Film review

  • Drive My Car

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Doraibu mai kā

    Ryusuke Hamaguchi (2021)

    A long film based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car has two distinct parts.  The boundary between them is marked by the appearance of ‘opening’ titles, about forty minutes into Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour drama, which he wrote with Takamasa Oe.  Up to that dividing point, the action is set in Tokyo and mostly comprises scenes from a marriage.  Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a theatre actor and director; his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), is a television screenwriter.  After Oto’s sudden death, the action moves forward two years.  The rest of the film is devoted to events occurring and relationships developing during Yūsuke’s two-month residency, casting and directing a play at a festival in Hiroshima.  The play is the same one in which Yūsuke was playing the title role at the time his wife died:  Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

    Hamaguchi’s part one is unhurried yet incisive, and often surprising.  We learn that the Kafukus, now in their forties, lost their only child when she died in infancy.  We learn, too, that Oto likes to think up her screen scenarios during sex:  she tells Yūsuke her ideas while they’re in bed; next morning, he recites them back to her and she starts writing things down.  Yūsuke habitually prepares for roles by repeatedly listening to play texts on tape, while driving his red Saab.  After a minor accident in the car, he undergoes medical tests and is diagnosed with glaucoma in his left eye; despite the condition and to his relief, he’s allowed to continue driving, at least for the time being.  In an early scene, we see him performing on stage in Waiting for Godot; afterwards, Oto comes to his dressing room to introduce Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a younger actor who has appeared in her TV pieces.  Sometime later, when bad weather stymies his travel plans, Yūsuke returns home unexpectedly to find Oto having sex with a young man:  his face is unseen but he could be Takatsuki.  Oto is too engrossed to notice her husband standing a few feet away and Yūsuke silently exits.  The BBFC certificate for Drive My Car refers to ‘strong sex’ and the adjective is doubly apt:  both Yūsuke’s and Oto’s bed scenes, and the brief sequence of her astride the other lover, are frankly vigorous and make a lasting impression.  Nothing more is said about Oto’s adultery until she tells her husband one morning there’s something she wants to discuss when he comes home later in the day.  Yūsuke decides what that something will be and delays his return:  like him, the viewer is braced for a marital showdown.  We also share his shock when he gets back to find Oto dead, from what is later confirmed as a brain haemorrhage.

    In Hiroshima, Yūsuke is immediately unsettled when the company manager, Yuhara (Satoko Abe), and Yoon-su (Dae-young Jin), a Korean dramaturge, advise that Yūsuke can’t drive himself between the arts centre and his hotel – not because of his glaucoma but according to a standard contractual condition, introduced after a previous artist-in-residence was involved in a car crash.  Yūsuke objects, even though Yuhara assures him he will have an excellent chauffeur.   He compromises by letting this prospective driver, Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura), take him out in the Saab; impressed by her quiet competence, he agrees, with some reluctance, to her driving him throughout his stay.  There’s a second unpleasant surprise when Takatsuki turns up at the Uncle Vanya casting session, and reads for Astrov.  The young man is amazed and disconcerted when Yūsuke casts him instead as Vanya.  By this point, Drive My Car’s jolting unexpectedness is beginning to wane.  It’s entirely reasonable that Hamaguchi begins linking elements of the story but those links – the protagonist obliged to share his car and cede the driving seat, his wife’s suspected lover reappearing, Yūsuke learning that twenty-three-year old Misaki is the same age his daughter would now have been – are formally neat rather than thought-provoking.

    Yūsuke’s conversations with Takatsuki and Misaki are more substantial.  The former is keen to talk with Yūsuke on a personal as well as a professional level.  When Yūsuke says he tolerated his wife having affairs with other men because he feared he might otherwise lose her entirely, Takatsuki expresses admiration for Yūsuke’s forbearance and, in the next breath, for Oto’s writing:  he mentions the ending to one of her stories, which Yūsuke has never heard before.  The modest, unprepossessing Misaki gradually opens up to Yūsuke about her wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing; he eventually asks her to take him to the place where she came from.  They go on a long, exhausting journey to a snow-covered mountain landscape, where Misaki points out the spot where her family home used to be.  She reveals that she left her physically and emotionally abusive mother to die in the mudslide that engulfed the house.  Misaki feels persisting guilt for this; Yūsuke admits to the same for deliberately returning home late on the day that Oto died.  Although these dialogues are never less than absorbing, the ironies and correspondences they bring to light make for a limited kind of screen drama.

