-up consistently lift CODA, and there are striking, sometimes funny details.  The concert duet is the Marvin Gaye-Tammy Terrell hit ‘You’re All I Need to Get By’ whose lyrics refer not only to Ruby’s growing attachment to Miles but also her sense of responsibility to the family (‘I’ll sacrifice for you/Dedicate my life for you’).  When Miles comes to Ruby’s house to practice, they’re interrupted by the sounds of vigorous love-making in the next room, which Ruby enters to find her parents hard at it.  Sitcom stuff and it’s unbelievable that the mortified Ruby wouldn’t get Miles out of the house instantly but the episode is redeemed somewhat in the awkward four-way conversation that concludes it:  Frank and Jackie assume that the purpose of Miles’s visit can only be to have sex with their daughter.  In an earlier exchange Jackie tells Ruby off for listening to music on her headphones at the dinner table, though she has no problem with Leo sitting there swiping through Tinder options.  When Ruby objects to a double standard Jackie explains that ‘Tinder is something we can all do as a family’.  These bits are comical enough but they also reflect a main theme of the story – her parents’ blinkered view of who Ruby can be.

    Ruby later asks if her mother wanted her to be born deaf and Jackie admits she did:  she feared they wouldn’t be able to connect emotionally if Ruby wasn’t deaf, as Jackie failed to connect with her own (hearing) mother.  It’s an important revelation but what isn’t revealed in the conversation is significant too.  If Jackie had answered that she didn’t want her to be deaf, would Ruby then have asked if her mother saw her unborn child’s predetermined role in life as go-between?  Ruby must in any case feel this is what she’s actually expected to be.  Her genial, loving parents’ assumptions are a vexing element that CODA badly needs.  Her brother knows this is how the family works, and it frustrates him as much as his sister.  When the Berklee College project looks hopeless, it’s Leo – in one of the film’s strongest moments – who desperately signs to Ruby:

    ‘You can’t stay here.  They’ll keep looking to you for everything.  … Let me do this!  I got this!  I’m the older brother and I get treated like a baby.  …   You’re so afraid that we’ll look stupid.  Let [hearing people] figure out how to deal with deaf people!   We’re not helpless! … Our family was fine before you were born.  Go!’

    The school concert eventually takes place on (believe it or not!) the evening before the Berklee entrance auditions.  By now, Ruby has given up the idea of attending those, though Mr V keeps urging her to change her mind.  Sian Heder handles the concert performance well.  Ruby has some solo highlights before ‘You’re All I Need to Get By’ and we already know from their repeated rehearsals that she and Miles sing it well.  Once the song is well underway, Heder therefore shows how Ruby’s family experiences it, by cutting off the sound.  For Strictly Come Dancing fans, at least, this device lacks the impact of originality but it’s still effective – especially when Frank is transfixed by a woman in the audience who is moved to tears.  When the family returns home after the concert he asks Ruby to sing the song to him again.  As she does so, he places his hand on her throat to feel the vibration of her vocal cords.

    The following morning, CODA launches into feelgood overdrive.  Her parents decide that of course Ruby must go for the Berklee scholarship.  The family dashes over to Boston, arriving in the nick of time.  Ruby bumps into Miles, who tells her that he’s flunked his audition.  (That was bound to happen:  he’s a nice boy but his family, the polar opposite of Ruby’s, is materially comfortable and short on love.)  Miles also mentions that Mr V has just left the building.  When Ruby goes in for her audition, she doesn’t have sheet music for the accompanying pianist and is told she’ll have to sing a cappella.  But wait … Mr V, alerted by Miles, has returned on cue and, since he’s a Berklee alumnus, the selection panel lets him take over at the piano.  Frank, Jackie and Leo are told they’re not allowed to sit in on the audition but they manage to get themselves into the auditorium anyway, and no one seems to notice them up in the gods supporting Ruby.  She sings Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’, beautifully.  We hardly need the subsequent scene when the scholarship letter arrives and the whole family goes crazy, but we get it nevertheless.

    Compared with the often sensitively played domestic scenes, and those between Ruby and Miles, the Rossis’ struggle to make ends is a bit heavy-handed throughout (like the miners’ strike bits in Billy Elliot).  The local authorities, by imposing new rules and additional fees, drive some of the fishermen out of business.  Frank decides to sell fish independently but it’s a struggle to get the venture going.  One day, when Ruby is off swimming with Miles, the coast guard boards the Rossis’ boat after Frank and Leo fail to respond to ship horns and radio calls.  They’re fined and have their licence suspended.  At a subsequent hearing, the licence is renewed only on condition that a hearing person is on board at all times.  It’s this which decides Ruby to give up the idea of college but, by the time her scholarship is confirmed, the family’s business has somehow taken off in a big way – enough for them to employ hearing crew and ensure an all-round happy ending.

    Production notes for CODA that featured in the BFI handout for their screenings major on how Sian Heder and her team discharged ‘the responsibility they bore to accurately depict Deaf culture and American Sign Language’, recognising that ‘Many people born Deaf or hard of hearing view their Deafness as a difference, not a disability’ and that ‘being Deaf is a cultural identity’.  (The use of an initial capital letter to underline such identity is now verging on ridiculous:  I caught the tail end of this week’s BBC Panorama programme, ‘Obesity: Who Cares if I’m Bigger?’; the day is clearly coming when fat people will have to be Fat.)  Heder’s film’s admirable, earnest mission may well be a main reason why CODA fared so well at the Oscars.  (It also helped that The Power of the Dog, the long-time Best Picture front-runner, was increasingly, and rightly, seen as a strenuously arty drag.)  But it’s the above-mentioned formula, in combination with Heder and her cast’s creation of characters both engaging and exasperating, which animates CODA – not its good intentions.  Besides, advertising those intentions is bound to rebound on a director making a mainstream picture that needs light and shade, jokes and highlights.  According to Wikipedia, the ‘depiction of the hearing child interpreting for her parents even in settings where professional interpreters would be required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, such as a court hearing and medical appointments, received widespread criticism as being misrepresentative’.

    Emilia Jones, as well as singing very pleasingly and variously, builds a highly convincing portrait of Ruby:  she gets across the sense of someone who, without being overly subdued, is clearly constrained by the role she has always been assigned.  What the deaf actors convey is often extraordinary; this is especially true of Troy Kotsur, whose performance has been deservedly laurelled, and Daniel Durant, whose work as Leo has been relatively overlooked.  The physical acting of these two is vividly eloquent.  Kotsur doesn’t just have an expressive face and hands; in Frank’s more emotional moments, feeling is dynamically transmitted from his shoulders down to his fingertips.  He and Durant, when their characters are really worked up, emit guttural sounds that are small yet intense.  As Ruby is about to leave for college, her father utters a single word, ‘Go’ – repeating the plea that Leo signed in his earlier, differently powerful speech to Ruby.  (A nice coincidence that the same imperative is spoken in the closing moments of Belfast, the cinema year’s other authentic crowd-pleaser.)  CODA also demonstrates that voicelessness has its advantages.  At one point of the high-school concert, Jackie and Frank Rossi (whose unabashed lewdness and profanity would likely make him an annoying cliche if he spoke) get a little bored with what they can’t hear on stage.  Without spoiling anyone else’s enjoyment of the show, their hands discuss what to have for dinner.

    14 April 2022

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