Film review

  • BlacKkKlansman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Lee (2018)

    The prologue to Spike Lee’s film starts with a clip from a famous scene in Gone with the Wind – the overhead shot of dead and wounded soldiers in the Atlanta railyard, Scarlett O’Hara moving among them, the Confederate flag flying above, an elegiac version of ‘Dixie’ on the soundtrack.   Next comes a vehement, gaffe-strewn address to camera by Dr Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin), a fictional white supremacist, with scenes from D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation playing in the background.  Brief opening titles for BlacKkKlansman follow, with the legend:  ‘Dis joint is based on some fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t’.  Lee then tells the stranger-than-fiction true story of how, in the late 1970s, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a young black police officer in Colorado Springs, infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and spoke ‘white’ enough on the phone to fool David Duke (Topher Grace), Grand Wizard of the Knights of the KKK.

    The film concludes with news footage from the ‘Unite the Right’ Charlottesville rally in August 2017; Trump’s assertion that the white nationalists there included ‘some very fine people’; and a clip of the real, sixtysomething David Duke, expressing hope that the rally is a step towards the restoration of the proper racial order of America.  Lee finally dedicates his movie to Heather Heyer, the young white counter-protester who died at the Charlottesville rally, with the words ‘Rest in Power’.  The Charlottesville film includes a shot of the car that killed Heyer careering into the crowd – an aerial shot that rhymes with the Gone with the Wind one.  This insert is presumably actual drone footage of the event rather than an image designed by Lee.  Even so, he has concocted a rich mix of reality and invention – not everything is fo’ real.  It sometimes feels as if nearly every American film that appears nowadays is described as an insight into the power of fake news, a critique of the racism and paranoia that helped bring about, and help sustain, the Trump presidency.  BlacKkKlansman merits the description more than most.

    The story starts with Stallworth, a recent college graduate, at interview for a job in the Colorado Springs Police Department.  On appointment as the Department’s first-ever African-American officer, he’s consigned to the records office desk, where he’s stultified and treated with varying degrees of contempt by white colleagues.  Stallworth tells the police chief Bridges (Robert John Burke) he’s desperate to do undercover work.  He gets his chance when Bridges assigns him to infiltrate a rally to be addressed by the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael (who has recently adopted his new name, Kwame Ture).  In the light of this, Bridges moves Stallworth to the CSPD’s intelligence unit.  He sees a newspaper advertisement for Ku Klux Klan membership and comes up with his idea.   His sergeant (Ken Garito) is supportive and Stallworth makes a call to local chapter president Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold).  The subsequent infiltration process involves Stallworth speaking on the phone to local Klan members (and Duke, in the first instance to expedite his KKK membership application).  A fellow detective, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), posing as Ron Stallworth, meets the Klansmen face to face.

    From Kennebrew Beauregard’s spiel onwards, Spike Lee stresses the prominence of anti-semitism and ‘Jewish conspiracies’ in KKK dogma:  the partnership of an African-American and a Jew in this undercover work is, in dramatic terms, entirely apt.  (It’s also, according to at least one adverse criticism of the film, a fiction.)  At the outset, neither man is racially politicised, though Stallworth is necessarily aware of his ethnicity and puzzled why his partner doesn’t ‘have skin in the game’.   Zimmerman explains his family weren’t practising Jews; he wasn’t bar-mitzvahed.  He starts to see things differently once Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Pääkkönen), the most rabid member of the local chapter, subjects him at gunpoint to a ‘Jewish lie-detector’ test.  In their car parked nearby, Stallworth listens in on Zimmerman’s wire and aborts the test by throwing a stone through Kendrickson’s window.

    In spite of its alarming subject matter, BlacKkKlansman is highly entertaining – an exciting crime thriller as well as a potent black-comedy polemic.  The screenplay, adapted from Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott and Lee, has fluent, incisive dialogue and is well structured, with some neat rhymes.  The starting point is a visit to Colorado Springs by a leading light of Black Power.  The climax takes place during an appearance in Colorado Springs by a notorious Klansman:  Duke is present for the formal induction into the KKK of Stallworth in the form of Zimmerman.  Stallworth’s first important assignment involves pretending not to be a cop, among the black Colorado College students who invited Kwame Ture to speak; at the business end of the film, he’s given the job of providing police security for Duke on his visit.  Zimmerman twice manages to avoid having his cover blown through split-second interventions.  The first is intentional (Stallworth’s stone through the window), the second accidental.  A man called Walker (Nicholas Turturro), attending the KKK reception for Duke, recognises Zimmerman as the officer who once got him put in jail.  Walker tells Kendrickson.  The latter, on the point of putting Duke in the picture, is called urgently to the phone.

