Film review

  • What They Had

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elizabeth Chomko (2018)

    To say that What They Had hasn’t had a wide release in London is an understatement.  So I was surprised to see it showing at the Richmond Odeon, even more surprised that they’d put it in one of the bigger screens, much less surprised that I was the only member of the audience (and that the Odeon isn’t showing it a second week).   Watching alone in the cinema gives you a strange sense of responsibility:  in the words of a W S Merwin poem, ‘there is no one else who can forget it’ – a sentiment that resonates with the subject of first-time writer-director Elizabeth Chomko’s drama.

    The film has no sex scenes but plenty of scenes of people in bed – having sleepless nights or being woken by their phone ringing.  What They Had begins with a woman getting out of bed in near darkness.  She opens a wardrobe and decisively takes out a jacket, which she puts over her nightdress.  She then goes outside into a snowstorm and sets off walking.   Chomko cuts back into the house the woman left, where an elderly man wakes suddenly to discover that she’s gone.  The man is Norbert (Bert) Everhardt (Robert Forster) and the woman his wife Ruth (Blythe Danner), who has Alzheimer’s.

    Although she’s found a few hours later and returns to their home in the Chicago suburbs, Ruth’s nocturnal outing triggers a family gathering that’s essential to Chomko’s purposes.  The Everhardts’ son Nick (Michael Shannon), who lives near his parents, phones his sister Bridget (Bitty) (Hilary Swank) in California, to tell her things have reached crisis point.  Bitty immediately returns to Chicago, along with her teenage daughter Emma (Taissa Farmiga).  The stage is set for a battle of wills, principally between father and son.   Bert, a narrow-minded ex-military man, is firmly in denial about the severity of Ruth’s dementia.  He’s had several heart attacks but insists he can continue to care for her in the home they’ve shared throughout their long marriage.  Nick, not in a settled relationship, angrily insists that Bert face facts and pushes for his mother to move into a local care home whose facilities will allow his father to live in sheltered housing, separately though nearby.

    Elizabeth Chomko’s avoidance of the physically gruesome aspects of living with Alzheimer’s, the better to concentrate on character, is welcome in principle.  In practice, it means she doesn’t have enough material for a feature-length piece (101 minutes) without broadening her focus into a less distinctive study of persisting tensions and frustrations within a family.  In a promising early scene, when Bitty and Emma first arrive at the hospital where Ruth is being checked over after her night out, Bert tells Nick off for getting his sister to make the journey from California.  This conveys a strong, credible sense of Nick being liable to be blamed for things because he’s always there to be blamed (and his presence taken for granted).  The relationship is less interesting once it develops into a martinet-father-disappointed-with-feckless-son number, although the dialogue between them is often well-written – for example, in an exchange about the status of Nick’s job.  He runs a bar; when Bert scorns him as a ‘bartender’, Nick corrects his father – ‘I’m a bar owner’.  But Bert keeps asking, ‘Do you tend the bar?’  Nick eventually has to concede that he does.

    The action takes place over the course of several days at Christmas time.  Bitty’s unhesitating decision to fly to Chicago then is a clue that there’s not much to detain her in California.  An unsatisfactory marriage is confirmed in due course.  (Another early hint is Bitty out jogging on her own – as usual, a signal that a character is running-away-from-something.)  It’s not clear why Emma comes along with her mother – other than for the reason that also explained the resentful son’s accompanying his rascally Nobel laureate father to Stockholm in The Wife:  the two don’t get on and must be on screen together to demonstrate the fact.  In Chicago, Bitty and Emma accompany Ruth, Bert and Nick to a Christmas church service, where Gerry (William Smillie), who was in high school with Bitty, reintroduces himself to her.  A day or two later, with the rest of the family out of the house, she phones Gerry, who works as a handyman, to ask him to fit new locks on the doors, supposedly to make it harder for Ruth to wander off.  As soon as Gerry arrives, Bitty flirts with him but he changes the locks first and things haven’t got far before the others arrive home (to find themselves unable to get in).  This is enough, though, for the sternly moral Bert to smell a rat and book his daughter on a flight home the following day.  Back in California, we discover why her marriage to Eddie (Josh Lucas) bores Bitty to tears.  Compared with Eddie, Celia Johnson’s husband in Brief Encounter is a livewire.