    I don’t mean to suggest that a film is successful in direct proportion to how often it takes its audience by surprise; but because Drive My Car’s first part is such an unusual combination of slow and startling, reducing the surprises makes the slowness more salient.  There are still unexpected twists.  It’s not until he accepts an invitation to dinner at the dramaturge’s home that Yūsuke discovers the genial Yoon-su is married to Yoon-a (Yoo-Rim Park), the mute actress Yūsuke has cast as Sonya in Vanya.   It emerges that Takatsuki’s career has gone into reverse in the two years since Oto’s death, in light of accusations of sexual relations with a minor.  Yūsuke is concerned by his lead actor’s volatile behaviour:  when they go to a bar together, he’s shocked to see Takatsuki assault a man for taking pictures of him on his phone.  This episode predicts but still doesn’t prepare Yūsuke (or the viewer) for a subsequent assault, which results in Takatsuki’s arrest for homicide.  The consequence of that, however, is more predictable:  Yūsuke is persuaded to step in at the eleventh hour and play Vanya again.

    The early references to Uncle Vanya, when Yūsuke is doing the play in Tokyo, aren’t enough to suggest resonances between people or events in the film and in Chekhov.  (When, for example, Yūsuke finds Oto with Takatsuki, it doesn’t, at the time, remind us of Vanya catching sight of Yelena embracing Astrov.)  This changes in the middle part of Drive My Car, courtesy of the amount of screen time devoted to preparations for the Hiroshima production.  The auditions are an especially lengthy and engrossing episode. Yūsuke doesn’t want a monolingual production and casts actors who speak Japanese, Mandarin and Tagalog, as well as Yoon-a, who performs in Korean Sign Language.  (When the production is eventually staged for an audience, supertitles are projected on a screen above the set.)  It’s fascinating to listen to the different language rhythms; to watch the Vanya cast members interacting with each other despite speaking in different tongues or, in Yoon-a’s case, no tongue at all; to hear Yūsuke insist that his actors ‘Just read the text’ and witness cast members’ unease with the absence of interpretive advice from their director.  At least, it’s fascinating if, like me, you’re interested in theatrical processes and techniques.  If you’re not, Drive My Car is liable to be a long haul.

    The film becomes increasingly dependent for its emotional power on that of Uncle Vanya.  While Hamaguchi’s characters aren’t neatly paired with Chekhov counterparts, there are points of connection between them, and in what is said and heard.  Although Yūsuke is incomparably more reticent than Vanya, they share feelings of being betrayed by and in mourning for life and love.  When Yūsuke was preparing to play Vanya in Tokyo, Oto recorded for him the whole play minus his own lines, so that he could learn them while driving.  In Hiroshima, he replays, from the recording made by his late, unfaithful wife, Sonya’s distraught question to Yelena, ‘You will tell me the whole truth, won’t you?’ and Yelena’s reply, ‘Yes, of course – I think that the truth, whatever it is, is not as frightening as uncertainty’. Plain, hard-working Misaki calls to mind Sonya but in the long exchange on the site of her family home, it’s Yūsuke who virtually quotes the speech with which Sonya closes the play, as he tells Misaki that they must, in spite of their deep sorrow, go on living.  When Hamaguchi follows this with the eventual performance of Uncle Vanya at the festival theatre, he majors on the finale, as Sonya embraces and consoles Vanya with her vision of a life, ‘beyond the grave’, that is ‘bright, beautiful and fine’.  This is beautifully performed by Hidetoshi Nishijima and Yoo-Rim Park; the scene has real distinctiveness, thanks to the signing of Sonya’s words.  But we watch it registering their meaning for Yūsuke rather than Vanya.  In the end, it’s hard not to suspect Hamaguchi of piggybacking on Chekhov.