    The caller is Kendrickson’s wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), whose job it is to place a bomb, made by Walker, at a civil rights rally taking place to mark Duke’s appearance in Colorado Springs.  Stallworth, noting Connie’s odd behaviour and swift exit from the induction event, alerts the police at the rally venue.  Their response panics Connie, who phones to ask her husband what to do next.  He tells her to implement ‘plan B’, targeting instead the home of the black student union leader Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier).  Patrice and Connie are the only two significant female characters and it’s disappointing that the former is the one important role that’s underwritten.  Patrice and Stallworth take an immediate liking to each other when he shows up at the Kwame Ture event; they continue to see each other and it’s some time before he owns up to being a cop – the admission scene is a rare perfunctory, underpowered moment in BlacKkKlansman.  Connie’s first appearance is relatively weak too.  Serving sandwiches to the Klansmen at a chapter meeting, she’s humiliated by Felix’s dismissal of her.  In the presence of the others, she tells him he’ll need her help one day.  (As tends to happen when someone in a movie says that, she’s vindicated.) Yet outsize Ashlie Atkinson, thanks to fearless engagement with her character, later provides one of the alarming highlights of the film.  Snuggled up in bed with Felix, the weirdly childlike Connie chatters about what they’re going to do to black people.  All our dreams, she murmurs in sleepy ecstasy, are going to come true.

    You don’t expect political subtlety from Spike Lee and you seldom get it here but he and his co-writers illustrate differences of degree in the racism at work in the police force – between, for example, Chief Bridges and the corrupt, abusive CPSD officer Landers (Frederick Weller) – and even in the ardent bigotry of the Klansmen.  There’s a distance between the canny, controlled Walter Breachway and the sweaty, bug-eyed Felix, with the vilely droll fatso Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser) somewhere in between.  I’m usually dubious about presenting the baddies in a political polemic as ridiculous but there really is no option here, and mocking them doesn’t dilute their viciousness.  Trump’s brief appearance alone is compelling confirmation there’s such a thing as an appallingly powerful nitwit.  Connecting malignity and idiocy also helps Lee deliver an effective comedy-of-errors climax.  Connie can’t fit the explosive device into Patrice’s mailbox and puts it under her car instead.  Felix, Ivanhoe and Walker arrive on the scene, park beside Patrice’s car and, when the bomb detonates, are killed in the explosion.

    The Gone with the Wind clip introduces race and the representation of African Americans in film history as a persistent and supple theme of BlacKkKlansman.  It’s there, most obviously, in the reprise of Birth of a Nation, which is screened at Ron Stallworth’s KKK induction.  (The enthusiastic reception of the audience is a bit overdone.)  It’s there in David Duke’s creepy moment of nostalgia for a Mammy figure from his own childhood, in Ron’s conversation with Patrice about the blaxpoitation films of the early 1970s (Spike Lee’s teenage years) and their heroes – Richard Roundtree’s Shaft vs Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest in Super Fly.   It’s there too in some of the casting.  While the KKK are inducting Stallworth, an elderly African-American activist is recalling, in an address to Patrice and her fellow students, a white lynch mob’s torture and killing of a friend and contemporary back in 1916:  the activist is played by ninety-one-year-old Harry Belafonte, whose social activism has outlasted his movie stardom.  The protagonist is played by a man whose father’s screen career, including the lead in several Spike Lee Joints – Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, Inside Man – has endured like no other African-American actor’s to date.

    You occasionally hear Denzel Washington in the voice of his son, who gives a strong performance.  One of his finest moments comes early on, when Ron Stallworth is at the Kwame Ture rally and, as he records the event, accomplishing a double concealment.  Stallworth not only has to hide his true identity from the people immediately surrounding him.  In his vocal reactions to the speech, which will be heard on the recording he’s making for CSPD, he must also control his emotional reactions to Ture’s rallying cry.  Washington is well supported by the dependably acute Adam Driver as Zimmerman and by Topher Grace.  Grace does well to play David Duke straight; as a result, he is sinister and comical, the qualities Lee is looking to balance more generally.  With some help from a 1970s hairdo and clothes, Grace makes Duke, as well as intellectually vain, a bit grotty and shopsoiled, even though he’s only in his late twenties.  (Topher Grace is forty:  maybe that helped too.)

