Film review

  • Hereditary

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ari Aster (2018)

    The first thing we see in Hereditary is a death announcement in a newspaper.  Ellen Taper Leigh was in her late seventies, a mother and grandmother.  The announcement names her close family and includes details of funeral arrangements.  The debutant feature director Ari Aster then cuts to inside a house.  His camera watches out through a window then moves back inside, slowly and menacingly.   There are ominous crescendi on the soundtrack.  The camera closes in on a doll’s house and focuses on one of its meticulously detailed rooms – a bedroom, which becomes an actual bedroom in the house containing the doll’s house.  The sudden silence on the soundtrack is as high-impact as the noise it replaces.  Aster has made clear in no time that something wicked this way comes.  He’s impatient to get on with building horror atmosphere.  You wonder why, if he hasn’t time for a slow build-up, he bothered to include the agreeably could-signify-anything obituary at the start, especially as the first scene proper describes Ellen’s family’s preparations, in the creepy house, for her funeral.

    This is a supernatural horror movie and the first half hour certainly creates a picture of a world other than our own.  Steve Graham (Gabriel Byrne), in a dark suit and tie, enters the aforementioned bedroom to rouse his sixteen-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff).  Steve tells Peter his mother is already waiting to go to the funeral.   A cut to outside and a car, containing the mother, Annie (Toni Collette), confirms as much.  Steve then asks his son if he knows where his younger sister Charlie is, since she doesn’t appear to have slept in her bed.  When Steve locates Charlie (Milly Shapiro), she, like Peter, is still in her night things.  There can’t be too many parents who, on the morning of a funeral, will wait until they’re ready to leave before they bother checking whether their teenage kids are up yet.  It’s particularly surprising in a household presided over by Steve who’s controlling enough to instruct everyone, once they’re back home after the service, to take off their outdoor shoes as soon as they get inside.  (Not that he ever does this again.)  At the funeral itself, Annie delivers a eulogy to her mother.  She describes Ellen as a very private person, with ‘private rituals’, who’d likely have reacted cynically to the large turnout of virtual strangers at the service.  Annie speaks with the voice not of a daughter doing her conventional duty but of a scriptwriter (also Aster) who wants quickly to impart suggestive information about (a) the departed Ellen and (b) Annie’s potential for psychological turmoil.

    As the funeral service ends, Charlie is eating a confectionery bar.  This seems weirdly immature for a thirteen-year-old at a funeral but that’s not the cause of her parents’ concern:  they need to be sure the bar doesn’t contain nuts.  A few scenes later, Peter wants to go to a party, which he pretends is being organised by his high school.  Annie insists that he take the worryingly unsociable Charlie with him:  it will be good for her (although she’s not yet high-school age).  Annie warns Peter to take care – no alcohol please – but makes no mention of Charlie’s allergy.  At the party, Peter and his contemporaries smoke weed.  He directs Charlie to a large chocolate cake instead.  Neither of them gives a thought to the nut allergy.  Charlie eats a piece of cake, duly goes into anaphylactic shock and Peter, high and at high speed, drives her to hospital.  She puts her head out of the car window to get some air.  When Peter swerves to avoid an animal and crashes, Charlie is decapitated by a telegraph pole.

    To Ari Aster, rooting his story in a realm of credibly consistent human behaviour is just a tiresome constraint to be ignored.  After all, Hereditary is about the irrational so it doesn’t need to make any sense, right?  Between Ellen’s and Charlie’s funerals, a fair number of spooky things have already happened. The family is informed that Ellen’s grave has been desecrated.  Annie, a miniaturist artist (doll’s houses her speciality), thinks she sees her mother in her workshop.  Charlie receives a visit from an otherworldly light and beheads a dead bird with scissors.  Annie goes to a support group for the bereaved, where she reveals the history of mental illness in her family.  (This must be why she married Steve, a professional psychotherapist with precious little else to recommend him.)  It’s after Charlie’s death, however, that Hereditary‘s horror show gets into full swing.  Once it does, there’s no reason for it to end (and the film, at 127 minutes, is very long).  Aster is full of ideas or, at least, has probably seen plenty of horror movies.  His only problem is that he eventually runs out of personnel with which to continue.