    The brief postscript is puzzling.  Misaki shops for groceries at a supermarket.  She comes out to the car park and gets into a red car.  There’s no sign of Yūsuke but a dog is waiting inside the car.  (This may or may not be the same dog that Misaki made friends with when she and Yūsuke dined at the home of Yoon-su and Yoon-a.)  This closing sequence, though exasperatingly cryptic, somehow revives the intriguing quality of the first forty minutes.  There’s much to admire in Drive My Car.  Hamaguchi and his DP Hidetoshi Shinomiya render the frequent exterior shots of Yūsuke’s car on the move down endless roads – in isolation or in traffic – both comforting and desolating (especially at nighttime).  In other words, they evoke something of Yūsuke’s feelings inside the car:  it’s a safe space in which he feels acute despair.  In a generally strong cast, Hidetoshi Nishijima is outstanding as the subtly melancholy Yūsuke.  As Misaki, Tōko Miura is consistently eloquent, particularly as a mime.  Masaki Okada’s Takatsuki, from his very first appearance, has a brittle, avid quality that’s as hard to ignore as it’s grating.  Yet Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s demanding, often impressive film fails to justify its 179-minute running time.  Since that makes it longer than the four acts of Uncle Vanya (plus interval), you can’t help feeling short-changed.

    9 January 2022

  • Don’t Look Up

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Adam McKay (2021)

    Rarely can a movie race against time have turned into such a slog.  At Michigan State University, astronomy research student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, just inside the orbit of Jupiter and heading Earthwards.  Her supervisor, Professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), calculates that the comet will impact Earth in six months and eleven days, wiping out all life on our planet.  NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordinating Officer, Dr Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), confirms the calculations.  When he, Mindy and Kate relay their dreadful findings to the White House, President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her son Jason (Jonah Hill), who is also her Chief of Staff, are unimpressed:  for them, political chicanery is always a more urgent priority.  When the scientists, in desperation, then leak their findings to the media and appear on a TV talk show, the hosts, Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), treat the cataclysmic news light-heartedly:  they’re more concerned with the latest showbiz stories.  Don’t Look Up goes on for 138 minutes.  Well before halfway, I was getting impatient for Comet Dibiasky to get its apocalyptic job done and ‘extinct’ (Kate’s verb) human life – or Adam McKay’s idea of it anyway.

    Labelling the film science fiction is misleading in that this satirical-polemical comedy is an allegory of science fact.  There’s a mismatch between the instant destruction threatened by the comet and the timeframe of the climate crisis that is Don’t Look Up‘s real concern but this is designed, of course, to stress the gravity of global warming.  But McKay, who also wrote the screenplay (from a story devised with the journalist David Sirota), is too preoccupied with deriding people and the attitudes they represent to keep his eye on the ball.  It says a lot about Don’t Look Up that, in the course of the half-year from the comet’s discovery until doomsday, there’s only one reminder (at twenty-five days to go) of how near the latter is getting.  Instead, McKay spends his time and gets his kicks showing honest scientific warnings undermined by a tangled web of demagogue opportunism, ruthless big-business commercialism, social media madness, the tyranny of TV ratings, the siren call of celebrity, and so on.  President Orlean changes her mind about the end-of-the-world threat when she sees it as a means of deflecting attention from a sex scandal involving her and her Supreme Court nominee.  After she announces a project to launch nuclear weapons to strike the comet and alter its path, her approval ratings skyrocket, too.  Orlean aborts the mission the moment that Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), billionaire CEO of tech company BASH and one of her top donors, intervenes to propose fragmenting the comet, which contains trillions of dollars-worth of commercially exploitable rare-earth elements.  Anorak Mindy becomes a TV personality and heartthrob.  As well as being literally seduced by Brie Evantee, he’s cajoled into working for the White House, advancing the case for Comet Dibiasky’s money-making potential.

