Film review

  • Journeyman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paddy Considine (2017)

    Paddy Considine’s appetite for gruelling drama was evident from his debut feature Tyrannosaur (2011), which he also wrote, and is confirmed by Journeyman, which he stars in too.  This second film, however, is deeply sentimental into the bargain.  It tells the story of Matty Burton, a middleweight boxer who, in his last fight before retirement, suffers a serious brain injury and embarks on a struggle to rebuild his life.   It comes as a surprise, in view of the film’s name, that the protagonist is a reigning world champion.  Perhaps the title is a corny pun – Matty is a man on a journey – yet it’s revealing too because Considine is drawn to the protagonist as a long-serving underdog.

    There are hints that Matty has spent his lengthy boxing career in the shadow of the father he loved and recently lost, and who was also a world champion.  At a press conference for the upcoming title defence, his much younger opponent Andre Bryte (Anthony Welsh) taunts Matty as a champion by default:  he won the title thanks to another fighter’s injury.  The handsome, spacious home Matty shares with his wife Emma (Jodie Whittaker) and their baby daughter is the only evidence of a life in the ring that must have yielded a few decent paydays.  Otherwise, the setting of Journeyman – the grungy gym where Matty learned his trade and still hangs out is typical – and his hangdog determination give an impression of years spent on the lower rungs of the boxing ladder.  Conversation in the barber’s shop where Matty goes suggests he’s a very local hero indeed (and kids at the gym don’t appear even to recognise him).  Andre ‘The Future’ Bryte is also from England.  World title fights between two Britons aren’t unheard of but they’re very unusual.  Wouldn’t it have made more sense – in terms of both credibility and Paddy Considine’s thematic priorities – if Matty had become a national rather than a world champion in the twilight of his career?

    Following a hard-fought points win over Bryte, Matty collapses shortly after returning home.  Considine then cuts immediately to his discharge from hospital – it’s not clear how long later.  Emma single-handedly has to help him into their car and drive him home, after which they’re completely isolated.  It appears that neither has any friends or family and Matty’s support team from the fight with Bryte have disappeared without trace.  That successful world championship defence purse must have been worth something yet  Emma – as well as looking after a now helpless husband who can hardly speak and has become prone to lash out physically at her – does all the housework herself.  As for help with child care, forget it.  Considine presumably wants to convey how desperately alone Emma feels in the aftermath of Matty’s injury but his depiction of their domestic circumstances rings so false as to be laughable.  When she leaves baby Mia in Matty’s care while she’s vacuuming, you start to wonder if Emma has brain damage too.  Mia’s crying gets on her father’s nerves:  Emma returns to find the baby missing and eventually discovers that Matty’s deposited her in the washing machine.  This is the last straw for Emma.  She rescues the baby, who’s understandably terrified but physically unhurt, and drives off.

    Shortly afterwards, Matty attempts suicide in a canal.  He fails, thinks better of the idea and makes his way to the gym.  His ex-coach Richie (Tony Pitts) is shocked into helping Matty and enlists the assistance of Jackie (Paul Popplewell), who was also in Matty’s corner at the big fight.  These two can now give him plenty of time and support:  Richie and Jackie seem to have no other personal commitments and Emma has taken over the baton in the defection relay.   The fact that, once Jackie and, especially, Richie start looking after Matty, they go beyond the call of duty makes it all the more phony that they previously deserted him in his hour of need.   By now, the plotting is exposed as contrived to the extent that, when Emma telephones Matty and he asks her when she’s coming back, you almost expect Jodie Whittaker to reply, ‘About five minutes before the end of the film’.  This is just what happens though I still wasn’t prepared for the OTT manner of Emma’s reappearance (see below).

    In spite of the realistic look and strongly naturalistic acting of Journeyman, Considine eschews believability not just in his presentation of Matty’s and Emma’s isolation but also in the hero’s road to recovery.  While underwater in his suicide attempt, Matty sees the faces of his wife and daughter and realises life’s worth living.  He comes up for air; the title belt that weighed him down sinks, never to be seen again.  In one sense, it’s refreshing that the film isn’t also freighted with medical explanations of and prognoses for Matty’s condition – that Considine thinks there are more important things in the story than the visual cliché of an X-ray, the aural one of a bleeping machine while Matty’s unconscious.  But the straightforward trajectory of his recovery of speech and balance (both physical and emotional) strays too far in the opposite direction.  It verges on the offensive, given what really has happened to professional boxers, who don’t wear protective headgear.  Here too, Considine takes a metaphorical idea – once Matty rises to the surface of the canal, the only way is up – and literalises it crudely.