    Bitty’s marital situation and sense of grievance – she never had the chance to go to college, resents it that Emma is now wasting her time there – don’t matter enough, relative to her parents’ situation, to justify the attention they get.  Hilary Swank has the most screen time of anyone but she stands out, in this mostly well-acted film, in a negative sense.  During a visit by Bitty’s to her brother’s bar, she reacts to something he says by holding her hands in front of her face for what seems ages.  The gesture is so oddly artificial you almost expect Nick to ask what on earth she’s doing.  Swank does an even more extended weird routine when Gerry calls round.  Bitty’s hyper-self-conscious uncertainty comes across like a bad parody of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall:  forceful and unnuanced, Hilary Swank has no talent for zany dither.  Elsewhere in the film, she’s competent but stubbornly unsurprising.

    There’s good work from her co-stars, though.  It’s a relief to see Michael Shannon, miscast in The Little Drummer Girl on television last autumn, resuming normal, excellent service.  Robert Forster and Blythe Danner succeed, crucially, in convincing us that Bert and Ruth have had a happy life together.  They do so without the film’s resorting to flashbacks (except in the form of mock home-movie bookends to the narrative) or much explicit dialogue.  Although Ruth no longer reliably recognises Bert as her husband, she knows he’s ‘my boyfriend’.  The strength of his feelings for her comes through most powerfully on the two occasions that Ruth goes missing (the second time only briefly), when Bert’s irascible authority is suddenly replaced by anguish.  The past tense of the title makes clear that dementia has dispossessed the couple but also comes to suggest that what they had – the security of their mutual love, religious (Catholic) faith – are things their children haven’t had and won’t have, even though Nick and his partner eventually get back together.

    Elizabeth Chomko executes the end of Ruth and Bert’s marriage very effectively.   We see them in bed together at night.  Ruth looks to be sound asleep.  Bert gets up and calmly makes a phone call.  A screen moment later, the blue light of an ambulance is flashing outside the house.  Each of   Nick and Bitty wakes to their bedside phone sounding.  Cut to a funeral service.  Chomko has made it seem that Ruth has died in her sleep then we see a coffin containing Bert.  Like The Wife (again), an early health report on the husband signals his eventual fate – but this heart attack is, unlike the one in The Wife, handled with taste and imagination.

    Other aspects of Chomko’s debut aren’t so great.  The melancholy lighting (by Roberto Schaefer) is overdone – the visuals are dark-toned sometimes to the point of muddiness.  A few details of the set-up don’t make sense:  unless he’s meant to be significantly older than Robert Forster is or looks, it’s hard to see how Bert could have fought in the Korean War.   And the resolutions of the story are too orderly and upbeat.   The last scene Nick and Bert have together is in Nick’s bar; the last thing the father says to the son is also the first time that he praises him (for a Manhattan cocktail, the house speciality).   Bitty, who has now left Eddie, tells Nick it’s her turn to look after Ruth, who moves to California without turning a hair.  One other moment late on has a different effect.  What They Had’s final bed scene, shortly after Bert’s funeral, has Ruth and Bitty sharing a double bed for the night.  Ruth suddenly says that her husband’s death was ‘perfect timing’: any sooner, she’d have missed him too much; any later, she wouldn’t have known who he was.  In conception, this may be another instance of Elizabeth Chomko’s tying things up too neatly but Blythe Danner transcends the conception.  You believe in Ruth’s summing up as a brief flash of lucidity, receive it as an unexpected gift.