    In my limited experience of the genre, the supposed highlights are often things horrible to behold rather than horrifying conceptions.  That’s certainly the case with this film, with Charlie’s head a main contender for the grisliest image prize.  There’s an occasional unnerving, well-constructed sequence.  Annie, an habitual somnambulist, goes into Peter’s bedroom; he tells her she’s sleepwalking and she comes to; in the conversation that follows, she expresses violently negative feelings towards him and he is terrified; Annie then wakes in bed, having dreamed it all, the sleepwalking included.  There’s an occasional funny line.  Annie makes a macabre discovery in the attic and starts gabbling out a summary to Steve.  She then warns him, as he prepares to go up to check things out, that there’s more than what she’s so far said.  ‘More?  You mean more than the headless body of your mother?’ he replies, with weary sarcasm.  But Annie’s right, of course – there is more, much more …

    The continuing supply of bizarre sights and incidents induces shock-horror fatigue.  It may be different for viewers who think they’ve experienced the supernatural.  For those of us who haven’t, such things happen only in fiction or on a movie screen and need to consist of more than technical aplomb to get under our skin.  Just about the only parts of Hereditary that do that are exchanges between Annie and Joan (Ann Dowd), a woman from the bereavement support group.  Joan, who gives Annie a DIY mediumship kit, is eventually revealed to be a key participant in Ellen’s ‘private rituals’, about which her daughter learns more and more.  (Ellen and Joan belonged to the same coven.)   But Ann Dowd is humanly convincing while Joan is cultivating Annie’s acquaintance and offering her sympathy.  When Dowd and Toni Collette, fine actresses both, are portraying the helpless grief of women who’ve lost their children, it’s upsetting like nothing else in the film.

    In this kind of material, characterisation is at best of secondary importance and at worst no more than a red herring.  In spite of that, Collette’s acting is remarkably committed:  she has some furiously powerful outbursts in which her emotions feel very raw.  It’s regrettable she’s not given more opportunity to shape her portrait of Annie, who’s bad-tempered and miserable from the word go.  When, latish on in the film, she weeps to her husband and son, ‘I love you so much’ , you can only think:  I missed that bit.  The sad-faced Milly Shapiro has the look of a wounded bird even before she takes scissors to the dead one:  the melancholy impression Shapiro makes while Charlie’s alive is stronger than any left by her post-mortem appearances, with or without head.   Alex Wolff does as well as can be expected with a character whose body ends up hosting the demon Paimon.  Gabriel Byrne is even more unlucky.  Screen shrinks in earthbound dramas are often miracle workers; in occult settings, they tend to be rationalist Aunt Sallies and this one is no exception.  Steve, in spite of that early success with the shoes removal, is so ineffectual that, when he glumly swallowed a handful of tablets and disappeared for a while, I wondered if he’d committed suicide without his wife or son, their minds on other things, having noticed.  It turned out Steve really did just want a good night’s sleep.  His eventual death is much more spectacular.

    Hereditary has been hailed, by Digital Spy for one, as ‘this generation’s The Exorcist’.  I never liked or admired the latter film but there was no arguing that the story was underpinned by author William Peter Blatty’s eccentric Catholicism.  I’m not sure if Digital Spy means to imply this but Ari Aster has made a film de nos jours in the sense that he exploits the steep decline in traditional belief systems to justify an anything goes approach to horror.  What’s more galling about Hereditary is the line being shot that it’s a tragic parable of the nuclear American family in crisis etc.  I don’t suppose this is being argued on the grounds of parental carelessness cited in the second and third paragraphs above.  It’s probably more a matter of Annie’s being able to design a doll’s house but failing, thanks to her neurotic inheritance, to create a supportive home environment in reality (I’m not sure how her husband’s responsibilities fit in).

    It’s a relief to see Mark Kermode, a connoisseur of horror cinema (and Exorcist superfan), give Hereditary a poor review.  Plenty of other critics seem keen to get on the bandwagon of its commercial success.  (According to Wikipedia, it was made for $10m and has already grossed $62.5m.)  I can understand why the film has built up an appeal, perhaps especially with younger audiences, as something you go and see with others and enjoy being (or acting out being) group-scared-out-of-your-wits-by.  Maybe the professional reviewers who buy into the hype are like those teachers you remember from school who were anxious to seem to be on the kids’ wavelength.  But if they’re not, to paraphrase Larkin in ‘The Old Fools’, why aren’t they screaming at Hereditary – and in anger rather than fear?   Over the closing credits, Ari Aster plays Judy Collins’s version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now’.  The (ab)use of this fine song is the one desecration in the film that I think will stay with me.