    The climax to Journeyman is a high-profile dinner in Matty’s honour, organised and attended by the British boxing industry and the national press.  There’s been no preparation for this at all in the narrative.  Again, it makes a pleasant change that baying newshounds haven’t been in evidence but what does Considine mean by this?  It’s doubtful he’s applauding compassionate discretion on the press’s part in giving the boxer and his family privacy.  If he’s suggesting instead that the papers have lost interest in Matty because he’s fallen on hard times, Considine makes it hard to believe the story is taking place in present-day Britain, with its schadenfreude-hungry tabloid journalism.   More likely, he decided to ignore the press until they came in handy for this big finish.  We learn from Matty’s speech to the gathering – an improbably assured piece of public speaking, all things considered – that he tried to take his own life only ‘a few weeks ago’.  He confirms his gratitude to Jackie and Richie and that he bears no will towards Andre Bryte, all of whom are among the guests.  Everything else at the dinner is upstaged, though, when, after Matty’s speech, Emma appears on the scene.  I must admit I was cynical enough to see this as rather a plausible comment on press power and influence.  The very public return of Emma, dressed for the occasion, looks all too believably staged for cameras.

    This isn’t the only moment whose effect is more bizarre than you suspect Considine intended.  Emma doesn’t know the title bout result until Matty arrives back home to tell her.  You can believe she couldn’t bear to watch him fight but no phone calls or TV/radio/internet news of the outcome – of a world championship fight – in the meantime?  In the final scene, Matty is at the gym, coaching young boxers – as if to confirm that boxing, in spite of everything, is still his lifeblood.  Emma arrives with Mia:  as soon as Matty sees them, he stops what he’s doing and the family leaves without another word to anyone in the gym.  It’s hard to tell whether this is an expression of Matty’s incomplete recovery or whether it’s the director who’s gone mental walkabout.

    Although the parts he’s created for them are underwritten (Jodie Whittaker’s especially), Considine directs his supporting cast well and gets results.  His own performance is more problematic.   For a start, he’s no more physically convincing as a top-flight middleweight boxer than he was on stage last year as a farmer in Jez Butterworth’s (overrated) The Ferryman.  Although he’s obviously bulked up for the part, he lacks the musculature of a professional fighter.  Besides, he’s now forty-four.   Some boxers go on a long time but, from Considine’s appearance, no one can disagree with Andre Bryte when the mouthy young pretender derides Matty as over the hill.  Compared with Considine, Anthony Welsh as Andre looks the part – in terms of attitude as well as physique.  (Andre also keeps threatening his opponent that the fight will be a ‘life-changer’ for Matty:  at one level, that would have been a better title for the film.)

    In a recent interview with the Independent, Paddy Considine stresses that he ‘thought of every reason not to play the part’ in Journeyman.  While that’s no doubt true, the role of Matty Burton (whose surname is also the name of Considine’s home town in Staffordshire) is a logical development in his acting career, which has gravitated increasingly towards more solemnly serious roles.   This viewer finds the straight actor very capable but much less exciting than the eccentric star turn of Shane Meadows films like A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (2009).   It takes a lot of technical skill to do what Considine does as the stricken Matty but you’re always aware that he’s giving a disabled-person masterclass – a type of performance you wouldn’t have expected to see from this actor only a few years ago.  Considine goes on to say in the Independent interview:

    ‘I think it’s the greatest performance I’ve done, unquestionably.  Absolutely without a doubt.  People can make their own minds up but I know.  I don’t praise myself much, but I had to watch this one.’