    5 March 2019

  • Meet John Doe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Frank Capra (1941)

    The final line of the script, delivered by newspaper editor Henry Connell (James Gleason) to D B Norton (Edward Arnold), the magnate who owns and publishes the paper, is, ‘There you are, Norton!  The people!  Try and lick that!’  Norton’s attempt to exploit a grassroots movement to further his political ambitions has been vanquished and Connell’s parting shot seems meant to be the essential message of Meet John Doe, conceived by Frank Capra and the screenwriter Robert Riskin as a melodramatic fanfare for the common man and vindication of Christian democracy.  But Capra’s mixture of social conscience and idealisation of ‘true’ American values gets snarled up in Riskin’s plot (and sometimes his own direction) to increasingly bizarre effect.  The film turns out to be, as much as a paean to the people, an illustration of the dangers of populism, and of the potential symbiosis between fraternity and fascist ambition.

    Connell is initially hired by Norton as a hatchet man on his newspaper, charged with ‘cleaning out the dead wood’ that includes journalist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck).   As he dismisses her, Connell reminds Ann, ‘Don’t forget to get out your last column before you pick up your check!’    Fuelled by urgent anger, she does as he says.  She composes a letter, in the name of an unemployed ‘John Doe’, that laments the social and economic injustices of modern America and announces that, on Christmas Eve, he will commit suicide as a gesture of protest and despair.   The letter is a sensation – it boosts sales, gets Ann her job back and raises suspicions among the paper’s competitors that it’s a publicity stunt.  Ann convinces Connell that attack is the best means of defence and the solution, with down-and-outs already lining up to claim they wrote the letter, to produce a flesh and blood John Doe.

    The man hired for the job is ‘Long’ John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a former baseball player, now a tramp and looking for funds to pay for medical treatment of the arm injury that stymied his sporting career.  For starters, Long John gets $50, a new suit, a hotel suite and, of course, his photograph on the newspaper’s front page.  Ann is paid handsomely by Norton to write speeches for John Doe, delivered by Willoughby in weekly radio broadcasts.  (He never knows what he’ll be reading out until the latest speech is put in his hand.)  Expanding on the themes of ‘his’ original letter, the speeches encourage listeners to realise that ‘the guy next door isn’t a bad egg’ and the philosophy spreads like wildfire.  Norton plans to use nationwide support for John Doe-ism as a springboard for the creation of a third major party in American politics and for his own presidential campaign.   Disgusted by his boss, Connell, in his cups, reveals to Willoughby what Norton is up to.  At the rally at which he is to deliver a speech endorsing Norton as the new party’s candidate for President, Willoughby instead tries to denounce him.  Before he can do so, Norton gets to the microphone to expose the fraud, claiming that he, like all John Doe’s followers, has been deceived by the staff of the newspaper.  Long John is dismayed both that he’s betrayed so many people and been betrayed by Ann, with whom he’s fallen in love (as she has with him).  In the climax to the film, ‘John Doe’ prepares to do just what he originally intended to do, jump from the top of City Hall.

    There’s a worryingly blurred line between the political aspirations and behaviour deplored and commended by the film.  The mass rallies and their choreography, including Mussolini-esque motorcycle formations, evoke contemporary fascist imagery that were familiar to audiences from cinema newsreel of the day but Capra doesn’t seem to disapprove of the paraphernalia as such.   Even when, after Connell has spilled the beans, Willoughby bursts in on a meeting of Norton and his cronies, the hero insists that, ‘The John Doe idea may be the answer, though! It may be the one thing capable of saving this cockeyed world!’  The view that the Doe philosophy is ‘still a good idea’ is echoed repeatedly in the closing stages.  Frank Capra seems to subscribe to it too:  there’s nothing wrong with the simple, love-thy-neighbour message – it’s just that the ‘good idea’ has been hijacked by bad guys.  Capra and Robert Riskin virtually ignore the connection between the popular appeal of easily understood political slogans and their scope for nefarious exploitation.

