Film review

  • The Killing Fields

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roland Joffé (1984)

    Roland Joffé’s account of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime is a prodigious feat of logistics.  It’s wonderfully photographed and edited, by Chris Menges and Jim Clark respectively.  Mike Oldfield’s score avoids grandiosity, much of the time anyway.   The Killing Fields comes up short because its characters – the non-Cambodians, that is – aren’t integrated with the grimly authentic context that Joffé creates.

    Bruce Robinson’s screenplay is based on a work of non-fiction, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, by the New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose relationship with the title character of his book (first published in 1980) is the heart of the film.  Schanberg (Sam Waterston) first arrives in Phnom Penh in 1973, during the civil war between the Cambodian national army and the communist Khmer Rouge.  Dith Pran (Haing S Ngor), himself a journalist, is also Schanberg’s interpreter.  He, Schanberg and photographer Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) are placed under arrest, though only temporarily, when Rockoff takes pictures of the killing of Khmer Rouge operatives.  The action soon moves forward to 1975, the time of Pol Pot’s takeover.  Schanberg secures evacuation for Pran and his family; his wife and their children leave Cambodia but Pran insists on staying in Phnom Penh to assist his American friend.  When Schanberg and Rockoff are again arrested and threatened with execution, it’s Pran who successfully negotiates for their lives to be spared.  The trio takes refuge, along with other journalists and medics (played by Athol Fugard, Patrick Malahide, Bill Paterson and Julian Sands), in the French embassy.  The Khmer Rouge orders all Cambodian citizens there to be handed over.  After the failure of desperately ingenious attempts to forge a British passport for Pran, he’s turned over to the new regime.

    Back in America, Schanberg, with no idea of his interpreter’s fate, starts a campaign to locate him but this gains little momentum.  One of millions coerced into ‘Year Zero’ forced labour, Pran shows continuing resource and resistance in the prison conditions in which he lives.  As the ‘disappearance’ of intellectuals gathers force, he feigns simple-mindedness.  He tries to escape; while on the run, he stumbles into one of the regime’s ‘killing fields’.  After being recaptured, he’s assigned to a new prison compound and works for a man called Phat (Monirak Sisawath), now disillusioned with the Khmer Rouge and who increasingly entrusts his young son to Pran’s care.  After intervening to try to prevent hardline regime officers from killing his colleagues, Phat himself is shot dead.  In the ensuing confusion, Pran escapes the compound with Phat’s son and others.  A long trek through the jungle begins, which Pran alone survives.  In New York, Schanberg eventually receives news that Pran is alive and a refugee in a Red Cross camp on the border with Thailand.  Schanberg flies out to the camp, where he and Pran are reunited.

    The impressive kinetic passages of The Killing Fields bring to mind those of The Deer Hunter (1978) and the two are worth comparing in another way.  Michael Cimino’s film is far from flawless but the hour-long wedding episode with which it begins ensures that, by the time the young men played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage arrive in Vietnam, the viewer knows them as individuals and understands them to embody a particular set of American values.  In purely realistic terms, it’s perhaps questionable that these three friends in a Pennsylvania steel town are part of the same army unit in Vietnam:  the audience accepts this because we accept the trio as their culture’s representatives in the story.  Besides, Cimino’s fictional characters are more believable than the real people interpreted by Sam Waterston and John Malkovich in The Killing Fields, able as both actors are.  The Sydney Schanberg of the film comes across as a hollow invention to place at the centre of a conscience drama.  Receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war in Cambodia, he criticises American foreign policy and says that Dith Pran should be sharing the Pulitzer.  Afterwards, Schanberg is confronted by Rockoff, who accuses him of using Pran to win the award and of not now doing enough to try and find him.  This exchange and Schanberg’s subsequent, soul-searching conversation with his sister (Joanna Merlin) are worse than phony and mechanical:  their prominence in the narrative is offensive.  Next to the Khmer Rouge atrocities and their effects on the Cambodian people, Schanberg’s moral anguish is of minor importance.

    I hadn’t seen The Killing Fields since soon after its original release; it was showing at BFI in their regular ‘Member Picks’ slot and the handout for the screening began with a quote from the member who made this pick:  ‘An important piece of history, which should be kept alive’.   No arguing with the sentiment and Roland Joffé’s picture has lost none of its quasi-documentary power but is biographical drama the best way of keeping history alive?  The form has a tendency to limit and distort historical perspective – this film does, at any rate.  Even Dith Pran’s gripping story is told by means of well-used tropes of other movie genres – the suspense around the fake passport, the repeatedly perilous jungle journey, against-all-odds survival – though it gains greatly in authenticity because Pran is incarnated by Haing S Ngor.  As well as proving himself a fine actor, Ngor was an actual survivor of the Cambodian prison camps (it’s a savage irony that in 1996 he was shot dead outside his Los Angeles home).  The reality he carries with him on screen is a big part of what makes the closing scene of The Killing Fields emotionally potent:  the final embrace between Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran is moving.  It would be even more moving without the plaintive accompaniment of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, a cliché even by 1984.