    Winding up the tension as he cross-cuts between the KKK gathering and the civil rights demonstrators, between chants of White Power and Black Power, Spike Lee has lost little of the dynamism he showed in Do the Right Thing nearly thirty years ago.  (Terence Blanchard’s score and Barry Alexander Brown’s editing give him considerable assistance.)  In view of his back catalogue, it’s striking that one objection that’s been made to the largely well-received BlacKkKlansman is that Lee is too kind to the police – particularly in a late sequence that shows Ron Stallworth and his colleagues celebrating the success of their project as one happy multi-racial team.  Stallworth’s appointment as Duke’s bodyguard for the day is probably an instance of Lee’s sacrificing credibility for comic effect; if taken literally, though, it suggests the CSPD was able and willing to rise above its own collective racism in order to demonstrate contempt for the Ku Klux Klan.  That also sounds like wishful thinking but Lee certainly isn’t soft-pedalling in the extended finale that culminates in the Charlottesville footage.  He pushed his politically angry message too hard in Do the Right Thing.  What’s finally shocking about BlacKkKlansman is that you don’t feel its force is the result of distortion or exaggeration.  In the current political climate of America, Spike Lee, at sixty-one, looks like a director whose time has come as never before.

    30 August 2018

  • The Children Act

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Eyre (2017)

    If you’re going to see one film of an Ian McEwan novel this year, make it The Children Act rather than On Chesil Beach.  If you want a good drama about Jehovah’s Witnesses, see Daniel Kokotajlo’s Apostasy and give The Children Act a miss.  Richard Eyre’s adaptation of McEwan’s 2014 novel, with a screenplay by the author, is more entertaining than expected, largely because the story takes a lavishly melodramatic turn after the protagonist, the High Court judge Fiona Maye (Emma Thompson), has delivered a pivotal ruling.  Mrs Justice Maye (Fiona hereafter) permits a hospital to give a blood transfusion to seventeen-year-old Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead), a leukaemia patient, despite his and his parents’ lack of consent to this, on religious grounds.

    Fiona’s ruling is not a surprise.  As she reminds the court in delivering her judgment, the Children Act (2004) provides that ‘the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration’.  What’s unusual is that, before confirming her decision, she visits Adam in hospital, in order to gain a direct insight into what he thinks and wants.  Adam’s condition improves as a result of medical treatment, including the transfusion, that he receives.  The impression that Fiona’s brief visit makes on him is hardly less powerful.  Like an earlier McEwan lifesaver, Joe Rose in Enduring Love, Fiona finds herself on the receiving end of an obsession[1].  Adam starts sending her texts and letters and turns up at her place of work and even the judge’s lodgings in Newcastle, during Fiona’s visit there as a circuit judge.  She repeatedly, kindly but firmly tells him not to contact her again and to get on with living the life he can now enjoy; her divided feelings surface only in their prolonged kiss as she prepares to send him back to London from Newcastle.   Not long afterwards, Fiona learns that Adam’s condition has deteriorated, that he’s in a hospice and once more refusing a blood transfusion.  He is now eighteen, no longer a minor.  Fiona dashes to his bedside for a tearful farewell.  In the film’s final scene, she and her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci) attend Adam’s funeral.

    The state of Fiona’s marriage has been summarised within about thirty seconds of the start of The Children Act.  At home, she’s working late on a judgment she must deliver the following day (regarding conjoined twins whose parents oppose their separation, also on religious grounds).  Irritated by her husband’s interruption to tell her he’s going to bed, she keeps her eyes trained on the computer screen and her back turned to him.  Jack doesn’t get Fiona’s attention until, a few scenes later, he tells her that, thanks to her complete preoccupation with work and their consequently loveless relationship, he’s thinking of having an affair.  A university academic, he later admits to a one-or-two-night fling with another academic while supposedly away on a conference.  (He’s a classicist and his lover a statistician, which proves, if nothing else, the growing trend of interdisciplinary collaborations in British universities.)  The short-lived affair is enough for Fiona to get the locks changed on their apartment and to initiate divorce proceedings.  Jack gets locked out once but is then (without explanation) back in residence.  This enables Richard Eyre and Ian McEwan to insert a bit where Jack’s two young nieces come to stay with him and Fiona, and ask, ‘Uncle Jack, why are you sleeping on the sofa?’  Fiona doesn’t speak to the young guests.  Instead, she looks mournfully out of the window into the garden, where Jack is playing a jolly game with the two little girls.  Fiona and Jack have no kids of their own: during one of their rows, she refers angrily to ‘the child I’ve failed to give you’.