    This last thread feels anomalous in McKay’s plot (of which there’s much more but life really is too short …).  Perhaps there are boffins who’ve sold their souls as Mindy does but the emphasis on his journey to the dark side runs counter to Don’t Look Up‘s key premise of scientific disinterestedness and integrity.  (It’s less of a problem that the NASA chief (Hettienne Park) fails to support Oglethorpe’s findings because she, too, is an Orlean donor – she has no background in astronomy so was presumably a political appointment in the first place – but even this strikes an odd note.)  The anomaly is more glaring because Leonardo DiCaprio plays Mindy as such a shrinking nerd you simply don’t believe he’d be unfaithful either to his wife (Melanie Lynskey) or his scientific calling.  McKay, in any case, feels obliged to have Mindy eventually regret his folly and rejoin forces with Kate and Oglethorpe in a futile last-ditch social media campaign to save the planet.  The other lead role is unsatisfactory in a different way.  Outspoken Kate Dibiasky, unloved by TV audiences and on the receiving end of White House threats, retreats from the public eye:  she abandons her studies and returns home to Illinois, where she gets a job in retail and starts a relationship with a quirky shoplifter (Timothée Chalamet).  Jennifer Lawrence – who has laid the ground for a possibly involving portrait of a spiky millennial, infuriated by the ignorant self-interest of her elders – virtually disappears for most of the film’s second half.  The parts McKay has written for the other three Oscar-winning actors in his starry cast don’t begin to test them – except in trying to resist the temptation of overcooking their performances.  Cate Blanchett resists more successfully than Mark Rylance or Meryl Streep.

    Don’t Look Up is evidently proving popular with audiences.  It began streaming on Netflix on Christmas Eve and, according to Wikipedia, ‘set a new record for the most viewing hours in a single week on Netflix’.  As well as pleasing Adam McKay devotees, the movie may also go down well with newcomers to his work, who don’t know, from the outset, what to expect.  It might not have made a difference but I felt sorry I’d seen earlier McKays.  If his film-making really is propelled by righteous anger, he’s doing an increasingly good job of concealing it.  The tension between outrage and show-off sarcasm that sustained The Big Short (2015) was absent from the unrelenting lampoonery of Vice (2018).  The main difference between that film and this new one is that Don’t Look Up is more slapdash.  McKay’s proven taste for decorating the screen with jokey text and graphics is immediately in evidence but not for long.  As well as a quote from the surrealist humorist Jack Handey (‘I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers’), there’s a Big Short-style explanation of a technical term but only the one.  The film is announced as a BASH production (obviously before we know what BASH is going to signify in the story) but this isn’t followed through.  Who knows why Rob Morgan’s decent character has the distracting name of Teddy Oglethorpe, which seems to come from a #MeToo-inspired mock-fest that McKay hasn’t yet got round to making, or why the egregious Janie Orlean shares a surname with Susan, the real, respected journalist played by the same actress in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002).

    When the comet-fragmenting plan goes awry and disaster is about to strike, the powers-that-be – Orlean, Isherwell et al – escape the planet on a sleeper spaceship, though the president inadvertently leaves her son behind.  Their departure paves the way for a mid-closing credits sequence, in which, ‘22,740 years later’, the escapees return to Earth, its Garden of Eden look reinforced by the nakedness of those alighting from their spacecraft.  Orlean admires and tries to pet a large bird-like creature that promptly bites her head off.  Earlier in the saga, Isherwell, boasting that BASH’s algorithms are advanced enough to plot every moment of everyone’s life and accurately predict their cause of death, informs Orlean that she’ll be killed by a Bronteroc.  When she asks what that is, Isherwell doesn’t know.  He does now:  tying up this loose end seems to be the sole purpose of the epilogue.  I switched off once the credits resumed but gather from Wikipedia that, after all have rolled, there’s another postscript with ‘Jason emerging from the rubble, having survived the comet, calling for his mother, and trying to post on social media using his phone’.

    It’s a struggle to find things to say in the film’s favour.  The titles appear in appealingly big, multi-coloured letters.  There are spoof songs that work well enough though they’d be more effective in a comedy sketch show – a reminder that McKay’s career took off as a writer and director on Saturday Night Live.  Yet the evidence suggests that Don’t Look Up has been greeted with enthusiasm by environmental scientists, in contrast to the film critics responsible for its green splat on Rotten Tomatoes.  This difference of opinion is more striking than surprising – the all-publicity-is-good-publicity syndrome is reliable – but the scientists’ reaction is depressing, too.  Wishful thinking that McKay’s lousy film really could make a difference must be a reflection of despair that more serious ways of exhorting media and public engagement with the climate crisis aren’t working.  Anyone refusing to believe that Don’t Look Up will soon be forgotten – in less than six months and eleven days, I should think – is into their own form of denial.

    8 January 2022

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