Film review

  • Portrait of Jason

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shirley Clarke (1967)

    Late one evening in December 1966, Shirley Clarke started filming Jason Holliday, a gay African-American hustler in his early forties, in the living room of her apartment in the Hotel Chelsea in New York.  The filming continued for the next twelve hours and the result was Portrait of Jason, which runs 105 minutes.  Getting ever more intoxicated on booze and drugs and by the sound of his own voice, Jason talks about himself:  it’s a one-man show, interrupted only occasionally by the voices of others in the room – Clarke, her partner Carl Lee and members of her film crew.   The Wikipedia article on Portrait of Jason describes it as a documentary and it’s a ‘Documentary, Biography’ on IMDB.  But according to a Bright Lights (May 2005) piece by Tom Sutpen, which BFI used as the programme note for this screening in their ‘Black Star’ season, Clarke’s film ‘isn’t a documentary, really; it isn’t even a cinéma vérité exercise’ or ‘an interview either … if Portrait of Jason is anything we can give a name to, it is a record of a performance’.   A ‘record of a performance’ and a ‘documentary’ aren’t mutually exclusive categories:  I’ll stick with the latter in this note.

    This black-and-white film was first shown at the 1967 New York Film Festival.  I don’t know enough about contemporary Underground film-making to be sure but Portrait of Jason may have been unusual half a century ago – in form and in shedding light on the lifestyle of a man like Jason Holliday.  If what Jason says is to be believed (this may be a big if), Clarke’s documentary also has historical interest as a description of aspects of mid-twentieth-century gay life in New York City and San Francisco, where Jason spent several years.  The piece doesn’t, however, seem extraordinary now, either formally or in its subject matter.  The continuous filming in the same space, the blurring of the image to create breaks between ‘scenes’, a few sound-only bits after the screen goes blank as the reel has to be changed – these are lineaments of the low-budget-but-arty documentary.  (I don’t doubt the film really did keep running out as Jason carried on talking but this was, in stylistic terms, a happy accident.)  Most of the non-Jason soundtrack is supplied by Carl Lee’s voice prompting him to tell particular anecdotes or, at one point, to do songs and mini-sketches from the nightclub act Jason dreams of turning into professional reality.  Gay iconography is now so familiar that his shtick seems predictable:  a song from Funny Girl; impressions of Mae West and Scarlett O’Hara; references to Carmen Jones and Tennessee Williams.  The only relative surprise is that Jason does Katharine Hepburn’s Calla lilies routine from The Philadelphia Story rather than one of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche Dubois highlights.

    Jason’s adopted surname (he was born Aaron Payne) echoes that of a tragic black diva.  The combination of his ethnicity and his sexual orientation provides a few sharp insights into racial issues, most notably when Jason tells Clarke that white men often tolerate gay black men because they’re not after white girls.  He talks about the Bowery, working as a houseboy, being kept as a ‘housewife’.  He recalls a mother who knew her ‘coloured’ place and a stern, physically abusive father, referred to as ‘Brother Tough’.  Although all this is interesting, Jason’s solo ‘performance’ is severely limited.  He’s like a singer with a limited repertoire of songs and a standard delivery; the relentless, off-his-head laughter is the equivalent of an overused and too insistent musical score.  After a while, Jason is compelling only in the rare moments when the laughter gets completely, worryingly out of control or when he’s briefly silent and reflective.  We soon perceive the desperation underlying and driving his verbal energy and wit but, as the show goes on, he doesn’t, in spite of Shirley Clarke’s in vodka veritas approach, reveal startling new sides to his personality. Perhaps Clarke is increasingly aware of this – that this is why, in the final reel, she has Carl Lee berate Jason for the bad things he’s done.  Whatever the motive for Lee’s invective, it delivers a big emotional finish, reducing Jason to rueful tears before he finally recovers his poise.

    In his paean to Portrait of Jason, published in the New Yorker in 2013, Richard Brody writes that ‘Holliday’s exuberant, floridly expressive personality and extravagantly uninhibited self-revelation was also an act of self-creation; it’s as if he created, on screen, in real time, a new identity from the scattered and broken pieces of his life’.   It’s highly unlikely that Brody, still a teenager when this documentary was made, had – as Shirley Clarke had – prior knowledge of Jason Holliday.  So how can this grand claim be justified?  Any screen appearance by someone you’ve not seen before is, to some extent, ‘an act of self-creation’.  If Jason were still alive – he died in 1998, at the age of seventy-four – he might be pleased to know that, fifty years after Portrait of Jason first appeared, people are still getting the opportunity to watch him up there on the screen.  On the evidence of this BFI screening, not too many people are seizing the opportunity, though:  the NFT2 audience was sparse at the start and four of them walked out before the end.   There are times when Shirley Clarke makes you feel you’re experiencing the full twelve hours of filming.  But for someone who loves the camera, and wants to be loved by it, as much as Jason evidently does, this would be a very secondary consideration.  There’s nothing to suggest either that he felt, as some critics did in the 1960s, that the film-makers were exploiting him.  At quite an early stage, he says how much he’s enjoying the experience.  He’s already treasuring the knowledge that, once Clarke has done her work and whatever happens in his life to follow, he’ll ‘always have this beautiful thing’.