    5 July 2018

  • The Bookshop

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Isabel Coixet (2017)

    I have a persistent bee in my bonnet about foreign language films that get away with things Anglophone critics would deride in British or American movies.   I think – with apologies for the mixed headgear-footwear metaphors – that Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop is evidence of the boot on the other foot.   As a part-Spanish co-production, directed by a Spaniard, this adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel was eligible for Goya awards and won Best Film, Director and Screenplay at this year’s ceremony.  In Spain, according to Wikipedia, there were ‘unanimous positive reviews’; the critical reception over here has been much less generous.  A probable explanation is that the 1959 English setting, characters and dialogue give the movie, to Spanish eyes and ears, an exotic quaintness – give it, in other words, protection.  The Bookshop is in several ways a bad film but it’s an odd one too.  That oddness and an unexpectedly lovely performance by Bill Nighy make it well worth watching.

    Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a widow in her forties, determines to open a bookshop in Hardborough, the small (fictional) Suffolk coastal town she’s lived in for some time.  Determination is certainly needed on Florence’s part.  She acquires as her home and business premises a damp, shabby property, badly in need of renovation.  Once the shop finally opens there, it does a far from roaring trade.  But the Old House, as it’s known, is of interest to others:  local bigwig Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) has ambitions for the place to become an arts centre.  She’s therefore miffed by the bookshop but not discouraged.  Violet’s MP nephew sponsors a parliamentary bill.  The (also presumably fictional) ‘Access to Places of Public Interest Act’ passes into law, enabling compulsory purchase by local councils of buildings of historical significance.  This is the fate of the Old House and signals the end of Florence’s life in Hardborough.  The arts centre is among the oddities of the story, both as the effective enemy of the bookshop (and the small lending library Florence sets up within it) and as a potential going concern.  It’s clear that Violet sees the centre as a means of enriching not the community but her own standing within it.  Even so, she might have had a more philistine project in mind to underpin the film’s demonisation of her.  It’s less clear why, since few Hardborough residents appear to read books, they’d be expected to flock to the concerts and lectures that Violet tells Florence will be on the arts centre’s menu.

    In terms of plot, the above is reasonably faithful to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel but Isabel Coixet makes some melodramatising adjustments and additions to the original.  These mostly centre on, or derive from, the town intellectual Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy), Florence’s most (indeed sole) committed customer.  Brundish is so reclusive that they communicate by letter rather than in person and Florence sends him books by post.  Just as the relationship seems to be settling into 84 Charing Cross Road territory (minus the intervening Atlantic Ocean), Florence receives an invitation to afternoon tea at Brundish’s house, where he lives alone.  The place has the look of a manor out of Gothic literature but his reading tastes are more modern.  He rubbishes the Bronte sisters.  He’s grateful to Florence for introducing him to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451.  When she asks his advice on whether she should order multiple copies of Nabokov’s Lolita, Brundish encourages her to do so.  Coixet builds up the relationship between them to the edge of romance before abruptly terminating it.  Brundish visits Violet Gamart to protest her sustained attempts to thwart and oust Florence:  he gets so worked up, he has a  heart attack and dies on his way home to Nightmare Abbey.  The film ends not simply (as the book does) with Florence’s eviction and departure but with the physical destruction of the Old House.  In the early days of the shop, Christine Gipping (Honor Kneafsey), a young schoolgirl, used to help out there, not for the love of books but to earn money (her needy family are fine with that).  Outraged at how Florence has been treated, Christine burns the site down and Violet Gamart’s dream of an arts centre also goes up in smoke.

    Books are still on the shelves inside the Old House so Christine’s arson does more – too much more – than echo the earlier references to Fahrenheit 451.  It ends, or nearly ends, the film in a blaze of barbarism that would seem thoroughly incongruous were it not for earlier pieces of heavy-handedness.  When Florence tells Christine what you must never do using a paraffin heater, you know that advice, in due course, will be importantly ignored.  The staging of Brundish’s death and Alfonso Vilallonga’s tragic score, which, until the closing stages, has seemed over the top, also pave the way for the melodramatic finale.  (The only printed survivor of the fire is A High Wind in Jamaica, which Florence once particularly recommended to Christine.)  The conflagration sits oddly, though, with the message and tone of the very ending of The Bookshop, in which the story’s voiceover narrator is revealed to be the middle-aged Christine (Francesca McGill):  inspired by Florence’s example, the adolescent book-burner now runs … a bookshop.  The narration, read by an uncredited Julie Christie (who appeared in Truffaut’s 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451), has included more than one bibliophilic platitude of the sort you see on book tokens – you’re-never-alone-with-a-good-novel, that kind of thing – and tweeness reigns in the postscript.  Look, there’s a copy of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop on display in Christine’s shop!