    Ian McEwan seems to think the idea of a specialist in children’s law who is herself childless, and therefore incomplete, a poignant dramatic conception.  (More than sixty years ago, Ingmar Bergman used a gynaecologist who doesn’t understand women as a comic premise in A Lesson in Love.)   It’s evidently important to McEwan to be admired as a creative writer thoroughly engaged with the real world and associated with leading lights within it – witness his learned appendices to Enduring Love and research undertaken for Saturday at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.  He has written in the Guardian about attending ‘dinner with a handful of judges’, whose host, Sir Alan Ward, was the judge involved in the real-life case that inspired The Children Act.  McEwan’s intellectual self-regard is such that he assumes that whatever he puts in a novel dealing with scientific or legal issues demands to be taken as seriously as those issues.  He’s oblivious to how tired an idea – brilliant at her job, crap at her personal life – his heroine is.

    In spite of his antipathy to religious belief and institutions, McEwan is also a leading exponent of preaching to the converted, plenty of whom enjoy his flattery – hence, for example, Peter Bradshaw’s description of The Children Act as ‘bracingly intelligent and civilised’.   McEwan allows Adam’s devout Jehovah’s Witness father his day in court: Kevin Henry (Ben Chaplin) stands up creditably to the sarcastic onslaught of the hospital’s counsel Mark Berner (Anthony Calf).  But the lawyer representing the Henry family (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is reduced to the seemingly desperate argument that, although Adam isn’t yet an adult within the terms of the relevant legislation, he should be treated in the matter of his treatment as if he were.  In any event, Richard Eyre and McEwan can be confident that Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t flock to the film and that the vast majority of their ‘intelligent’ audience will be parti pris on the right side of the argument.

    The ‘civilised’ aspect of things is important too.  In the opening scene, Fiona may be focused on composing her judgment but there’s classical music playing in the room (discreetly, of course) as she writes.  When, after the conjoined twins case is over, Jack vainly hopes he and his wife might enjoy themselves over the weekend ahead, he mentions a ‘doubles’ (presumably tennis, which, for some reason, isn’t tarred with the same philistine brush as other sports) and ‘tickets for the opera’.  There’s a piano in the apartment for Fiona to play but no television to sully the exquisitely appointed surroundings.  Perhaps Eyre and McEwan intend the culturally rarefied condition of the couple’s world to reflect the emotional insufficiency of their marriage but I suspect it’s meant to enhance their tragic credentials.

    Mark Berner, an accomplished singer, and Fiona, accompanying him on the piano, perform together each year at a Christmas concert for the great and good of the London legal world.  The events of the film take place as they prepare for this year’s concert. Their opening number will be the carol ‘Lully, lulla/Thou little tiny child’.  (I’m not making this up.)   Their encore song will be ‘My Funny Valentine’.  (Or that.)  The eventual concert performance is the melodramatic climax of The Children’s Act.  As Fiona and Mark are about to take the stage, her loyal clerk Nigel (Jason Watkins) hands her a note informing her that Adam is in the hospice, in Camberwell, and may not last the night.

    Fiona, though greatly distracted, gets through ‘Lully, lulla’ and the next piece.  When it comes to the encore and Mark opens his mouth to sing ‘My Funny Valentine’, she plays a different tune and does the singing too.  It’s a reprise of a setting to music of the W B Yeats poem ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’: when she visited Adam in hospital during the court hearing, he was learning the tune on the guitar and Fiona sang along.   What was borderline plausible the first time around is laughably contrived now.  She then flees the concert, rushes out into torrential rain to get a cab to Camberwell, sprints along the hospice corridor, and so on … She eventually returns home, distressed and soaking wet.  Jack, who was in the audience at the concert, follows her in, exclaims, ‘You’re wet through!’, and, rather than getting her out of her wet clothes, puts his overcoat round her shoulders – in case she’s going out again?   The whole episode is shamelessly OTT, enough to make any TV soap green with envy.

    The direction the plot takes would be easier to accept if the screenplay gave its bizarreness free rein but that would require McEwan to show things from Adam’s point of view as well as Fiona’s and he’s not interested in doing so.  Adam is essentially a vehicle for the moral dilemma and for bringing Fiona’s anxieties and unhappiness into the foreground.  And since Fiona, until she lurches out of character at and after the concert, is consistently controlled and professional, the scope for dramatising her response to Adam’s behaviour is limited.  Until the kiss outside judge’s lodgings, the film has given no hint that Adam’s infatuation with her may have a sexual element, even though, with Emma Thompson in the role, Fiona is formidably attractive.  Instead, his letters to her are all about poetry, music, the life of the mind as experienced by someone newly unshackled by religious dogma.  (Adam’s liberation is anticipated in the film’s single scene of Jack at his university work, telling students about the blessed interval between the death of Greek polytheism and the advent of Christianity, which ‘closed western minds’.)