    8 November 2016

  • Nocturnal Animals

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom Ford (2016)

    In Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan, first published in 1993, Tony is the protagonist of a soon to be published novel-within-the-novel.  Susan is the reader of the manuscript of the novel.  She’s surprised to receive this from the author, her ex-husband Edward, with whom she’s not had contact in years.  Dedicated to Susan, Edward’s novel is called ‘Nocturnal Animals’:  she’s always been an insomniac – during their brief marriage, Edward called her a ‘nocturnal animal’ – and she reads the manuscript at night.  Tom Ford, as well as directing, wrote the screenplay for his film of Wright’s book.  Ford retains the basic scheme of the original but his decision to give the movie the name of Edward’s novel is significant.  It draws attention to an inherent challenge in turning this piece of literature into cinema – even if unintentionally (Ford may have thought Nocturnal Animals was simply a catchier title than Tony and Susan).  While the film can retain formal parity between Wright’s two narratives, Edward’s shocking crime story will, on screen, tend to be more exciting than watching Susan read the story – and Ford eschews the use of internal monologue to tell us what she’s thinking as she reads.  One of the interesting features of Nocturnal Animals is that the Tony part doesn’t, in the event, eclipse the Susan part.  This too may be the result of things Tom Ford didn’t quite intend.

    In Edward’s story, Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and teenage daughter India (Ellie Bamber) drive through West Texas at night.  They’re en route to their holiday home for a few days.  The family’s car is forced off the road by nocturnal animals in the form of three redneck hoodlums (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Robert Aramayo and Karl Glusman).  Powerless to stop two of these men from abducting Laura and India, Tony is forced by the third to drive to a patch of abandoned land, where Tony himself is abandoned.  Next morning, he manages to find a farmhouse, from where he contacts the police.  Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), the detective assigned to the case, discovers the dead bodies of Tony’s wife and daughter, both of whom were raped before being murdered.  A year later, Andes contacts the guilt-wracked Tony:  one of the three men suspected of the crimes has been shot dead while committing a bank robbery and Andes asks Tony to identify another of the men, who is now in custody.  The bereaved husband and father then joins forces with the detective, who reveals that he is terminally ill, to bring the one culprit still at large to extra-legal justice.  The finale is a gruesome confrontation between this man, Ray Marcus (Taylor-Johnson), and the formerly mild-mannered Tony.  Neither of them gets out of the story alive.

    Susan (Amy Adams) is wealthy but troubled – in her work running a fashionable Los Angeles art gallery, in her second marriage – to a financier called Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer).  He’s out of town – and playing away from home – throughout Susan’s sleepless nights reading the manuscript.   She’s gripped and shaken by ‘Nocturnal Animals’, largely because of what she perceives as its resonances with her youthful relationship with Edward, which Tom Ford describes in flashbacks.   Tony’s loss of his wife and daughter reminds Susan that she was unfaithful to Edward with Hutton, and had an abortion when she was pregnant with her first husband’s child.  It seems her marriage to Edward was in trouble even before then because he felt she didn’t sufficiently encourage his writing.  ‘I think you should write about something other than yourself,’ she ventures. ‘Everybody writes about themselves,’ is the touchy reply.  This exchange is evidently still in Susan’s mind some fifteen years later:  as she reads ‘Nocturnal Animals’, her mind’s eye sees Tony as Edward.  This isn’t the only reason why Tom Ford has Edward, in the flashbacks, as well as Tony, in the novel-within-the-film, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.  Perhaps anxious about the limited dramatic scope of the Susan material, Ford seems to think the presence of the same actor in both the movie’s halves will somehow equalise their dramatic charge.  Thirty-five-year-old Gyllenhaal is physically convincing as twenty-something Edward and forty-something Tony but the dual casting turns out to be problematic – because of the particular themes of Nocturnal Animals and because of Tom Ford’s shortcomings as a film-maker.

    Many people who regularly read novels and see movies struggle, if they read a novel after watching the film adaptation of it, to rid the novelist’s creation of the actor who has incarnated it on screen.  Familiarity with this syndrome gives the viewer of Nocturnal Animals a kind of sympathy with Susan, for all that her situation as a reader is so different and individual; but it also raises questions about the logic of her visualisation of Edward’s story.   If Tony is inescapably Edward, who are the sources of the other people Susan sees in ‘Nocturnal Animals’?  In particular, doesn’t she see herself as Laura or her daughter Samantha as India?  At one point, Ford has Susan make an anxious phone call to Samantha (India Menuez).   Because this sequence is oddly disconnected and Armie Hammer’s Hutton looks too young to have fathered a girl now in her late teens, I wasn’t sure if Samantha was Susan’s fantasy of the daughter she’d have today if she’d not had the abortion years ago.  Even if Samantha is a fantasy, however, the above question still applies.