    The regular supply of folksy humour in the early stages of Meet John Doe dissipates as the story darkens.   More sustained features are a somewhat forced freneticism and speechifying, not always from a public platform.  The basic structure of the plot (adapted by Riskin, Robert Presnell and Richard Connell from a short story by the last-named) is sound enough.  The narrative is propelled by serial instances of characters taking impulsive action in desperate circumstances – Ann writing the original letter, Willoughby joining the queue of claimants to the John Doe identity, even Norton seizing the initiative at the rally.  One aspect of the storyline is puzzling.  In view of John Doe’s celebrity, it’s surprising there isn’t more public curiosity about his real name and background.  I wasn’t sure if Capra intended this lack of interest to make a point (but what point?) or merely found it convenient to overlook.

    Gary Cooper’s first entrance is almost comically effective.  His natural glamour shines through his tramp accoutrements, making Willoughby a race apart from the parade of animated mug shots ahead of him at the Joe Doe ‘auditions’.  Cooper doesn’t have the finesse to bring off some of the looks and gestures meant to convey Long John’s somewhat eccentric diffidence; he adopts an odd, short-stepped walk that expresses the man’s humility at the expense of his athletic past.  Cooper is spiritually right, evincing a touching innocence and decency, but Willoughby’s switch to articulate outrage in light of what Connell tells him is too abrupt.  This doesn’t show another side to his character so much as turn him into a different one.

    Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck worked marvellously together in Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire, released (later) in the same year as Meet John Doe.  They don’t have anything like the same chemistry in this film, largely because the relationship between Willoughby and Ann is essentially perfunctory – it’s there because Capra recognises that a love-story element is required but it isn’t one of his priorities.  Stanwyck is energetic and often witty but she never seems, in the romantic scenes between her and Cooper, to believe in what she’s being asked to do.  She’s much more satisfying in her earlier collaborations with Capra (including Ladies of Leisure, Forbidden and The Bitter Tea of General Yen[1]).  Edward Arnold, who gives a superb comic performance in Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You, is remarkably different here as the malignant Norton.   The role pays diminishing returns as Norton’s villainy becomes more overt but the early scenes with Stanwyck are very good.  Arnold quietly dictates the mood and tempo of these exchanges, creating a welcome break from the prevailing hectic rhythm.   James Gleason manages Connell’s moral transitions skilfully.  Walter Brennan is entertaining as ‘the Colonel’, Willoughby’s animatedly cynical sidekick.

    Although Gary Cooper’s face gives a tragic allure to the finale, this is otherwise a bit of a mess – floridly unconvincing and yet anti-climactic.  Ann rises from her sick bed against doctor’s orders and, still wearing a nightdress under her coat, hotfoots it to City Hall to prevent the man she loves from taking his own life.  She then climbs fourteen flights of stairs to appear with, as it transpires, all the other main dramatis personae, on the roof of the building.  The combination of Barbara Stanwyck’s intensity and Ann’s sudden outburst of Christian rhetoric –

    ‘John, look at me.  You want to be honest, don’t you?  Well, you don’t have to die to keep the John Doe idea alive!  Someone already died for that once!  The first John Doe.  And He’s kept that idea alive for nearly two thousand years!’

    – does no more than make you think the heroine’s illness is making her delirious.  No wonder that John Willoughby isn’t persuaded to think again (when Ann faints in his arms, he seems to regard her principally as an impediment to his death leap).  What makes the difference is the intervention of Bert Hansen (Regis Toomey), who was earlier inspired to start a John Doe club but turned against his role model when Norton exposed his fakery at the rally.  Bert, accompanied by his wife and other members of the club, now insists that, ‘we’re with you, Mr. Doe.  We just lost our heads and acted like a mob. …‘   The admission hardly seems a recommendation of the ‘people’ but it’s enough for Willoughby to see the light and for Connell’s so-there putdown of Norton.  Church bells ring out the ‘Ode to Joy’ as Long John heads back into City Hall, carrying the still unconscious Ann.  The narrow avoidance of suicide just in time for Christmas anticipates It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s first post-World War II movie and, for many people now (alas), his most famous film.

    4 March 2019

    [1] Afternote:  Also The Miracle Woman (1931), which I saw for the first time a few days after Meet John Doe.

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