Film review

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kubrick (1968)

    2001: A Space Odyssey was pivotal in Stanley Kubrick’s career – his first years-in-the-making, self-conscious masterwork – and is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time.  In the most recent Sight & Sound decennial polls in 2012, it placed sixth among critics and joint second among directors canvassed.  2001 is even more widely regarded as the outstanding science fiction film.  A few Christmases ago, we went to our next door neighbours’ drinks party and got into conversation with another couple about films and what genres we liked most and least.  When I said I didn’t often like sci-fi, the next question was, ‘Not even 2001?’, which the man in the couple praised as ‘real philosophy’.  I can’t remember what I answered but the honest answer would also have been ‘I can’t remember’.

    I’d seen the film only once, as a student in Leeds, around 1978.  I did recall it as very long, though, and was pleasantly surprised, when this month’s BFI brochure arrived, to discover it’s not such a marathon – a few minutes under two-and-a-half hours.  I decided to give 2001 a second go.  It’s been the subject of graduate dissertations and doctoral theses, as well as countless critical analyses and think-pieces.  As I still can’t summon up a lot of interest in the film, this note won’t be more than a few, sometimes non-conformist observations.  As countless people have seen 2001 many times, I won’t bother including any kind of plot synopsis.

    Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke developed 2001: A Space Odyssey as a novel in parallel to their co-authored screenplay.  (The source material for both is Clarke’s short story The Sentinel.)  At this distance in time, the film is more impressive in anticipating the lunar iconography that the later Apollo space flights etc would soon make familiar than as a prediction of space exploration at the turn of the millennium.  But 2001’s cachet, like that of George Orwell’s 1984, exempts it, in spite of the date-specific title, from adverse criticism on the grounds of inaccurate prophecy.

    It’s worth comparing the very opening with that of Kubrick’s next work, A Clockwork Orange (1971).   Both are launched by a piece of classical music that compels attention.  Whereas Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary is almost immediately ambiguous and ominous, thanks to electronic distortion and what appears on the screen, Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, accompanying an image of the sun gradually rising above the earth and the moon, is unequivocal.  It announces a Very Important Picture.  Whatever one thinks of 2001, there’s no denying that the VIP tone established in these first moments is sustained throughout the film – and that the means of sustaining it is Kubrick’s exceptional technical skill.

    His ingenious image-making and fanatical attention to both the concept and the detail of a production are a main reason why so many have been convinced that 2001 is a work of intellectual depth and imagination.  Besides, the narrative involves major questions.  The first of its four ‘acts’ is entitled ‘The Dawn of Man’, the last ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’.  Kubrick is interested – upfront – in human evolution and aggression, artificial intelligence, our place in the universe, the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  The movie is visually and sonically formidable (the cinematography is by Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott, the sound editing by Winston Ryder).  The vehicles and sets whose design and building Kubrick supervised are a major feat of engineering.  The film wears its important themes on its sleeve.  It must be a thoroughly big deal.

    BFI used as its handout not a contemporary review or an interview with Kubrick but thoughts on the film, after seeing it on its original release, from Margaret Stackhouse, a fifteen-year-old New Jersey student.  Her teacher sent Margaret’s notes to Kubrick and he replied:

    ‘Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations on the film are perhaps the most intelligent that I’ve read anywhere, and I am, of course, including all the reviews and the articles that have appeared on the film and many hundreds of letters that I have received.  What a first-rate intelligence!’

    Thanks to their author’s youth, Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations (available online) do make absorbing reading but the register of Kubrick’s reaction to them is instructive too.  His closing exclamation is the voice of the schoolmaster concluding a glowing report on one of his brightest students.  It’s tempting to think that this kind of searching, diligent appreciation is what Kubrick expected of his audience more generally.  He must surely have been delighted that 2001 has spawned so many solemn interpretations.