    I’ve often praised Paddy Considine and am still keen to but this claim is doubly worrying.  His conviction that his portrait of a man who suffers and suffers is ‘unquestionably’ superior to his previous work is a reflection of the grim-is-good tendency that threatens to limit Considine’s work as a film-maker.  Nor is it a promising sign when an actor decides he knows better than anyone else how good he is.  Considine can state with certainty that playing Matty took more preparation and effort than anything he’s done before.  But that’s not the same thing.

    5 April 2018

  • Look Back in Anger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Richardson (1959)

    John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is a notoriously verbose play.  A striking feature of the film version is that it’s several minutes in before we hear a word spoken.   The opening sequence takes place in a jazz club, where Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) is playing a trumpet solo.  The camera follows Jimmy from the club, through the streets of the Midlands town he lives in, to the house where he and his wife Alison (Mary Ure) rent a flat.   He watches her sleep before getting into bed with her, and wakes next morning with Alison already up and about.  It’s only when Jimmy goes to rouse Cliff Lewis (Gary Raymond), whom we glimpsed at the jazz club and who lodges with the Porters, that conversation starts.  Though it’s certainly not the only highlight, this opening is arguably the best bit in the whole of Tony Richardson’s film.  It shows Jimmy absorbed in the music he’s playing and enjoying the applause he receives.  In the moments that follow, he comes down to earth definitely but not melodramatically.  Richardson, directing his first feature film, makes things too fancy on the approach to home:  Jimmy plays a few notes on his trumpet and a ghost trumpet answers in the deserted darkness.  But this only briefly interrupts the absorbing journey from the convivial, jam-packed club to the cramped, silent apartment.

    The film shifts as soon as Richard Burton starts talking.  In his mid-thirties, he was perhaps a little too old for the role (Kenneth Haigh was twenty-five when he played Jimmy in the 1956 stage production at the Royal Court) – but Burton’s refractory charisma serves him well.  It’s his extraordinary vocal instrument that’s the problem.  Although his effortless, rhythmical delivery of Osborne’s abundant invective is pleasurable, his voice is so richly sonorous and magnetic that it not only contradicts Jimmy’s (and Burton’s own) socially humble origins.  It’s also essentially wrong for a character driven to keep talking and shouting because he feels no one is listening.  A second shift – which also proves problematic throughout – occurs soon afterwards.  The whole play takes place in (to quote the text) ‘the Porters’ one-room flat in the Midlands’.  It’s one thing for Tony Richardson to start outside the flat and move back there; quite another for him then to keep opening out the action:  the jazz club again; pubs and cafés; the market square where Jimmy, with Cliff’s assistance, runs a confectionery stall; a hospital and a graveside; a railway station, where the climax takes place.  When Alison leaves Jimmy, there’s a brief sequence back at her parents’ home to emphasise her comfortable middle-class background.  It’s understandable that Richardson and Nigel Kneale (who gets a sole credit for the adapted screenplay:  Osborne is credited with ‘additional dialogue’) were nervous about the commercial implications of staying indoors but the narrative’s wanderlust has a diluting effect.  Plenty of people find Jimmy Porter, even in the theatre, a tiresome egocentric windbag but the play’s setting – Jimmy is stuck in the middle of contemporary England with nowhere else to go – reflects and makes sense of his furious claustrophobia.  On screen, with plenty of opportunities to get out of the flat, he’s a much less justified moaner.

    It follows from the opening out that the cast is much bigger than the play’s quintet of Jimmy, Alison, Cliff, Alison’s relic-of-empire father, Colonel Redfern, and her friend Helena.  The significant additions include a little-Hitler market inspector Hurst (Donald Pleasence), an Asian immigrant market trader Kapoor (S P Kapoor) and Ma Tanner (Edith Evans), a widow who gave Jimmy some financial help to set up his sweet stall.  (Ma Tanner is mentioned in the text of the play but doesn’t appear in it.)  Donald Pleasence unsurprisingly gives Hurst’s small-minded vileness a sinister edge.  The detail of characterisation that Edith Evans achieves is amazing, given how little material she has to work with, and her Ma Tanner is convincingly working-class – a remarkable achievement for an actress of Evans’s generation and theatrical cachet.  Yet although these three are individually convincing as characters, they’re designed to suggest that what drives Jimmy Porter’s (and John Osborne’s) splenetic tirades is straightforward socially conscious moral outrage; as such, they seem somehow peripheral.  When Ma Tanner greets her, Alison almost flinches from an embrace with a social inferior.  Kapoor’s career on the market place is doomed by the commercially anxious racism that pervades it.  Of course such prejudices fuel Jimmy’s anger but his disaffection is part of a more complex personality:  he may be a political radical but he’s a sentimental misogynist too.  Tony Richardson was able to satisfy his appetite for social critique more fully in his next three films – The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).  Here, alongside the additional characters, it’s reflected in minor, pat details like the respectable middle-aged woman eager to read salacious Sunday paper stories before she heads for church.