    The Children Act is sometimes oddly opaque.  When he turns up in Newcastle, the frustrated Adam, as well as telling Fiona that he wants to come and live with her (and her husband), berates her for seeing him in hospital, when she already knew what judgment she was going to give.  His accusation strikes this exceptionally articulate woman dumb.   The motive for her visit seemed clear and reasonable at the time.  His father and his counsel made much in court about Adam’s remarkable independence of mind and refuted the suggestion that he was withholding consent under the influence of his parents; Fiona wanted to test these claims for herself.  Why doesn’t she tell Adam that?

    A scene in which Adam tells his father and mother (Naomi Henry) he’s never going back to Kingdom Hall seems misplaced in the sequence of events.  The film also blurs Adam’s motivation for refusing a second blood transfusion.  In the novel, according to Wikipedia:  ‘Fiona receives another letter from Adam, a religious poem, which implies that he thinks of her as Satan for tempting him away from religion and has returned to the faith’.   In the film, when she visits him in the hospice, he simply whispers, ‘My choice … My Lady’ (the form of address for Mrs Justice Maye in court).  It’s not clear how he’s reverted to the faith he lost or even if he has:  maybe Adam, rejected by Fiona, has decided life’s not worth living without her in it?

    Fiona’s hotfooting it to the hospice is an invention for the film (in the book, she learns at the Christmas concert that Adam has died).  It makes for a bit of high-speed action, a reminder that we’re watching a movie as well as listening to a lecture.  You wouldn’t expect a Richard Eyre film to be visually interesting and this one isn’t.  It’s shocking, even so, to see him rely on clichés like the rent-a-mob press pack outside the Royal Courts of Justice (one of the worst I’ve recently seen, though the competition is fierce).  Inside, it’s a different matter.  The well-staged courtroom sequences are one of two positive reasons to see The Children Act.   The other reason is much of the acting.

    Casting Emma Thompson at the centre of a drama as self-important as this one made me fear the worst:  as an actress, Thompson has a tendency to keep reminding the viewer, when the occasion demands, that she’s involved in a morally serious enterprise.  There’s a hint of this when Fiona delivers her judgments in court, which are a bit too acted.  Thompson’s carefully composed expression and sensitive voice are designed to make crystal clear that these-are-complex-issues-but-humane-compassion-trumps-superstition-in-a-modern-rational-society-like-ours.  For most of The Children Act, however, you have to admire (I admit I’m doing so against my will) Thompson’s economical and incisive technique. The outward indicators of Fiona’s professional authority are obvious enough but Thompson walks, wears her clothes and does business with her spectacles with such aplomb that she’s very good to watch.  It’s hardly her fault that the character McEwan has written is so circumscribed that you respond less to Fiona’s personality than to how expertly Emma Thompson is presenting her.

    Both the marital crisis and the rapprochement of Fiona and Jack are corny and mechanical.  Stanley Tucci’s American speech rhythms are welcome in loosening up some of the tight dialogue but in the closing stages he can do little more than give tactful supportive smiles.  Adam, though an idea rather than a person, is played very appealingly by Fionn Whitehead.  He also matches up well physically with Ben Chaplin, who’s excellent in the court scenes.  Nikki Amuka-Bird, Anthony Calf and Jason Watkins are all good.  Watkins seems too busy and theatrical at first but he engages so strongly with his thin role that he wins you over. I liked the devoted Nigel’s careful packing of ‘My Lady’s’ wig and gown for her trip to Newcastle.  It’s a bonus to see Rosie Cavaliero, wonderful in the second series of Unforgotten on television, in a cinema film.  I didn’t really understand who her character was meant to be (some kind of ‘guardian’ for Adam, who accompanies the judge on her visit to the hospital) but Cavaliero makes this woman vividly human.  The music is by J S Bach and Stephen Warbeck and even I can tell them apart.

    27 August 2018

    [1] There’s a difference, of course:  it isn’t the life of the obsessive Jed Parry that Joe saves in Enduring Love.  Even so, the echo is hard to ignore.

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