    It’s harder to decide if he was similarly pleased for the film to be embraced as ‘the ultimate trip movie’.  (Kubrick excised almost entirely from his version of A Clockwork Orange the drug-taking in Anthony Burgess’s novel.)   It’s a nice irony that the psychedelic visuals produced such a powerful connection between control-freak Kubrick and the late 1960s counterculture – a marriage made not in heaven but in Star Gate.  One of the film’s most notable creative consequences was David Bowie’s 1969 song ‘Space Oddity’.  As Bowie told Classic Rock in 2012:

    ‘It was the sense of isolation [in 2001] I related to.  I found the whole thing amazing.  I was out of my gourd, very stoned when I went to see it – several times – and it was really a revelation to me. It got the song flowing.’

    Unlike me, the two friends whose judgments I most feared as a teenager saw 2001 while we were still at grammar school.  I remember one of them, Andrew, contemptuously describing the reactions of other kids in the audience he was part of – in particular, how some girls giggled when the ape realised, in momentous slow motion, how to use a bone as a weapon.  I probably still wouldn’t dare tell Andrew but I also can see the funny side of this ‘classic’ moment.  Kubrick (according to Wikipedia),  made Daniel Richter, the mime artist who plays the leading apeman, ‘largely responsible for choreographing the “Dawn of Man” sequence, believing Richter could take the film away from Hollywood clichés of men in monkey suits’.  But men in monkey suits are definitely what these creatures are.  There was audible amusement in the NFT1 audience too but the cause of this was the sinister calm of the voice of HAL (supplied by Douglas Rain), the spacecraft computer.  HAL certainly becomes a major character in 2001 but it needs to be said that, even before ‘his’ behaviour becomes erratic, there’s negligible human competition.

    The actors are so blank and toneless that people who saw the film in 1968 could be forgiven for wondering if this was one more element that had to ‘mean’ something (those familiar with later Kubrick may recognise the bad acting as a sign of things to come).   A scene in which the US government scientist Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) meets with Soviet boffins illustrates the point.  Floyd is making a stopover en route to a US lunar outpost where a mysterious virus has supposedly broken out.  The Soviets ask questions about the epidemic; Floyd woodenly deflects the questions; except when they have a line to deliver, the other actors (who include Leonard Rossiter and Margaret Tyzack) might be in suspended animation throughout the exchange.  Keir Dullea, as the main astronaut Dave Bowman, is vocally much less expressive than HAL in the dialogues between them.  Dullea’s better, though, when he doesn’t have to speak – notably in Bowman’s facial reactions, after leaving his craft on Jupiter to investigate the Monolith orbiting the planet, as his pod is drawn into the Star Gate vortex.

    In the concluding scene, Bowman finds himself in a chamber with decor both baroque and clinical, where he ages from a middle-aged version of himself, still in his spacesuit, into an older man in a dressing gown and finally an ancient figure lying in bed.  The Monolith that has made regular appearances since the ‘Dawn of Man’ is at the foot of the bed and Bowman, as he reaches towards it, is transformed into the Star Child foetus that forms 2001‘s final image.   Margaret Stackhouse speculates that the ageing process may ‘represent the various stages in the life of one man or of all men’.   Surely the latter:  Kubrick shows no interest in humans individually, only in humankind.

    The Star Gate sequence is doubly remarkable.  The pace of  the apemen introduction is brisk enough but most of what follows in 2001 is of a magisterial slowness, including the famously ‘humorous’ space-station docking, scored to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz.  The tempo, perforce, speeds up as Bowman ‘races across vast distances of space, viewing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colors’.  Those words (of Wikipedia) hint at what else is remarkable here.  High-class special effects illustrating out-of-this-world experience can make you wonder in more ways than one.  You feel admiration and amazement.  You also wonder whether, if such experiences were actually possible, the real thing could beat the cinematically imagined version.  Stanley Kubrick has been described by many (and condemned by some) as a ‘God-like’ director and in the bravura son et lumière display of Star Gate, he seems to take the comparison almost literally.  The wonderment this viewer felt, though, was for Kubrick’s technical command and nothing more.  I don’t find 2001 either moving or thought-provoking.  I’m glad I’ve seen it again but only in a mission accomplished sort of way.