    19 January 2022

  • The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Will Sharpe (2021)

    Despite the current queue of higher-profile films to see, I felt I had to catch The Electrical Life of Louis Wain:  over the years, I’ve sent and received a fair few greeting cards featuring the title character’s mad-eyed, anthropomorphised cats.  Louis Wain (1860-1939) was, from a young age, an oddball.  In later life, he suffered serious mental illness and spent his last fifteen years in hospitals.  Will Sharpe’s biopic is nothing if not whimsical, as if to suggest it’s on the same wavelength as its curious subject.  The longer the film goes on, though, the more tonally wrong it feels.  Sharpe does little to explore Wain’s psychological condition, which may have been schizophrenia, although ‘the diagnosis is in dispute’ (Wikipedia); whatever it was, there seems little doubt that an accumulation of deaths of people close to him triggered Wain’s succession of nervous breakdowns.  Although Sharpe doesn’t omit these deaths, he spends too much time treating (Benedict Cumberbatch) as an engaging eccentric, dropping in dollops of mawkishness along the way.  The result verges on tasteless.

    Sharpe, who wrote the screenplay with Simon Stephenson, takes his strange title from Louis Wain’s persisting belief in electricity as ‘A mysterious and elemental force that occasionally he could feel shimmering in the ether and that explained all of life’s most profound and alarming secrets’.  Those are the words of the film’s narrator, voiced, unmistakably, by Olivia Colman but with no other identity; she isn’t, for example, someone claiming to have known Wain or who is telling his story to a particular listener or kind of listener.  The narration has occasional moments of brutal candour – there’s a reference to Victorian England’s ‘bizarre social prejudices and the fact that everything stank of shit’ – but Colman’s voice is, for the most part, jolly and amused.  This is surprising, in view of what befalls Wain, yet it chimes with Sharpe’s visual and musical choices.  Philip Kemp’s Sight & Sound (Winter 2021-22) review, presumably quoting Sharpe, notes that the film was shot in 4:3 ratio ‘for its “storybook, fairy-tale quality”’.  The art that Wain continued to produce during his last years, although still cat-centric, was ‘marked by bright colours, flowers, and intricate and abstract patterns’ (Wikipedia again).  You might need to know that in advance to make sense of the kaleidoscopic effects and the often prettified look that Sharpe and his cinematographer, Erik Wilson, contrive.  The score, by Arthur Sharpe (the director’s brother), is of a piece with the queasy quaintness.

    For purposes of historical accuracy, Benedict Cumberbatch is given a cleft lip and beaky nose.  The lip is understandable – you accept it as contributing to the younger Louis’s self-conscious shyness – but why the nose?  The real Louis Wain wasn’t Cyrano de Bergerac and it’s not as if his face is famous enough for many viewers to know how closely or otherwise the actor playing him resembles the original.  Although the results are patchy, Cumberbatch makes a valiant attempt to blend quirkiness with emotional depth, and he has some strong support.  Claire Foy is Emily Richardson, Wain’s sisters’ governess and subsequently his wife.  Their time together was tragically short:  Emily developed breast cancer and died three years after they married.  You don’t get any sense of the true age difference between Louis and Emily, who was ten years his senior (which placed the couple on the receiving end of one of the era’s ‘bizarre social prejudices’).  Foy is convincing, even so; there’s relatively little strain in the balance of serious and humorous in her performance.  At first, Andrea Riseborough seems to be overdoing humourless, scolding Caroline, the eldest of Wain’s four younger sisters; it’s a narrow role but Riseborough’s unrelieved neurotic intensity somehow validates it.  No surprise that there’s good work from Toby Jones as Sir William Ingram, editor of the Illustrated London News (which kept Wain going as an artist of subjects other than cats in the early stages of his career) or, in a smaller role, from Adeel Akhtar.  Phoebe Nicholls has a melancholy grace as Louis’s mother but there’s also some ropy acting – from Asif Chaudhry, Sharon Rooney and Nick (Bad Seeds) Cave, an inexplicable choice to play H G Wells.

    Wells was both an admirer and a supporter of Louis Wain.  Sharpe includes a bit from a radio broadcast in which Wells praises Wain’s creation of a ‘whole cat world’; Wells also helps draw attention to the artist’s plight when his desperate sisters have him committed to a pauper ward at a mental hospital in Tooting.  The resulting public appeal led to an intervention by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and Wain was transferred to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, and latterly to the more agreeable surroundings of Napsbury Hospital in Hertfordshire.   According to Wells, the popularity of Louis Wain’s feline art transformed the domestic status of cats in Britain from creatures tolerated because of their practical usefulness as mousers, to pets in their own right.  Will Sharpe commendably uses real rather than CGI cats throughout but it’s disappointing that – except for Peter, the stray kitten who set the cat pictures ball rolling after Louis and Emily adopted him – they function in the film largely as décor.

    19 January 2022

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