    As often happens, the voiceover features largely in the early stages, to give us our bearings, then disappears until a last-minute return.  It’s nevertheless overused, vexingly telling us at the start what Florence is feeling, when Emily Mortimer’s face is already supplying the evidence.  Most of the dialogue that follows similarly leaves nothing to the imagination, which makes Coixet’s pacing of the verbal exchanges bizarre:  their lack of rhythm implies that something important is unspoken.  About halfway through the film, a minor female character called Kattie (Charlotte Vega) says of Milo North (James Lance), with whom she’s currently involved, ‘You’ll never know if a man like him has a rich inner life or if there’s nothing there at all’.  The line resonates because that’s what you’ve been wondering about the dialogue more generally – and you’re increasingly inclined to think it’s the latter rather than the former.  (Kattie sensibly reaches the same conclusion about Milo.)

    The Lolita order subplot, taken from Fitzgerald, is, in the film at least, opaque in terms of both Florence’s motivation and its consequences.  She seeks Brundish’s opinion of the novel but what is her own?  On what evidence does he say to her, before pronouncing, that it’s probably less important to him than it is to Florence whether or not something is moral?  Brundish judges Lolita ‘a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough.  They won’t understand it, but that’s all to the good – understanding makes the mind lazy’.  So Florence orders 250 copies of Lolita in its distinctive Olympia Press pale-green cover, and puts a sign in the bookshop window advertising the ‘novel that is shocking the world’.  There’s no indication of her bulk-buying anything else so is this just a desperate-cum-cynical bid to boost sales?  Hardborough residents flock to the Old House and gawp at the window but we don’t know if any of them buy the book.  All that matters to the narrative is that the crowd in the street helps reinforce Violet Gamart’s anti-Florence campaign.   It’s something of an irony, of course, that what Penelope Fitzgerald, in 1978, may have intended as a comment on the moral climate of a bygone era doesn’t work that way forty years on, now that Nabokov’s novel has regained its political incorrectness.  At least Isabel Coixet didn’t chicken out, move the setting on a year and have Florence try instead to flog copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the aftermath of the 1960 obscenity trial.

    Emily Mortimer is emotionally acute throughout but she has no one to play against productively until Florence meets Brundish.  Aside from Mortimer, Nighy, Clarkson and Frances Barber (in a cameo), the cast isn’t well known – so I don’t like saying that much of the acting in The Bookshop is unusually ropy and name names, but it is and here they are.   There’s a good excuse in the case of the Spaniard Jorge Suquet (as Florence’s solicitor), who’s unused to playing Englishmen speaking English.   And perhaps Coixet’s nationality is a larger contributory factor, though she has directed several English-language films before.   Honor Kneafsey has an expressive face and gives Christine a convincing personality but her line readings are erratic, something a native-English-speaking director might have helped her with more.  Whatever the reasons, Hunter Tremayne (a bank manager), James Murphy (Violet’s nephew) and Lucy Tillett (Christine’s mother) are emphatically wooden.  Reg Wilson (Violet’s retired general husband) isn’t much better.  James Lance is a bigger name than these (although new to me) but he’s all over the place as Milo, a slippery fainéant, though he supposedly works at the BBC.  (It’s inexplicable that, after Christine is prevented by school inspectors from continuing to help in the bookshop, Florence agrees to let Milo occasionally mind the store – with results predictably damaging to her interests.)

    Patricia Clarkson has worked with Isabel Coixet before (on Elegy (2008) and Learning to Drive (2014)) but her portrait of the malign queen bee Violet, although technically far more sophisticated than any of the above, is also bad.  The problem isn’t so much that it’s overly mannered, rather that you repeatedly see Clarkson preparing her effects and the result being anti-climactic.  I rarely enjoy Bill Nighy as much as many others seem to.  He obviously has a style all his own – a style he often relies on effectively but I think lazily.  Not here.  The afternoon tea conversation between Florence and Brundish raises the film (and Emily Mortimer’s playing) by several levels.   Nighy gets right inside a man whose life has been solitary so long that he’s forgotten the rudiments of social interaction:  you see it in Brundish’s almost frozen bearing and his avoidance of eye contact – until one or two of Florence’s remarks make an impact enough for him to look involuntarily at her.  His fury in the fatal encounter with Violet is terrific.  We see what’s been released in Brundish as he walks away from the meeting and his stiff bearing turns into a determined, arm-swinging march.  It’s a pity this ends in the cliché of a fatal seizure, an earlier moment that sees Florence kiss him doesn’t work either, and don’t ask how the isolated Brundish has his finger so precisely on the pulse of current local gossip.  No matter:  this is the finest (and most touching) acting I’ve seen from Bill Nighy.  It makes The Bookshop, in spite of everything, a memorable film.

    4 July 2018

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