    29 May 2019

     

     

  • Rocketman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dexter Fletcher (2019)

    Proximity of release consigns the Elton John biopic Rocketman to inevitable comparison with the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.  Will Elton languish in the commercial shadow of the phenomenally successful Freddie or benefit from arriving in his slipstream?  It’s likely the answer to both questions will be yes.  (Worldwide box-office receipts for Bohemian Rhapsody currently stand at $903.2m.)  Will Rocketman emulate its forerunner in the awards stakes when the time comes?   That seems improbable, though no more improbable than the fact that Bohemian Rhapsody won more Oscars this year than any other film.  Watching Rocketman reminded me how much I liked some of Elton John’s songs in the 1970s – and made me suspect I was unfair to Dexter Fletcher in blaming the bad direction of Bohemian Rhapsody as much on him as on the discredited (yet still officially credited!) Bryan Singer.  Nobody is going to claim that Rocketman is a work of great depth or imagination – let’s hope not, anyway.  But thanks to its combination of songs and story, it delivers emotionally and is wonderfully entertaining.

    Lee Hall’s screenplay frames the narrative in Elton John’s participation in an Alcoholics Anonymous group, with longer flashbacks charting the first forty or so years of his life.  The closing legends tell us that John has now been sober for nearly thirty years, which means the AA session is happening circa 1990.  The decision not to go beyond this point in time means that twenty-nine-year-old Taron Egerton, in the lead role, doesn’t need major aging make-up.  For this viewer, the cut-off point had other benefits too – no ‘Goodbye, England’s Rose’, for a start.  John’s humanitarian work has benefited many but his public pronouncements are often pompous nowadays:  it’s a relief that reference to his AIDS Foundation’s fund-raising achievements is limited to another few words of text on the screen at the end.  Rocketman, though it clearly means audiences to like and admire its leading man, is far from a hagiography.  Elton John and his husband David Furnish have been trying to make this film happen for approaching two decades, and are credited among the executive producers and producers respectively.  But the result is noticeably less pussyfooting about, for example, its subject’s sex life than was Brian May’s and Roger Taylor’s posthumous tribute to Freddie Mercury. 

    The framing device is clumsy but serviceable.  Elton joins the circle wearing one of his outrageous stage outfits.  Introducing himself to the group, he says ‘…and I’m an alcoholic’ only for starters:  he goes on to list his other hang-ups and obsessions – narcotics, bulimia, shopping, and more.  (The shopping addiction, according to the final captions, still isn’t cured.)   In the culminating AA sequence, the protagonist sees key figures in his life – among them, his self-centred, belittling mother Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard), his loving, loyal grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones) and his ophidian manager John Reid (Richard Madden) – materialise in the room.  Elton’s now able to speak his mind to them and not before time.  He becomes a star quite early in the film; once he does, his tale reduces to repeated, often garish illustrations of the gulf between professional success and personal torments.  The story is going nowhere except towards its inevitable happy ending but the high energy level is sustained by the performances and the music.  Dexter Fletcher and Lee Hall, well aware that they’re telling a remarkable individual history through an essentially hackneyed medium, harness the two elements effectively.   It’s as if they accept that the form of the material is pre-ordained, that their job is to colour this particular example of the form as vividly as they can.

    Rocketman is so flamboyantly shallow that things like chronological clarity and tidiness soon cease to matter.  Fletcher mixes biopic conventions with fantasy sequences justified by the hero’s frequently experiencing life through the prism of mind-altering substances.  Some of the famous songs are sung by Elton onstage, others take the form of numbers as in an integrated (or a jukebox) musical.  While the great ‘Space Oddity’ outdistances ‘Rocket Man’ as the definitive solitary astronaut ballad, the staging of the title track is enough to make one realise once again how distinctive and touching it is.  Chords from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, my favourite Elton John song, are heard tantalisingly at several points.  When the song proper finally arrives, it’s sung consecutively by its authors:  the lyricist Bernie Taupin[1] (Jamie Bell) goes first, Elton reprises, and the result is affecting.  In the early stages, Adam Murray’s choreography suggests plenty of Mamma Mia!­-esque dance chaos in store but the crowd(ed) routines turn out to be more rationed than one fears.