    Susan gets a paper cut removing Edward’s manuscript from its envelope.  The cut is an effective foreshadowing of the lacerating force of his novel:  by the time she’s finished it, Susan is convinced that ‘Nocturnal Animals’ not only is the tale of Tony Hastings’s revenge on the forces that destroyed his family but also serves as Edward’s revenge on her (and that this is why she’s the book’s dedicatee).  Tom Ford’s dramatisation of ‘Nocturnal Animals’ doesn’t, however, live up to this billing.  It has the quality of an accomplished but orderly pastiche of Southern Gothic.  It lacks the motive force and crazy momentum needed to make us feel, as well as understand, the powerful effect that Edward’s prose is having on his ex-wife.  ‘Nocturnal Animals’ takes a long time to come to life.  When it does so, this is thanks to Michael Shannon, whose dying lawman is more vivid – and more real – than almost anything else in the film.  Shannon, strikingly slim as Elvis Presley in Elvis & Nixon earlier this year, is alarmingly lean here.  His ambiguous, unnerving presence makes Detective Andes hard to read but somehow threatening.   The actor’s loss of weight makes it all the more convincing that Andes turns out to be nearing death, and careless of how justice is done.

    The trouble is that Michael Shannon upstages Jake Gyllenhaal, which seriously upsets the scheme of Nocturnal Animals.  Gyllenhaal is conscientious and able as Tony but Tom Ford’s penchant for elegant design exposes the artificiality of the proceedings – especially the matching of Tony’s and Susan’s actions:  he takes a bath or  shower to cool down after each new stage of his trauma; Susan does likewise, to recover from the shock of reading about it.  This fancy rhyming is more damaging to Gyllenhaal in the Texas badlands than it is to Amy Adams in the deliberately chilly chic of Susan’s world.   As the vicious psycho Ray Marcus, Aaron Taylor-Johnson may be slightly better than usual but, playing a character who’s meant to be scary and unpredictable, he needs to be much better.  Taylor-Johnson is at the centre of a scene that illustrates perhaps better than any other the nullifying effects of Tom Ford’s style above substance.  Andes and Tony go to interview Marcus while he’s sitting on a toilet (which is placed outside his front door).  Not only do we see Marcus wiping his bum; after he’s done so, we also get a momentary shot of the piece of toilet paper he’s used.  If Ford means this to shock, he fails:  the viewer is less likely to be disgusted than to note the discreetness of the brown marks on the white paper.

    A few of the images created by Ford and his cinematographer Seamus McGarvey are more powerful, at least in their immediate impact – none more so than those in the film’s opening titles sequence.  This features a succession of drum majorettes strutting their stuff.  They are far from young, seriously overweight, and virtually naked except for their headgear.  The look and the movement of their bodies are extraordinary.  The women are then revealed to be part of a new installation at Susan’s gallery and don’t connect substantially with anything that follows in Nocturnal Animals – except for one detail.  I may have imagined this but I thought the woman to whom Ford’s camera keeps returning during this intro had a bloodstain at the side of her mouth; if so, this anticipates a wound on the mouth of Tony’s daughter when her corpse is discovered.  This might be just another example of Tom Ford’s patterning but it could also be a relatively convincing instance of Susan, as she reads ‘Nocturnal Animals’, drawing on her own experience to visualise details of the novel.

    Amy Adams gives a technically impressive performance. Although she’s playing a woman around her own age, the immobility of her face suggests a world-weary mask:  Adams makes Susan beautifully old before her time.  She may be insomniac but she also seems a sleepwalker in her own life.   When she sustains the paper cut, a majordomo is on hand to take over the opening of Edward’s surprise package.  In the last scene of the film, Susan goes to meet Edward for a dinner date.  (As a final way of getting his own back, he doesn’t show up.)  She’s escorted into the restaurant and to her table by her PA, before a waiter takes over attending to her.  This is a woman whose privilege is virtually debilitating.  The contrast with her vitality in the flashback scenes with Edward is enough to be almost poignant.  In the short time they share the screen, Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal really spark each other.  I think these bits are strong not just because we’re shown Susan and Edward in happier times (initially, at least) but also because the two stars get to do some acting in them and achieve a short-lived independence from Ford’s image-making.  It didn’t make sense to me that Armie Hammer had the same glazed, impersonal handsomeness as both the Hutton who took Susan away from Edward and the one with whom she’s become so bored that she’s nearly indifferent to his affairs with other women.  Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen all do expert work in one-scene roles (Linney as Susan’s mother, Riseborough and Sheen as LA beau monde friends).  Abel Korzienowski’s score includes hints of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo music – apt enough for a movie whose protagonist, like Vertigo‘s Scottie, clings unhappily to an idea of another person that amounts to mistaken identity.  But Tom Ford is no Alfred Hitchcock.

    4 November 2016

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