    The relationship between Jimmy and Alison’s actress friend Helena (Claire Bloom) is the film’s most dramatically satisfying.  Through precise line readings and gestural detail, as well as her own porcelain beauty, Claire Bloom embodies the class difference between herself and Jimmy in ways that Mary Ure’s Alison doesn’t.  While she’s staying with the Porters before the pregnant Alison returns to her parents, Helena is as openly hostile to Jimmy as he is to her (though in a different register).  Claire Bloom gives occasional indications, subtly but incisively expressed, that Helena is strongly attracted to Jimmy.  Once they become lovers after Alison’s departure, we realise the feelings Helena was suppressing fortified her antipathy towards him.  Mary Ure’s odd, compelling presence contradicts Alison’s description of herself as a ‘conventional girl’.  Ure’s blonde hair, pale skin and light-coloured clothes (the film is in black and white), combined with her character’s lack of force, give Alison an almost zombified quality.  At the same time, Ure (the only member of the Royal Court cast in the film) has a tension that makes Jimmy’s reference to Alison’s ‘relaxation of spirit’ – during the final reconciliation scene between them – quite baffling.   It’s easy to believe in the physical attraction between Jimmy and Alison but not much more.

    Glen Byam Shaw, a famous name in 1950s theatre, plays Colonel Redfern rather too stiffly.  There are cameos from George Devine (a doctor), Nigel Davenport and Alfred Lynch (a couple of commercial travellers).  Alan Bates was Cliff Lewis in the original stage production:  in retrospect, it seems surprising the screen role went to an actor who didn’t go on to the major film career that Bates enjoyed.  Gary Raymond nevertheless gives a most appealing performance as Cliff, the young Welshman devoted to both Jimmy and Alison.  Raymond is emotionally fluid and makes Cliff’s boyish hero worship of Jimmy natural and touching.   It’s a pity Cliff’s on the receiving end of a couple of miscalculations on Tony Richardson’s part.  In the flat, Jimmy and Cliff indulge in, as well as horseplay, occasional pretend music-hall routines.  As part of Jimmy’s get-Helena campaign, he and Cliff gatecrash her play rehearsal at a local theatre – they take to the stage and do one of their double acts.  Cliff eventually gets embarrassed but it’s unbelievable that he would start to behave like this in public, even allowing that Jimmy calls the tune in their relationship.  When Alison has moved out and Helena taken her place, Cliff decides to return to Wales.  There are two farewell scenes between him and Jimmy – first in the flat then at the train station. Gary Raymond plays both scenes well but only one was needed.

    The final scene on the railways bridge between Jimmy and Alison, after Helena has taken her leave, is a miscalculation too.  Oswald Morris’s lighting makes the scene visually powerful but the couple’s lengthy heart-to-heart speechifying is artificial in this dark, cold, outdoor setting.  It’s doubtful, though, that the conclusion to Look Back in Anger could be made persuasive whatever the location.  The most telling part of this exchange in the film is a bit of dialogue that doesn’t appear in the play’s text.  As Jimmy and Alison discuss the baby she’s lost, Richard Burton laments, ‘It wasn’t my first loss’, and Mary Ure, in a good, strangled voice, replies, ‘It was mine!’   These three words have more impact than Alison’s more colourful and improbable exclamations during the finale (‘I want to be a lost cause!’).  The trouble is, the thoughtless self-pity from Jimmy that prompts Alison’s trenchant reply makes it all the less plausible that she would think of returning to him.

    3 April 2018

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