    The former Reginald Dwight is played as a child by Matthew Illesley and as a young teenager by Kit Connor, and both are expressive.  Reggie transforms from Connor into Taron Egerton midway through his performance of ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ at a local pub.  (In other words, dramatic aptness trumps chronological exactness in the placing of numbers in the narrative.)  Having deliberately avoided the Kingsman films and Eddie the Eagle (also directed by Dexter Fletcher) and having not got round to Testament of Youth, I haven’t seen Egerton before.  He’s terrific here, not least because he does his own singing and does it very well.   It’s a pity he’s not given the chance to do more of the numbers in their entirety.  No doubt the singing voice of Elton John isn’t as daunting a challenge for an actor as that of Freddie Mercury but lip-syncing, in a more or less sophisticated form, is such common practice in today’s musical biopics that Egerton’s achievement mustn’t be underestimated.  Whether singing, speaking or silent, he never gives the impression of trying to mimic Elton – there’s just the occasional look or intonation that evokes the real thing, and it’s enough.  The actor creates an independent character.

    Rocketman is too good to dismiss as a vanity project but there’s a strong whiff of physical vanity – or wishful thinking – in the casting of key roles (an impression reinforced by information in the Wikipedia article on the film that Elton John’s first choice to incarnate him was Justin Timberlake).  If the online images of John Reid are anything to go by, his younger self wasn’t exactly Richard Madden.  A Hollywood Reporter headline announces that Rocketman ‘Blazes Trail as First Major Studio Film to Depict Gay Male Sex’, an episode that reveals Taron Egerton as more trim and muscular than the real Elton has ever appeared to be.  Although cleverly costumed (by Julian Day, who also dressed Bohemian Rhapsody), Egerton is never quite the self-conscious ‘fat boy from Pinner’ but no matter.  He captures the varieties of Elton’s sexual anguish – shyness at first, fear and guilt to follow – convincingly.  (And casting Richard Madden does work – by showing us John Reid, for whom Elton falls hard, through the latter’s eyes.)  Whereas Rami Malek’s Mercury struggled to enlarge himself in onstage performance, Taron Egerton has almost the opposite problem:  he needs to work to be unprepossessing but the work pays off.   Egerton is likeable and makes you like Elton but his approach is never reverential.

    The only significant weakness in the supporting cast is Bryce Dallas Howard’s harsh, censorious lampoon of the hero’s mother.  Howard would have done better in this limited role to opt for more naturalistic playing, as Steven Mackintosh does in the part of Elton’s equally unsympathetic father.  Gemma Jones’s Ivy develops from salt-of-the-earth caricature, complete with old-woman walk, into something with warmth and emotional depth.  I loved the performances of Jamie Bell, Stephen Graham and Richard Madden.  Bell’s accent moves about a bit but he creates a very engaging portrait of Bernie Taupin, who loves Elton like a brother but is decidedly heterosexual.  Both actors convey a genuine, natural rapport in the scene in which Elton and Bernie, paired up to write by the music publisher and ‘handler’ Dick James (Graham), first meet.  A bit later, Bell conveys with real subtlety Bernie’s shocked reaction to first hearing that Elton is gay.

    The cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed Dick James is a standard-issue pop-industry mogul yet Stephen Graham, who scores with nearly every line he delivers, individualises him.  Seeing Rocketman midway through Channel 4’s screening of Shane Meadows’s four-part The Virtues, in which Graham stars and is altogether remarkable, makes one appreciate all the more his versatility.  Richard Madden portrays John Reid as callously manipulative, thoroughly professional and skilfully seductive.  Bell, Graham and Madden all perform like graduates of the Judi Dench school of acting, whose first rule is that you give of your best regardless of how crudely conceived your role may be, and never suggest it’s beneath you.  There’s nothing casual or dismissive in what these three actors do in Rocketman.  Their talent and passion have the magical effect of defining their characters with cartoon clarity and giving them human substance too.

    27 May 2019

    [1] The film reminded me that the first time I ever heard the names Elton John and Bernie Taupin was as the writers of ‘I Can’t Go on Living Without You’, one of the six competing numbers in the BBC’s A Song for Europe in 1969 – the winner to be performed by Lulu in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest.  The John-Taupin song came sixth in the public vote.  I can still remember the chorus, though.

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